skygiants

When last we left off in booklogging, I was feeling a powerful urge to read some nice sober nonfiction, so I picked up Ruth Goodman's How to Be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Everyday Life.

genarti has been singing Goodman's praises to me for the past many years and I am glad to say I now wholeheartedly agree! She's very good!

The thing that is notable about Ruth Goodman as a historian is her emphasis on physical, material culture: there's a passage where she walks through a Tudor suit of clothes stored at the (I think?) V&A museum going through all the physical evidence of how it was constructed and what we can learn from it, capping with the charming fact that it was put together in such a hurry that a couple of pins were accidentally left in the lining. In addition to doing the research to look at the prints that show us what it was like to iron the ruffs or use the bread-ovens, she has then gone on to iron the ruffs herself, use the bread-ovens, etc., and she tells you about it and what she's learned from it and what it was probably like to live it in a very straightforward and readable way that lets you follow along with the process of drawing reasonable conclusions from the evidence and practice at hand.

Some of the info is stuff I had general previous knowledge of or aligns pretty well with what I would have guessed, some of it I sort of knew but nonetheless hit me with a "man I never thought about that" (the existence of secular theater in England only predated Shakespeare by like 50 years! he almost missed it completely!), some of it was the full HOO BOY the past is a DIFFERENT country, and some of it was the equally powerful HOO BOY the past is the SAME country. Had a great time! My only real complaint about the book is that it contains various prints of some of her source material but the picture quality is GODAWFUL -- clearly meant to be in color, the contrast in the black-and-white version that I have is so low that I couldn't make out a Dang Thing. "This print shows --" well, okay, Ruth Goodman, if you say so, I will believe you! I certainly can't see for myself!

A couple of recent theatrical experiences I have not yet had the time to write up in full so I might as well write up in short:

1. ( A Khmer Swan Lake )

2. ( Spring Experience at the Boston Ballet )

3. ( The Aria of Julie D'Aubigny )

4. ( LES MISERABLES )

I really enjoyed Hiron Ennes' first book, Leech, a high-concept post-apocalyptic Gothic with one compelling high-concept pitch: the protagonist is a doctor who is a secretly a parasitic hivemind. There are many advantages to Dr. Hivemind! I understood immediately what Dr. Hivemind was all about! I was excited to see what Dr. Hivemind would get up to next!

Hiron Ennes' new book, The Works of Vermin, is interesting and ambitious and has a lot to admire in it, but I have to admit there were several times when reading it that I found myself missing the simple, comprehensible joys of Dr. Hivemind.

The Works of Vermin is set in Tilliard, a massive Baroque [post-apocalyptic?] city-state that inhabits -- I think? -- an enormous parasite-infested tree trunk. I think there is a sort of aristocratic layer on the surface and then everybody else lives in big root and mycelial structures but here as you can see we are already starting to get a bit fuzzy. We are fully in Vibes-Based worldbuilding. The important thing is: BIG TREE and also MANY GIANT WEIRD BUGS and also IT'S BAROQUE. There are bloody revolutions about once a generation and each revolution is associated with a new major artistic style that manifests itself largely through the central opera house, which puts on massively over-orchestrated performances which all the battles and deaths are real dramatic bloodsports. Impoverished child ushers at the opera are blindfolded and ear-stoppered so they can't 'steal' any of the performance by Experiencing it without paying for it in full. This gives you a sense of the sort of nature of Tilliard.

We, the readers, are following two major plotlines. In one, Guy Moulène -- a former child usher with an obsessive love for theater who was banished from the Opera House for opera theft crimes -- works with his pining partner Dawn as an exterminator of Weird Creatures, struggling to pay off his debts and find a better life for his teen sister Tyro. At the beginning of the book, Guy encounters his Weirdest Creature Yet, catapulting him and his team into a rapidly and hallucinatorily escalating power struggle in the undercity.

In the other, Asteritha Vost -- contracted perfumer and semi-adopted daughter to the Marshal Revenant, one of the two most powerful men in the city -- and her best friend Elspeth -- brilliant portrait artist and fiancee of the Chancellor, the other one of the two most powerful etc. -- enter into romantic intrigues with a dashing stranger newly-come to the overcity, apparently to complete some kind of dangerous and mysterious revenge quest. This probably would be more fun for both of them if they were not both slowly dying from some kind of weird consumptive vermin infection that makes Aster's [frequent] coughs and Elspeth's [exceedingly rare] tears unpleasantly wriggly, but honestly it's still a better time than they've had in quite some time.

The two plotlines eventually converge, in a way that's structurally very cool and satisfying to track -- I was sort of struggling in a sea of maximalist vibes until page 100 at which point ( major spoilers ) It's also, I think, thematically ambitious. The title is pointed and deliberate; the central conceit of vermin, of corruption, of infestation, is used and reframed again and again to comment not just on class but on creativity and art, disability and selfhood, and mostly I think does succeed in continually complicating itself to avoid any 1:1 correlations or sweeping statements.

The flip side of the pleasantly-puzzlebox plot chugging along at the center of all this wild baroque imagery was that I felt the character work suffered a little in the process of making it all fit together ... each character had their driving motivations and emotional connections that set them along their little track to make the plot go. Guy Loves His Sister. Aster Loves Elspeth More Than Anyone But Also Has A Big Crush On The Mysterious Stranger. Because of this, Guy does X, and Aster does Y, and I, the reader, squinted down through the dense vivid technicolor thicket of worldbuilding and watched them chug along their little tracks and said, sure! I guess! Maybe you could have spent a few of the hundred words you spent describing the big weird centipede to instead give us a more grounded sense of how these people live, in their real lives, and why they care about each other ... but I understand the big weird centipede is also important and I would never say that it's not.

Anyway. I did, overall, enjoy it; also, when Hiram Ennes wants to write a scene that is gross they WILL write a scene that's REMARKABLY gross [laudatory]. (There's one scene in particular that I felt so viscerally in my throat that I immediately had to go chug a drink of water about it.) However, on finishing, I also had to immediately go read some heavily researched historical nonfiction just to feel like I understood how humans inhabit an environment again.

The Corn King and the Spring Queen is one of Naomi Mitchison's earliest books, and What A Book it is! Seven hundred and some pages of fascinated swings and roundabouts, both for the protagonists and for my feelings about what she was doing with them.

Set mostly between the years of 229 and 222 BCish, The Corn King and the Spring Queen follows two thematic plotlines, emblematized by two young women:

- in Marob, an imaginary Scythian state where magic works and is real and the good of the community is reliant on rites and rituals as performed by the semi-divine-incarnate Corn King and Spring Queen, a young woman named Erif Der becomes Spring Queen and bespells Tarrik the Corn King into marriage at the behest of her ambitious father, who is planning a coup. Erif and Tarrik both have Many Personality Problems, but despite the mutual violence of their initial relationship and the following deadly power struggles between Tarrik and Erif's family, their marriage grows into something real and important to both of them, even as it destabilizes the necessary magic of Marob.

- in Sparta, a real historical Greek state where magic does not work and is not real and the good of the community is reliant on political revolution, a young woman named Philylla, the favorite teen handmaiden of Agiatis of Sparta, enthusiastically supports the radical reforms of Kleomenes III and enters into a long patriotic engagement with Kleomenes' boyfriend in a sort of king/king's boyfriend/queen's favorite handmaiden/queen sedoretu situation. As Kleomenes attempts to bring his revolution across the Greek world, Philylla struggles to convince even her own family of the desperate necessity of persistent social change.

These characters intersect first when a stray Stoic philosopher washes up on the shore of Marob and, after some time tutoring Tarrik in philosophy, asks to be escorted back to Sparta to assist with the radical revolutionary reforms. In consequence of that first trip, Tarrik and Erif struggle to reconcile modern Greek ideas with their semi-divine roles in Marob, and Erif's artist brother Beris falls in hopeless love with Philylla in the course of attempting to convince her that art and aesthetics have value for their own sake, which unfortunately for him is a very un-Spartan point of view. (Though by the end, it's Erif's love for Philylla that is arguably truer, more romantic, and more significant.)

Then history happens, which I valiantly did not look up at any point over the course of the book despite being desperate to know how tumblr Naomi Mitchison was being in her characterization of heroic gay socialist King Kleomenes -- and the answer is, not very, actually! By which I mean, any time I started to squint at the book like 'Naomi are you sure about this heroic gay socialist king of Sparta,' Naomi would do something to remind me that she knew very well that the rules of the ancient world are neither the rules of her time nor of mine, and that there's no such thing as a bloodless revolution or a powerful man without abuses. All of her protagonists are deeply human and sympathetic and struggle relatably and love deeply and also do terrible things. All of them make decisions for the best of reasons that end up with the worst of consequences, but all of them also sometimes do something absolutely shitty just because they're having a bad day and they can. It's the year 229 BC. The Spring Queen can kill a slave if she wants. The king of Sparta can force a captive woman if he wants. Philylla ... okay Philylla is actually a pretty perfect revolutionary cinnamon roll .... no, Philylla despite her dedicated solidarity for the Spartan working class can be a Spartan supremacist if she wants.

There's a kind of fascinating double-anthropological vision in reading this book in 2025: here's Naomi, doing her best with the information she has to imagine how people living in 229 BC thought and acted as driven by their own particular social concerns and understanding of the world, and here's me, doing my best with the information I have to imagine how 1930s ardent upper-class free-love socialist Naomi Mitchison is bringing her own particular social concerns and understanding of the world to this vision of 229 BC, and how she wants me to read what's happening in it. This book is profoundly about 1930s politics. It's profoundly about her understanding of the world as a deeply unfair place, and herself as a person who's been very privileged within it; about her belief that revolution is necessary and yet cannot come without cost and it's very hard to say when the cost becomes too high to pay for the revolution, especially when it's women in particular who get crushed in the gears; about her struggles with the good of the individual versus the good of the community, about art as ideology vs art as something worth pursuing in and of itself; about her ideas on marriage and successful and unsuccessful polyamory! I could write multiple dissertations on the sexual politics of this book alone.

Because it's Naomi Mitchison it is of course magnificantly tragic but also sometimes very funny. One of my favorite bits is when Erif and Beris go visit the Oracle at Delphi and have a very charming Ancient World Tourism experience; another is a series of letters written by a jaunty young Athenian playwright who ends up in Marob for a while having a Very Scary Adventure with Tarrik during which he almost dies multiple times and goes through several long dark nights of the soul, which does not stop him from cheerfully adding that he is getting on like a house on fire with his play: I seem to have accumulated ideas in all that time away from the manuscript. A new comic character has turned up, and the heroine has really made one or two quite smart epigrams! As a matter of fact I shall probably have to rewrite a good deal; some of the early speeches look simply childish now. And what a lovely lot of new metaphors I've picked up! (One has to suspect this is a little bit of Naomi joke on herself.)

And then there are the darker jokes, as when, for example, in the section Kings Who Die For Their People, an adolescent Spartan prince grimly girds his loins and goes to offer sexual favors to the Ptolemaic pharaoh in exchange for military assistance and it all goes embarrassingly wrong and he has to get smuggled out of the palace by snickering concubines. Kings die for their people in this book in all kinds of ways. Including, of course, the literal ones. Naomi is a socialist, of course she doesn't believe in kings, but maybe, if they're martyred, it's okay ....? Or maybe it isn't. Maybe the cost is still too high. But oh, boy, is it sexy; and oh, boy, what ideological art you can make of it --!

Anyway this post is already too long so I'll stop it here, though I haven't even touched on the half of what's interesting about the text; I really want to argue with her about really quite a lot of it but there's so much meat there to argue with. It's a book worth arguing with, and worth arguing with people about.

Okay, this is my last McCaffrey post for the foreseeable future for real, but I do want to talk about the weirdness of reading Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern in 2026.

I find it hard to imagine I did not read this one when I was a child and reading Every Pern, but I also didn't remember anything about it except that it was the Plague Book, and it surprised me in several ways!

1. the most plot-important relationship in the book is Moreta's friendship with her mentor, the previous Weyrwoman, which takes increasing prominence once Moreta's dragon lays her eggs and has to hang out by the Hatching Grounds and Moreta keeps needing to borrow Leri's dragon to fly around in a weird sort-of-taboo blurring of the bond between the two of them and their dragons that eventually results in both Moreta's Heroism and MOreta's Doom. This could have been really interesting in the hands of a writer who was more interested in this sort of thing, which McCaffrey is not, but nonetheless is probably the strongest and most central relationship between two women I've yet seen McCaffrey write

2. [direct corollary I think] the main romance in the book is completely plot unimportant. I had somehow been under the impression that Moreta died delivering vaccine specifically to or from this guy's place-- not true! He's not involved! It would change almost nothing about the novel if the romance did not happen except that Moreta would be having a slightly worse time because she didn't get to have a nice date in the middle of it. To be clear I think this is great; the fact that this relationship is in no way load-bearing takes all the pressure off it in a way that is remarkable for a McCaffrey novel. It's nice to see two adults click over a shared hobby!

(Moreta also has a Weyrleader. They have dragon-mandated sex when necessary and otherwise he's a kind of annoying coworker who does some parts of his job very well and has to be aggressively managed through the other parts, though Anne McCaffrey and I do not always agree on which elements of his behavior are annoying.)

3. there are more explicit m/m dragonrider pairings in this book than in any other before or (I think?) since.

sovay and I were chatting a bit over this and I do think it's impossible to completely disentangle this from the fact that this is the Pern Plague Book, written in 1983 -- the same year that Samuel Delaney dedicated a Neveryon book to Anne McCaffrey, the sequel to which would be his own take on the AIDS crisis. She had to have been thinking at least a little bit about it, consciously or subconsciously. For which reason, I was sort of extra pleasantly surprised that all of these named gay dragonriders do actually make it out alive and are well in recovery by the end of the book!

4. [kind of a corollary] despite the massive and terrible death tolls reported as a general statistic throughout, very very few named characters actually die of the plague; everyone we actually spend any time with makes it through completely fine. There is a sort of a sense that Anne McCaffrey secretly believes it's a bit embarrassing to die of the plague and anyone who really bucks themselves up and commits to it should be able to make it through on sheer willpower ... like she knows, in her head, that this is not true, and nobody should actually be blamed for dying of plague. But I don't know that she's been able to make herself believe it in her heart. For this reason perhaps I did not actually find it very creepy or horrifying as a plague book -- I was braced for it to be kind of a difficult read, for the Obvious Reasons, but McCaffrey is really much less interested in creeping inevitable horror and more in Heroically Practical People Find Solutions.

5. You know what I did have a big reaction to? You know what I did have big emotions about? THE WHOLE PLAGUE SITUATION AND FULL VACCINATION PROGRAM IS RESOLVED IN TEN DAYS. Ten days! TEN DAYS. Ten days and then nobody has to think about it ever again?? What I wouldn't give -- no. Sorry. It's a very bad and serious plague situation and so many people on Pern died and also they have to deal with Thread, and also feudalism. It's rough to be on Pern. (TEN! DAYS!!!)

Earlier this week we saw new Black Swan musical, which felt so obviously necessary and important that it was only like a few days prior that I realized I had never actually seen the movie Black Swan. So! On Monday we watched Black Swan (2010) and then on Tuesday we went to see the show.

For those of you who missed Black Swan (2010), it's just under two hours of tightly-wound ballerina Natalie Portman getting cast as the lead in Swan Lake and then dramatically unraveling betwixt the combined pressures of controlling live-in stage mom, ambitious shadow-double understudy [ft. hallucinatory toxic yuri], and psychosexually exploitative artistic director Thomas Leroy.

Black Swan (the musical) (2026) is also two hours of a tightly-wound ballerina getting cast as the lead in Swan Lake and then dramatically unraveling, but there are some key differences; most significantly, there is no psychosexually exploitative artistic director! Instead, towards the beginning of the show, the company manager explains that the celebrity guest choreographer for Swan Lake has had to pull out unexpectedly ["cancelled," the corps mutter sagely to each other] and is going to be replaced by a different celebrity choreographer, Margaux LeRoy, who appears and immediately delivers a speech about how in her Swan Lake Reimagined there will be NO prince! NO evil wizard! It's ALL about the swans!

I admit I do think it's really funny that Jen Silverman and Dave Molloy were like 'please clap we've made a Black Swan musical without heterosexuality -- sorry I mean this cool feminist choreographer character who is certainly not our in-text stand-in has made a Swan Lake without heterosexuality. and you should clap for her.' But also I am really sympathetic to and interested in the project -- this adaptation is making an argument that voyeuristic sexual exploitation by domineering men is not the only kind of horror story you can tell about ballet, that you can focus the horror explicitly on a pressure-cooker of women in a toxic system fracturing against each other in various ways and have it be just as sharp and scary and powerful. I appreciate this as an adaptation tactic; I think the show gets like 75% of the way to being something that could, if successful, be better than the film.

( unfortunately I don't think the show actually manages to prove its point; that said there was some stuff I really liked )

I've been meaning to read one of Bora Chung's short story collections, but instead I read her novel Red Sword (translated by Anton Hur) because this is the one that came into my house via my wife's library pulls. I found it striking, unsettling, minimalist and strongly visual in a way that immediately conjured up the sense for me of a particular kind of animated film -- in my mind, it's that kind of unsettling rotoscope animation, mostly black-and-white with flashes of bright signifying color.

The protagonist of Red Sword is a prisoner on a spaceship who has been brought to an alien planet with numerous other prisoners to do battle in a war that she doesn't understand. The planet is strange and white; the aliens are strange and white; big black birds fly overhead, and they're strange too. The prisoners haven't been given guns, but the people holding the prisoners don't seem fully aware that the protagonist's sword is a weapon as well. So: she has her sword. She has a lover, who dies in the first few pages. She has comrades; a pair of lesbians that she knows only as Indigo Skirt and Light Green Skirt, and an older man who seems drawn to her for reasons neither of them quite understand, but as things they don't understand go that one's pretty far down the list and gets further all the time as weirder things continue to occur. And she has memories of her childhood, a home she used to have, and hopes to have again.

The first portion of the book is mostly just a desperate struggle for survival, caught between the incomprehensible aliens on one hand and the equally incomprehensible force of their captors on the other, and then on the third hand the incomprehensible landscape of an incomprehensible planet. Then things get weirder. The book has things to say about constructed identity, the nature of the self, and the nature of big horrible systems; the arbitrary and unilateral nature of oppression under imperialism. The prose is very clear, very sparse, with a kind of deliberate simplicity that lays bare the confusion and horror of the whole situation: if you don't know or don't like what's happening, it's not on account of the way it's been told.

I don't know that I enjoyed the book, per se, but I think it will linger with me. The part that stuck with me most is when ( spoilers here )

A few weeks ago I was grimly gearing up to do the Hugos homework when suddenly I realized that Hugo voting privileges do not actually pass over year to year, only nominating privileges. I'm free! Flinging the nominations list joyously to the wind in favor of catching up on overdue library books and the massive stacks of books in my own home! However before this happy revelation I did read The Raven Scholar which had vaguely been on my list anyway, largely on a series of planes.

I was under a profound misapprehension about the plot of The Raven Scholar. I spent the first several chapters, in which a young woman whose father has been executed for treason gets brought before the reigning Emperor on the occasion of her majority, peacefully thinking to myself "and I suppose from here she's going to end up going to some sort of raven school." Not the case! Very different things happen to that young woman! In case you are confused like me, The Raven Scholar is ostensibly about adults in their late twenties and thirties, although I have to say I found them extremely YAish adults -- kind of a reverse Six of Crows problem, these people extremely felt like teenagers to me -- and the actual heroine is Neema, who has already graduated from raven school and is now a full-fledged raven postgrad.

Neema's plot begins with her at the bottom of the raven postgrad pecking order due to classism and being a poor scholarship student; then she accepts a government order that everyone thinks is a bit evil and gets a big promotion out of it, so by the time the plot proper begins she's the most important raven postgrad in the Empire and also the most disliked. She has a mean girl nemesis, and a sexy chaotic ex-boyfriend from the fox monastery who hasn't spoken to her in the years since she accepted the evil order despite the fact that she's pretty convinced that he himself does government assassinations --

-- there are six important animal schools, by the way, or rather animal monasteries, and they're all associated with Characteristics. Perfect for sorting! The shadow of Harry Potter does inescapably hang over this a bit; we've got our Scholarly Ravens, our Hardworking Oxen, our Brave Bears, our Extremely Classist Evil Tigers, and then we've added to this Loyal Hounds, Artistic Monkeys, Sexy Chaotic Foxes and Weird Magical Dragons, so don't worry! there are eight kinds of people instead of the reductive four! I was also unfortunately reminded of when I had to take management training classes at work and we were taught with great seriousness how to identify our coworkers as lions, peacocks, turtles, and doves --

Anyway! Neema is having problems with her social life, is what I mean to say, and she's in charge of organizing prom, by which I mean the big festival during which representatives from each of the different types of monasteries compete in combat! and absurd little Taskmaster competitions!! to see who will next be awarded the throne now that the current Emperor has ruled the legal amount of years he's supposed to after winning the last competition and is ready to retire!!!

AND THEN ... in the MIDDLE of all of this ... someone is MURDERED.

After my initial confusion, I found the first 2/3 of the book really enjoyable to read on a plane. I think it was very clever of Antonia Hodgson to go "what do people like? well, murder mysteries. And what also do people like? When people have to compete in absurd little Taskmaster competitions." I'm people! I also like murder mysteries and absurd little competitions. ( some broad strokes plot spoilers from here )

So although I had a good time for much of this book I ended up pretty disinclined to read the next one, but I can certainly see why people liked it and it probably wouldn't have come bottom of my Hugo list, if I was voting. Which, thankfully, I'm not, so I don't have to rank anything!

In addition to all the Perns, I have also been reading some non-Pern McCaffreys! At this point this includes:

The Ship Who Sang, in which a young woman gains beyond-human powers through being indentured to a corporation which provides her with wealth and status while simultaneously keeping her locked in endless responsibility and debt, loses the thing she cares about most in the world, and desperately seeks a life partner, eventually finding one in her manipulative boss

Crystal Singer, in which a young woman loses everything she cares about in the world, gains beyond-human powers through being indentured to a corporation which provides her with wealth and status while simultaneously keeping her locked in endless responsibility and debt, and, despite not seeking a life partner, nonetheless enters into a romance with her manipulative boss

The Rowan, in which a young woman with beyond-human powers loses everything she cares about in the world, gets indentured to a corporation which provides her with wealth and status while simultaneously keeping her locked in endless responsibility and debt, and desperately seeks a life partner, eventually finding one in the guy who at the end of the book succeeds to the position held by her manipulative boss

Obviously all of these books have their own unique points of distinction:

The Ship Who Sang kicked off generations of what-if-a-girl-was-a-ship stories and also generations of disability-in-SF conversations; it is also IMO one of the most interesting of McCaffrey's structural experiments, being composed of short stories that do generally work well as short stories, while creating a coherent and connected character arc for Helva across the whole set. Also: women! Helva gets to partner with women! Does she want to partner with women? Absolutely not. She wants a hot guy, or, failing that, a weird little manipulative boss who's obsessed with her. But nonetheless while waiting for her inevitable manipulative bossmance she has some interesting women thrust upon her, which I appreciate even if she does not.

The Rowan is the latest, structurally the weakest, and I think perhaps generally the worst of these books ... Killashandra has a bad personality and it's charming, but the Rowan's bad personality mostly comes out in the context of being a bad boss within her devil's-bargain corporation, which is less charming. Also there's sort of a halfhearted attempt at an evil aliens are attacking plot but the evil aliens take up approximately ten (10) whole pages of the book because McCaffrey finds them much less interesting than the Rowan's boyfriend, who is of course destined for her because he's the only hot guy telepath who's more powerful than she is. Anyway, the funniest part about this book is the fact that the Rowan gets a telepathic cat in the first section, and because everyone loves a telepathic cat the telepathic cat is on the front cover of the book, but then Anne McCaffrey is like 'yeah but she left the telepathic cat on the spaceship the first time she left home, they weren't actually that tight' and the telepathic cat is never mentioned again.

Crystal Singer is notable for the fact that Killashandra -- in addition to being a failed opera singer who has to pivot to harvesting addictive crystal with the power of her voice -- is the meanest and most self-interested McCaffrey heroine and also the one who has the most casual sex. A real delight to go from Avril Bitra in Dragonsdawn to Killashandra, who has all of Avril Bitra's traits except she's protagonist-shaped so instead of performing sexy torturemurder and getting fired into the sun, she reluctantly saves the life of a guy who hates her, complaining about it all the way. God bless! Has the most opportunities not to enter into a devil's bargain with a corporation to become a protagonist, and also has arguably the worst devil's bargain of the lot (crystal singing rots your brain! creepy!) and so I think is in many ways central to the Corporate Devil's Bargain thesis of it all: the subtext of The Ship Who Sang and The Rowan is that yes, the devil's bargain Is worth it, but Crystal Singer holds it up defiantly and makes it text. Yes, you were probably manipulated into it, and yes, it's going to end in tragedy, but look how cool you are now!

This all also sort of makes me look a certain way at Lessa, the OG bad personality heroine herself, and her arc in Dragonflight. It's more obviously a devil's bargain when it's a Big Corporation and not a cool dragon that loves you unconditionally -- but what are all these sexy manipulative bosses, except proof that Big Corporation actually loves you unconditionally? And yes, you were manipulated into it. No, you can't leave now that you've done it. Yes, the institution takes away your agency, by design, but broadly speaking, it's a benevolent institution -- or at least, society can't do without it. Anyway, now that you're part of this institution, you are now the coolest person in the world; everyone needs you, admires you, loves you, and you're happier than you've ever been. Of course it was worth it!

I am under a kind of curse, which is that if I see a King Arthur riff that looks exceptionally strange or funny I must bring it home to experience and add to my collection [mentally, metaphorically] [the physical book does not need to stay in my physical home once I have consumed its contents].

King Arthur in the children's novel The Camelot Code: The Once and Future Geek is also under a kind of curse, which is to say, he's King Arthur. I found this novel in a used bookstore and read the back copy explaining the plot, which is that Arthur time travels to the future, self-Googles, and immediately decides to abandon his destiny and try out for the football team instead. The mirror crack'd from side to side, "the curse has come upon me," I cried, eyes fixed on Camelot, etc.

So! The Camelot Code begins with best friends Sophie and Stu, playing their favorite video game Arthurian Flavor World Of Warcraft with their buddy Melvin from California. Alas! Stu can't raid next Friday because he has recently joined the soccer team and he has to go to pizza with them. Sophie worries that their friendship, which is built around being geeks who don't have normal high school hobbies, is perhaps doomed. :((

Meanwhile, in The Indeterminate Past, best friends Serving Boy Arthur and Princess Guinevere (a plucky warrior princess who can absolutely use a sword but is also at risk of being Sold Off Like A Mule to the Highest Bidder in Marriage) are hanging out secretly distributing largesse to oppressed peasants. Alas! They can't distribute any more largesse because evil Agravaine and Kay have shown up to bully them and oppress the peasants even more. Arthur worries that their friendship, which is built around being compassionate heroes who are not married off to evil knights, is perhaps doomed. :((

These two worlds connect when, during a visit to Merlin's Crystal Cave [it's very sparkly] [Merlin distributes Ray-Bans to all visitors], Gwen and Arthur accidentally drop Uther's magical scabbard down a time portal to Massachusetts, which Merlin keeps open for the wi-fi. Through a series of chaotic events, Arthur ends up at Sophie and Stu's school, while Stu under a shape-changing spell has to sub in for him at Camelot to pull the sword out of the stone and get the legend off on the right track.

Merlin is able to recruit Sophie and Stu specifically because! it turns out! he's their raid buddy Melvin! To be clear, this is not part of some Merlin master plan. Merlin just enjoys Arthurian-flavor WoW and it is NOT weird for him that everyone in Arthurian-flavor WoW greets each other by going "May the Merlin be with you."

( The rest is under a cut because I do feel compelled to describe the entire plot in detail )

Okay, that's all. It's in the mental collection. My curse has been lifted, and the book can now leave my house again.

I was sold on E.Y. Zhao's Underspin by this post via

sleepnoises -- I also love books with Big Hole in the middle that do interesting things with POV! I also love a book that tells you at the beginning that the protagonist is already dead and then lets you sit with that tension for the next however many hundred pages. Pre-haunted by the protag, if you will.

I didn't quite love Underspin, as it turned out, but I do think it's really interesting as a structural project. We start at the funeral of almost-great table tennis prodigy Ryan Lo, his parents waiting for his coach to show up, which he doesn't. Then we go back in time and begin tracking Ryan's career through the eyes of various people who intersect with him over the course of his twenty-five years -- some who spend years with him on major life and career-altering enterprises, and others who cross his path for a day, a weekend, a single table tennis tutoring session at the local club. (My favorite POV character is the very elderly woman whose daughter is forcing her and her husband to take table tennis As A Retirement Activity despite their absolute lack of interest.)

Each of these chapters essentially functions as a little short story about a person who is at least tangentially involved with table tennis. They're all caught up in their own lives and problems, and also Ryan is also there, visible and attention-grabbing, handsome and talented and apparently destined for success, a perfect lightning rod for whatever insecurities the POV character happens to be feeling at that time. Through the structural distortion effect, though, it increasingly becomes clear that there's something wrong about Ryan's relationship with his coach, and the unease of that runs through the book, which began at Ryan's funeral.

I did kind of want more of a structural distortion effect ... from the description I was expecting a series of first-person narratives, The Moonstone-like, but on a prose level most of the book is actually written in more or less the same third-person MFA short story style, with a couple of exceptions. I didn't really click with it and it did detract a bit from the tension for me; I wanted a little more psychological horror, a little less wistful melancholy. But I think that's mostly an expectation-reality mismatch. I did like that there's never really a 'gotcha' moment, that by the time some truths are revealed you are not surprised by them, and that everything stays deeply ambiguous, deeply ambivalent, through the end. Also, there's no question that the book absolutely understands The World of Table Tennis.

So the Boston Immigrant Justice Accompaniment Network, where I volunteer, is scraping the bottom of their bond fund. If you have a few pennies to toss, now would be a really exceptional time.

(I personally have been scratching my head trying to figure out what kind of best talent show this town has ever seen might be helpful to the overall cause, so I guess if there's anything you've ever wanted to see me do or post about particularly that might work as a fundraising incentive, let me know???)

So I read the Matthew Stover Revenge of the Sith novelization ---

portico: why
me: i don't have to justify myself

-- but the actual reason is that I didn't want to listen to the A More Civilized Age podcast episodes about it without having read it myself to form my own opinions first, and the approximately eleven hours they spend talking about it gives me two full weeks of podcast time to fill my walk to work. Also I'd heard from a couple different people that it was unexpectedly good!

With affectionate respect to the people who told me this, I did not actually find this to be true. In fact I found the book somewhat worse than I expected. However, it is unexpectedly gay, and I do understand how people can substitute the one thing for the other. If you care about Anakin and Obi-Wan, let me tell you, you are in luck, so does Matthew Stover. If you care about Anakin and Padme -- scratch that. If you care about Padme in any capacity, you are less in luck. This is the most boring I Care About Nothing But Being A Love Interest Padme Amidala that I've ever seen and that includes the Padme in the film, where Natalie Portman is at least attemptiong to project 'I'm trapped in this narrative get me out of here' with her eyes. My frustrations here are exacerbated by having relatively recently read the Mon Mothma book that succeeded (to my mind) in making Mon Mothma a complex and compelling political figure who is often kind of a failure. I would love to see a Padme who's a complex and compelling failure of a political figure, which is the way I think she often comes across in the Clone Wars TV show ... not necessarily on purpose .... but someone could write her that way on purpose ...

But, on the other hand, I had no real reason to expect the Revenge of the Sith novelization could or should be political thriller; this is a book that is 50% fight scene by volume. Indeed the first 30% of the book is One Long Action Sequence. My understanding is that this is because the original script, from which Matthew Stover was working, is also 30% one long action sequence that got cut down to five minutes in the actual film. I'm sorry but this IS very funny, I sympathize deeply with this poor man desperately trying to pad out a lightsaber fight to fill three chapters with extensive discussion of forms like it's the duel in The Princess Bride, only to get to the first screening and go 'god damn it!'

Anyway. It's fine. If they tell you it's a critical text in the Star Wars universe I think you might want to take that with some grains of salt, but then again, I think the most critical text in the Star Wars universe is Star Wars: The Bad Batch: Season Two Episode Three: The Solitary Clone so you might want to take anything I say with some grains of salt. But do you want a page of Obi-Wan thinking about Anakin's ass? This book will indeed give that to you.

I do think there is a particular charm, a particular interest, in a biographer who is really visibly in love with their subject. Like, you probably wouldn't want it in every biography. But it's nice to know that the author really extremely wants to be there. It gives an enjoyable sort of tension to the reading experience: at what point is the book going to go off-the-rails because the author has spontaneously transmigrated back to 1931 in a doomed attempt to alter the course of history and fix Buster Keaton's Hollywood career with the power of her passion alone? It could happen! It feels like everything has been foreshadowing it!

Obviously Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the of the Twentieth Century does not in fact go off the rails in this way, it does actually remain an interesting and readable biography that uses Keaton's life and career as a jumping-off point to explore the times in which he lived. In the book's introduction, Stevens explains that her fascination with Keaton is such that whenever I heard about something that took place between 1895 and 1966, I found myself trying to fit that event or phenomenon into the puzzle of his life and work. (She also uses the introduction to share a poem she wrote about Keaton. It's not bad!) Anyway, this is a pretty fruitful methodology that leads her to down various side paths to explore not just the history of early cinema but other twentieth-century touchstones such as changing child labor laws, vaudeville and minstrel shows, the rise of Alcoholics' Anonymous, and the career of F. Scott Fitzgerald.*

Often these aren't things that directly impacted Keaton -- Keaton never participated in AA, for example; by the time the program started to gain popularity, Keaton had already hit his rock bottom and come out the other side -- but they run along parallel tracks, such that Keaton's life casts a mirror on the phenomenon or vice versa, or there's an interesting alternate pathway to be imagined where they did indeed intersect. Keaton and Chaplin only worked together once, but you can't help but compare/contrast their trajectories; Keaton and Fitzgerald may never even have met at all, but the downward arcs of their careers were both intertwined with MGM executive Irving Thalberg, on whom Fitzgerald based his last novel.

(Also, it can't have helped with Fitzgerald's fascination, says Stevens, that Thalberg was also extraordinarily good-looking, slight-framed and serious-faced, with large, liquid brown eyes and wavy black hair -- an appearance not unlike that of a certain slapstick comedian whose contract his company had just acquired. We DON'T know they met but we DO know that if they did, Fitzgerald would CERTAINLY have thought Keaton was hot!)

It feels, in other words, like exactly what it is -- a book written by a person whose obsession with one individual has led them down a number of other interesting rabbitholes, to fruitful if not entirely cohesive results. If Keaton had been a fictional character, this might have been a 120K fanfic with a number of beautifully researched, oddly specific chapters. Because Keaton is a real person, we got this book. I had a great time!

I don't know that Angela Thirlwell's Rosalind: A Biography of Shakespeare's Immortal Heroine was particularly mind-blowing for me as a text in terms of new knowledge or insights on As You Like It. However, it certainly was satisfying for me to read, in the way it is always satisfying to read a book with someone who passionately agrees with you about a mildly contrarian fannish opinion, like:

Angela Thirlwell: I simply think Rosalind is the absolute top-tier Shakespeare heroine
Me [nodding vigorously]: How true!
Angela Thirlwell: she is so witty and clever and in absolute total narrative control of her text and also doing gender like nobody else in Shakespeare
Me [nodding vigorously]: I think everyone who puts on an As You Like It should read your book!
Angela Thirwell: and As You Like It is a brilliant work that hangs together brilliantly in its entirety
Me [nodding en--pausing]: well I'm not sure I agree entirely with that
Angela Thirlwell: and here's my chapter on Rosalind's Daughters which includes every literary heroine I've ever loved. Elizabeth Bennet is kind of a Rosalind when you think about it.
Me [nodding politely]: I see, I see. Do you have any evidence for that?
Angela Thirlwell: Well, no. But! I believe it in my heart. Because Rosalind is the best!
Me [nodding vigorously]: She's the best!

The part that was probably most interesting for me in terms of actual new thoughts about Rosalind and As You Like It was the contextualization of the play in in terms of when, exactly, it was written, and what other plays it sits alongside in its canonical period, including some that are relatively unfamiliar to me -- I don't actually have a great constant sense in my head of Shakespeare's timeline (other than the obvious TEMPEST IS THE LAST) and the Great Chronological DWJ Project has made me much more interested in tracing the way a train of thought evolves over the course of somebody's work. It's interesting to see Rosalind and Viola as different ways of working out a concept that begins all the way back in Two Gentlemen of Verona; Thirlwell makes much of the fact that Viola is stressed and and serious and poetic whereas Rosalind is almost always speaking in comic prose, and takes charge of her own epilogue. Indeed she never forgets to remind us that Rosalind has the epilogue. You can tell what Thirlwell's favorite bits of the play are because she will quote them at least times in the text in order to prove five different points, blissfully unconcerned with repetition. I personally did not need to return quite so many times to the Bay of Portugal but I guess even the fact that Rosalind speaks the greatest percentage of her play of any Shakespeare heroine [good for her!] does not provide that many Rosalind lines to quote from.

Anyway. Do I think you ought to read this book if not for the pleasure of nodding vigorously along with various enthusiastic statements about Rosalind? Like, do I think it will transform you into a person who nods vigorously along with enthusiastic statements about Rosalind, if you were not one previously? Who could say! Report back if you find out!

I have succumbed to peer pressure and started rereading Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy -- well that's not true, I have reread the first book, Assassin's Apprentice, and told myself [lying] I PROBABLY won't go on from here, I just want to remember what's what! But it seems I will in fact be going on from here because to my surprise I thought Assassin's Apprentice was better than I expected or indeed remembered it being and now I want to get to the Liveship Traders trilogy, which is the one I actually actively remember as being good [citation: fourteen-year-old Becca, a notoriously unreliable narrator as we have many times established.]

The thing is I essentially remembered nothing about Assassin's Apprentice because at the time I read it I didn't really know the narrative value of the fraught emotional bond between a protagonist and their mediocre-to-bad mentor and Assassin's Apprentice is NOTHING but mediocre-to-bad mentors. This book is chockablock full of problematic adults intensely projecting their various personal traumas and failures on our young protagonist and attempting to extend him care and guidance through these various highly distorted lenses, and unfortunately their best at its best is never very good but you can't say they're not trying: not really appealing to me at fourteen but delicious to me at forty.

Assassin's Apprentice begins with the arrival of our protagonist on a royal doorstep, age sixish: this kid is the illegitimate son of the famously upright, faithful, virtuous, happily married, non-slutty heir to the throne, Prince Chivalry, and his unknown relatives have decided that it's time for the child to be Chivalry's problem. This immediately and publicly blows up the entire political situation in the country, as Chivalry and his wife subsequently remove themselves from the line of succession and retire to a remote country estate without ever interacting with the child in question.

So that's Fitz, a kid with no official status who's a walking Weird Situation For Everyone. As for his various mediocre mentors, we've got:

Burrich, who was Chivalry's overwhelmingly devoted right-hand man, and due to a one-two-three punch of inconveniently timed injury/Fitz's arrival/Chivalry's retirement has found himself demoted from Heroic Hand of the Heir to the Throne to local stablemaster and accidental foster parent to the kid who blew up his life and his boss'

Chade, the king's assassin, who started from a similar position to Fitz and has been tasked by the king with molding Fitz into just as useful a tool for the royal dynasty as Chade has been for all these years

Verity, Fitz's uncle and the new responsible-but-overwhelmed heir to the throne, a pleasant and dutiful man with minimal emotional intelligence, who is always sort of absently nice to Fitz until the Kingdom's Problems start Eating Him Alive and suddenly things become enjoyably fraught as the potential increasingly arises that perhaps the Kingdom's Problems would eat Verity alive a little less if he let them eat Fitz alive a little more, but he is not going to do that! because he has ethics! but they both know that the possibility is there!!

Lady Patience, Chivalry's wife, who shows up midway through the book when Fitz is a teenager like 'oops possibly this child should have been parented by us? who says you can't fix the failures of the past! I'm doing it right now!'

What I find charming about Lady Patience in particular is that it's really obvious that to Chivalry she was his beautiful carefree manic pixie dream girl and to everyone else she is a nightmare. In fact all these people are sort of nightmares, and they all do care deeply about Fitz, and are also all failing him in important ways that have to do with their own deeply personal blind spots. The book's strength is in the evenhanded way it looks at these people and their strengths and their failures, and lets both the love and the mistakes matter equally.

The book's weakness is in that Robin Hobb apparently decided that since she had all these deeply flawed sympathetic characters, she also needed some actual villains that no one could possibly feel sympathetic about. There's an evil prince who wants to usurp the throne, and there are also some evil pirates who are kidnapping people from the kingdom and turning them into Soulless Monsters, or rather what

blotthis accurately describes as video game NPCs that you don't need to feel bad about killing. The fact that Hobb goes to great lengths to explain how everyone is very distraught about the situation and does some failed experiments to ensure that there's no way to turn these people back from being soulless monsters and you really truly don't need to feel bad about killing them really just makes it worse.

Also, I think it's important to note that Robin Hobb really is better than most of her peers at thinking about the practical requirements of domestic animals in a Nineties Eurofantasy environment; the proper care of horses and dogs forms a significant underlying element of the book and occasionally becomes a major plot point, especially since Fitz's Special Secret Skill is dog telepathy [Burrich thinks From Personal Experience this is an evil perversion that will ruin Fitz's life and that he must train out of Fitz as much as possible] [this is definitely not a metaphor for anything] [Robin Hobb wants to know how you could you possibly ask that]. Anyway the flip side of this is that Robin Hobb will Not hesitate to kill a puppy. Never think she won't do it. She has a knife to another puppy's throat right now. ( spoilers )

When I say that reading Aster Glenn Gray's Diary of a Cranky Bookworm feels like spending several delightful hours with an old friend, this is just about the least surprising statement in the world I could possibly make, because:

a.) Aster is indeed a longtime friend, and also
b.) both the book and Sage-as-protagonist are drawing explicit inspiration from many other teen-girl-writer bildungsromans (I Capture the Castle, the Montmaray trilogy, the collected oeuvre of LM Montgomery, etc.) that are beloved old friends to me, and also
c.) every character and interpersonal dynamic in this book does indeed feel like an exact portrait of someone I either was or knew in high school, with pitch-perfect and sometimes painful accuracy

Sage Perrault, Our Heroine, is an imaginative, judgmental misanthrope from a small town in Minnesota who was fortunate enough to form a small tight friends group in elementary school who also proved themselves worthy of her affection by being precocious readers:

- Georgie, Sage's best friend since kindergarten, when her mother (terrified of Sage becoming a miserable loner like Gay Cousin Rachel who Never Comes Home For Christmas) seized on the other precocious reader in class and started arranging playdates with feverish speed. Sensible, driven, raised by an overprotective mom who never got out of town and is thus double determined to Get Out Of Town. Friends outside of Sage: church youth group
- Arielle, the dramatic friend, with inattentive divorced parents, a moderate case of main character syndrome, and a rich life of the imagination often expressed through implausible lies about her past. Passionate in her enthusiasms but will not stop obnoxiously sending you fanfiction that you do not care about. Friends outside of Sage: drama club
- Hilary, the chillest friend; always delighted to run with any bit that she's given and make it more fun and funny, but holds her own emotional cards close to the chest. Has a very nice boyfriend and never talks about him. Wonderful to hang out with at any time but is planning for pre-med so will almost certainly be far too busy to stay in close touch with anyone when they scatter. Friends outside of Sage: almost the entire school, everyone loves Hilary because she's a delight, and the fact that she chooses to eat lunch with Sage and Hilary and Arielle is frankly a great compliment to all of them

This has left Sage peacefully free to hold onto grudges also formed in elementary school, continue happily hating the kids in her class that she has hated since they were all eight, and avoid going through the effort of speaking to anybody else. Unfortunately, it's senior year! College is looming, and with it new tensions and unpleasant questions, such as:

- can being a precocious reader really continue as the be-all and end-all of Sage's perception of her own self-worth? and how can she write a college essay about it?
- how much of what Arielle's told them all about her plans for college is normal bad ideas, and how much is outright lies, and how much is in fact a cry for help?
- how can Sage break it to beloved best friend Georgie that she doesn't want to go to the U [University of Minnesota Twin Cities], which is the ultimate apex of Georgie's ambitions, and instead kind of wants to attend a small liberal arts college somewhere in the middle of nowhere?
- but if she doesn't go to college with Georgie, will she ever successfully speak to another human being?
- and on that topic, is it possible that a Longtime Beautiful Enemy is in fact a human being worth talking to, to despite the fact that she's bad at spelling and was mean in middle school?

Sage, early on: Arielle always tries to blow on whatever flickering embers of bisexuality she finds within herself, which I admire. I'd be far more inclined to play Whack-A-Mole. And obviously part of the book is also that Sage has to stop playing Whack-A-Mole, but the big emotional question of the Longtime Beautiful Enemy subplot is less "will they kiss" [though they do, eventually] than "can Sage build an emotional connection with a new person, at the same time as she's facing fundamental shifts in all her other most important relationships?" At its heart this is a book about friendship in all its different shapes, the different kinds of ties you build with different people and the way those change with you as you grow.

And also, of course, about being judgmental about books and films and art. There's a whole other conversation that I feel like I've been coincidentally having in various different contexts about the purpose of the literary cross-reference in this sort of text; I am definitely one of the people for whom there's a profound self-indulgent pleasure in watching characters react to another work [Kage Baker's infamous Cyborgs Watch D.W. Griffith scene my beloved; what a bad idea to spend a whole chapter on it and what a delight it was for me personally] as long as I don't believe that the author believes that all right-thinking people should agree with the character's opinions. Fortunately I am in no danger of this with Sage. Sage has a LOT of opinions about books and films and art, and I disagree with many of them but so do many of Sage's friends; this, too, is one of the important shapes of friendship.

Legend of the Magnate is the first historical cdrama I've watched that's interested in the middle class, and for this alone tbh I'd recommend it. The Qing Emperor dies pretty early on and nobody cares except inasmuch as it leads to some national policy changes, because not a single one of our main characters knew him personally!

The year is 1860; the Qing Empire is struggling with the aftermath of the Opium Wars and the ongoing Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rebellion; and our protagonist, Gu Pingyuan, a nice young man with scholarly ambitions from a family of tea farmers, has unfortunately spent his twenties in prison-exile in the frozen north after getting sabotaged by an Unknown Enemy into making criminal amounts of noise at the big civil service exams in the capitol. During his years in exile he has learned various survival skills and at the start of the show he makes his escape so he figure out who sabotaged him, as well as what happened to the long-disappeared father he went to the capitol to seek information about the first place.

Given this setup -- and the fact that the show is a high-budget historical drama that shares several cast members with Nirvana in Fire -- we were kind of expecting Gu Pingyuan to be a master schemer and puppeteer with martial skills and elaborate plans. Not so! It turns out the survival skills that Pingyuan learned in prison mostly included Wheeling, Dealing, Bullshitting, and Occasionally Falling On His Face And Begging. Very refreshing also tbh to see a clever protagonist who has no pride whatsoever. Many times Pingyuan's brilliant schemes to manipulate the market forces around him do succeed! (Often I didn't understand why, because I'm not a financial genius, but I was willing to nod sagely along and agree that they probably were brilliant.) And many other times they result in heavily armed men throwing him in prison because his bullshit immediately backfired on him and he has to wait for someone else to come and rescue him, because he did not in fact acquire any martial arts skills in prison, he leaves that to his love interest.

I should probably at this point talk about the other main characters of the drama. They are:

- his love interest, a nice young woman whose family runs a horse caravan for long-distance deliveries; as this often takes her into somewhat dangerous situations, she's picked up some martial arts skills and low-key considers herself part of the jianghu but in like a normal person way. She's lovely. So is her dad, who loves Gu Pingyuan almost as much as she does. Unfortunately Gu Pingyuan has a pre-prison-exile fiancee that he thinks he's duty-bound to be getting back to and as a result he fumbles her so many times
- his foil, the son of very wealthy merchant, Li Million, who owns a massive chain of pharmacies; as a result before we learned his name we spent several episodes calling him the Heir to CVS. The lonely CVS Junior has a deep and powerful attachment to Gu Pingyuan, and the plot keeps briefly letting them get into joyous financial cahoots and then immediately putting them into rivals situations; every mini-arc includes a scene where Li Million (a major ominously antagonistic figure, played by the Emperor from Nirvana in Fire) is like "I have told you Many times you are Forbidden to associate with that Convict" and CVS Junior stares up at him with big sad eyes and goes "but daddy ... ~~I love him~~ he's my only friend ...."
- his ex-fiancee, who unfortunately for Gu Pingyuan is busy having her own plot, ( which is spoilery )
- his ... hmm I don't really know how to describe Ms. Su in context of Gu Pingyuan as she doesn't actually care that much about him; she's obviously the main character of her own drama that occasionally intersects with this one in which she is a ruthless master puppeteer engaged on her own mysterious business. She appears in the plot every few episodes, often cross-dressed, often waving large amounts of money, occasionally trying to assassinate somebody, and half the time it's like "thank God she's here to help our friend out of prison, we couldn't have done it without her" and the other half the time it's like "well, five men are now dead." You never can tell with Ms. Su!

The show is somewhat interested in politics, but much more interested in how things are made, who makes them, who sells them, and how they get from place to place. At one point some East India Company white guys show up with something ominous under a cloth, and

genarti was like "is it a Spinning Jenny?" and the cloth came off and INDEED IT WAS A SPINNING JENNY and we all screamed. The real villain of the story has appeared!

-- though the villain of the story, I want to be clear, is not capitalism. The show wants to be very clear on that. About every three or four episodes it's clearly been mandated by Someone that Gu Pingyuan have a conversation with somebody to reiterate his Ethical Vision for Ethical Business That Truly Serves the People. And when that doesn't happen and when businessmen act badly? That is the fault of the FAILING QING DYNASTY, or possibly the BRITISH, but it is Not the fault of Business, which is Good, and Ethical, and also Patriotic. The last scene of the drama -- this isn't a spoiler, it has nothing to do with the plot of the show in any way -- is a brief post-show epilogue set fifty years in the future where we learn that Gu Pingyuan's business wealth acquired through years of ardent dedication to the free market is of course funding the Communist Revolution.

But the flip side of this dedicated Business Propaganda is that the rest of the show is free to be nuanced, messy, and politically ambivalent. The show doesn't particularly support either the rebels or the Empire; the show just thinks that the civil war sucks for everyone who's caught up in it and makes tea production very difficult. When aristocrats and officials appear in the plot, they're small disruptive typhoons oversetting everything in their wake for the merchant- and working-class people whose lives we're following. Upward mobility is possible, but also perilous; Gu Pingyuan is constantly getting put into glass cliff situations by more powerful people who need a scapegoat, because the Empire is a powder keg and fundamentally our protagonist is just an ex-convict from a tea farming family.

( big major show spoilers )

All this is to say that I enjoyed the show very much, but I do have one -- well, two major complaints. The first is that Gu Pingyuan has a younger brother and in a show where most people broadly do get interesting characterization and growth this brother never once transcends Comedy Status. Earth-shaking revelations are destabilizing the rest of his family to their core and nobody ever bothers to tell him! What is even the POINT of a Comedy Brother if you don't get a moment of shocking and unexpected poignance! Absolute waste.

The second is that there is an arc with Wolves, all of whom seem to have been imported straight into China by way of Hammer Horror. RIP to those many, many monster movie wolves.

It's been several days since I finished Cristina Rivera Garcia's No One Will See Me Cry (translated by Andrew Hurley) and I've still sort of singularly failed to formulate an opinion about it; I just keep sort of mentally picking the book up and turning it over and putting it uneasily down again.

In some ways this book reminds me of A Month in the Country, in that both are historical novels that delicately build up a picture of lives destabilized by and lived in the cracks after an epoch-shaking event, while carefully avoiding -- tracing the parameters of, writing around, turning the camera consistently away from -- the event itself. The difference is that A Month in the Country does in fact feel light, delicate, balanced against the heavy thing at its center, while No One Will See Me Cry isn't in any way a light book; aside from the heaviness of its subject matter, feels laden with symbolism at every turn, although the symbolism itself is often specific and startling.

The premise: in 1920s Mexico City, an aging, morphine-addicted photographer who's been hired to take portraits of asylum inmates meets Matilda, a woman he last photographed many years ago, when she was a prostitute. Joaquin engages in a kind of narrative barter with, first the asylum doctor, then with Matilda herself, in an attempt to understand her story and how it intersects with his own to bring them both to this asylum. Both of them, it turns out, formatively knew and formatively loved the same woman, a revolutionary, in the years before the war -- but neither of them was actually involved in the Revolution, neither of them were active agents for or against the transformation of their livetimes; Joaquin describes himself more than once as the only photographer of his generation who didn't take any photographs of the war, and Matilda was, at the time, involved in an emotional affair with a desert landscape.

There are some tropes that one expects, and is braced for, around Women and Lost Women and Madwomen, especially when insanity is used as a thematic metaphor around national trajectory, especially when all that is inextrictable from questions of poverty and indigineity. Rivera Garcia is definitely deploying some of those tropes with purpose and to a point and I absolutely do not know enough to have a full sense of what she's doing with them. This is one of those situations where I wish I was reading a book in context of a class or a club. As it is, what I'm left with is interest, unease, some beautiful and surprising images, and a sense that I ought to read a lot more about the Mexican Revolution.

I've been meaning for months to write up Knight Flower, the Joseon-era kdrama about a RESPECTABLE WIDOW BY DAY, VIGILANTE BY NIGHT who spends her days dutifully kneeling by her husband's portrait and serving her mother-in-law and her nights running around town in a black mask dispensing justice by the sword.

I enjoyed this drama very much, but it's kind of an odd beast -- it's genuinely interested in the awful constraints on Joseon's women's worlds and widow's worlds in particular and wants to explore that seriously, and it also wants have our heroine be extremely cool and fight off five guys in an alley every episode and toss off a one-liner about it, and it also wants our [middle-aged! widow!] heroine to be a charming sitcom naif who gets comically overcome by the sight of a man's midriff and is shocked! shocked! to learn about some of the various injustices going on in Joseon despite the fact that she's been wandering the streets dispensing vigilante justice for ten years. (They attempt to square some of this circle by virtue of the fact that our heroine's arranged husband was killed! by bandits! on his very wedding day! and so she has spent ten years dutifully mourning a man she never actually met, let alone slept with.)

And because Lee Hanee is a talented actress, she can almost more or less pull all of that off and make RESPECTABLE WIDOW SECRET VIGILANTE JO YEO-HWA a coherent character -- helped in large part by the various interesting women around her, including:

- Yeo-hwa's hard-nosed and cynical maid, whom Yeo-hwa rescued off the streets as a teenager, and who has spent her years since then in the single-minded pursuit of enough money for An Independent Place, which she is going to move into JUST as soon as her chaotic mistress to whom she is unfortunately absolutely loyal is Out Of This Fucking House and No Longer Doing This Stupid Vigilante Shit
- Yeo-hwa's mother-in-law, who holds Yeo-hwa harshly to the extremely narrow line of conduct allowed for widows [go nowhere; speak to no one; serve your husband's family; accept that it's an embarrassment for you to be alive when your husband is dead] and sees her largely as a walking reputational vector for the family -- but hey, at least she would never pressure Yeo-hwa to commit honorable suicide, like some other mother-in-laws-of-widows of their acquaintance, so that's something! In any other drama this character would be a cruel stereotype but in this drama she's played by Kim Mi-kyung with sympathy and complexity; she's the immediate bane of Yeo-hwa's life, and nonetheless she and Yeo-hwa have spent a decade bound together as family with a kind of affection, and Yeo-hwa understands perfectly well that her mother-in-law is also trapped by the only rules she knows
- Yeo-hwa's business partner and accomplice, a merchant whom Yeo-hwa also rescued on the streets and who has also spent the time since then like You Could Just Leave This Fucking House, I will prepare a fake identity for you, it won't be hard
- the main female villain, ( who is somewhat of a spoiler though this all starts to come out pretty early on )

Obviously Jo Yeo-hwa also has a love interest. He's an honorable baby cop who wants to fight corruption and also has a backstory tied up in the ten-years-ago political plot. He's completely fine. His older brother, an upright schemer who's been helping the virtuous king lay long-term plots to take back control from his evil ministers,* has an very cute B-plot bookstore romance with the cynical maid that I frankly found much more compelling in the glimpses of it that we got. More compelling yet ( is spoilers again! )

*there's nothing kdramas love more than a virtuous king who's trying to take back control from his evil ministers

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