pengwern | Reading

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 )

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I left the house for this afternoon's doctor to discover that the mail had already brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #87, containing my poem "Gramarye." It owes a title to Susan Cooper and the rest to anger and the sea. It belongs to the talent issue, sharing double edges with the fiction and poetry of Joseph Hirsch, Marissa Lingen, J. Hellend, David Kopaska-Merkel and more. I love the alert, alien camera contributed to the cover art by John and Flo Stanton. Pick up a copy, add to the weirdness. Its digest-sized persistence is a gift.

I love the idea of adding Glasgow to Boston's roster of sister cities, or Boston to Glasgow's. I keep forgetting we're not officially twinned with Halifax.

WERS played Aretha Franklin's "Eleanor Rigby" (1971) as I was driving from

a_reasonable_man's to my mother's. I may have been given a new motto. It is fine that the tornado watch seems to have expired in a very brief monsoon.

Current Music: Belly, "Feed the Tree"

sartorias

In Chicago now. Apparently the weather was so wild yesterday that they canceled the train that I would have been taking. They are folding them into today's train. It's gonna be PACKED.

On trains they put people with other people in the dining cars. I don't mind this; while I have trepidation at approaching strangers, heck, approaching anyone, anymore, except blood relatives who can't reject me) I don't mind when it's not my fault my old, boring, unaesthetic self is foisted on innocent parties.

Today's breakfast was with a gent who, after I told him I'd attended a book con in Montreal, said that he was writing a book. His first! After years as a successful businessman, he had this innovated idea . . . he isn't writing alone, but with a collaborator--AI! "This is surely new and innovative," he said cheerily.

I explained that actually, a lot of people have been experimenting with AI writing, and left it at that. If he tries to market it, he'll learn and in the meantime he's having fun. Nothing amiss with that.

So in a few hours I head home, saying goodbye to the miracle of rain in June, and the deep green that results!

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My plans for the day went over sideways, but in the evening

spatch treated me to barbecue from Blue Ribbon and we watched the after-sunset reflecting in Spy Pond. This weekend my father who has spent a lifetime not caring about sports cheered for the Knicks and I remain, like just about everyone, thrilled by Cape Verde's no-goal draw to Spain. I have made a cucumber soup for the first summer in years and put up my hair to take a bath for the first time in my life. Apparently this afternoon there was a flash mob for Irn-Bru on Boston Common. Widow's Bay (2026) stuck the landing.

Current Music: Thao, "Fossils"

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I guess DW doesn't permit vids, as I tried to upload a wonderful 24 seconds of the train running alongside a bird drifting down the Hudson. Ah well, try to imagine it!

I had a delightful stay in Montreal (a bit crispy at first, then RAIN, then perfect weather) and another delightful Scintillation. So much book talk! Bought Cameron Reed's new book, What We Are Seeing and Jo Walton's just-about-to-come-out Everybody's Perfect, and for a launch panel discussed Emmet O'Brien's first two books in his Vega Victrix series, which he is publishing AT LAST. (I'd read some of it in draft over the years.)

Let me pause and give some thumbnail thoughs here; indie publishing depends on word of mouth (don't I know it!) and I think this space opera series really deserves it.

Both Your Houses is the first book. This series represents everything I want in space opera: intriguing skiffy balanced with complex characters whose emotions are not overwhelmed by the worldbuilding. Which is quite complex, but we learn about it gradually through Corin Oshima, our first-person narrator. She has a wry voice and a dry wit that makes everything, including info, interesting.

The author chose to keep the focus of this book on a specific case, while gradually widening the lens to afford a glimpse of the larger mystery.

Great alien design is another plus, and plenty of action. Corin is my favorite kind of hero--smart, cool, cognizant of conflicting moral algebra without being a jerk. I don't like jerk main characters; when everyone is a jerk, I lose interest in a story. Corin's story immersed me right from the start.

The second book, Ever Vexed With Storms, carries on from the first book. Don't begin with this one! This is a complex space opera universe and a complex story, though in the first two volumes, the author chose a mission/mystery structure, which provides enough guidepost for the reader to start assimilating the complicated background.

Corin continues to be awesome. I love it when the action catches up with her to see how she gets out of it. There's no "and then she leaped from the pit" cheats. Great aliens, high octane emotional entanglements, and a dry, delicious wit kept me immersed until the last page.

Right now they are only available at Amazon, which--whatever else you can say about them, and there's plen-ty to say--makes it relatively easy for the first timer to upload their work. More platforms will happen, and eventually print.

I got the rights back to my INDA series at last, and I've been like a pig in mud, cleaning up all the errors that I wish had been addressed long ago. It didn't get a professional copyedit, which I desprately need, but of course I'm responsible for the crap prose. Cringe, cringe, cringe. So it' time to address that the best I can, and this time there will be a list of characters, something about the ships, and the CORRECT map. That will happen early next month.

Aside from that, so many beautiful things seen and experienced! And today the homeward trip begins; I'd planned to walk to the train station, using up that four and a half hours between latest hotel checkout and needing to be due at Albany/Rensselaer, but the weather will be eighty. Not sure I want to drag a suitcase almost two miles in 80 temps, with sporadic thunderstorms in the forecast. Rain in June? In SoCal that would be a joke, but back here, it's entirely possible! Anyway so I will find a cafe, and hole up with a book and an iced chai latte instead, and decorously take a Lyft.

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My poem "ἀγκυλοθάλασσος" is now online at Strange Horizons. I am indebted to

radiantfracture for his Twine prompt generator designed to produce scientific-sounding compound adjectives and nouns, in this case the irresistible "ankylothalassic" from ἀγκύλος "crooked, bent" and θάλασσα "the sea." In the process of rendering it back into classical Greek, it acquired Twelfth Night and José Esteban Muñoz. It was written on New Year's Eve and I am very pleased to have it published in the middle of Pride.

Speaking of Strange Horizons, their Annual Fund Drive is underway! This year running on BackerKit instead of Kickstarter, thanks to AI. Please donate! The fund drive issue has already earned one poem, one short story, one essay, and two reviews, and more await. Not to mention the magazine continuing to pay its authors their well-deserved rates.

My week began with the wrestling of bureaucracy, but

troisoiseaux has sent me a beautiful slim paperback of Duff Cooper's Operation Heartbreak (1950), about which I have been desperately curious since learning of it. The fact that Operation Mincemeat escaped containment into a novel directly precipitating the publication of Ewen Montagu's The Man Who Never Was (1953) is one of those points of history where the suspension of disbelief gives up.

At intervals accommodating my current ability to process film and TV,

spatch has continued to show me selected episodes of visually potato, dramatically satisfying Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–99), lately focusing on Jadzia Dax because we started with a couple of Sisko-centric episodes and then a couple of Quark and a couple of Bashir, and I am fascinated by the degree to which a show that couldn't commit to Garashir despite the best efforts of Andrew Robinson and Siddig el-Fadil just forgets to be anxious about queer and trans concepts around the Trill. Obviously I too am thrilled three decades on by "Blood Oath"'s iconically matter-of-fact "Jadzia, my beloved old friend!" but I was just as struck by Yedrin Dax in the grandfather paradox of "Children of Time" unselfconsciously recalling his wedding to Worf, slipping so naturally from the third person of a former life to the first person of memory that it leaves little room for rules-lawyering the gay away. The character himself was a predictable one-off favorite of mine from the first time around—his episode was one of a very small handful of DS9 I caught first-run, at which time it had no long-term chance in the intensity of my attention to Babylon 5 (1994–98)—but the constancy of affection asserted across the fluidity of bodies made so much sense to fifteen-year-old me that as with similar expressions by Tanith Lee, I took it as read and got to be surprised by its historical presence all over again in 2026.

Yesterday I got into the car to find WHRB playing the madrigal fable of Gian Carlo Menotti's The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore (1957), which I had known about but never heard. Later that night through more twenty-first century channels I heard Riah's "Other Side" (2025) and Thao's "Fossils" (2026).

Current Music: Riah, "Other Side"

skygiants

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 )

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I can't remember if it ever occurred to me before last night's re-read of Jane Yolen's Neptune Rising: Songs and Tales of the Undersea Folk (1982) that her Greyling (1968) resembles Gordon Bok's "Peter Kagan and the Wind" (1971) in that both are stories of selkies who return to their seal-selves not despite the bonds of human love but because of them—a father in one case, a husband in the other, both fishermen in peril on the sea. Bok and Yolen knew one another; she partly dedicated the collection to him. It's slightly nuts to me that he never set either of her sea-songs published in it, since it takes so little imagination to hear "The Ballad of the White Seal Maid" or "The Selchie's Midnight Song" in his deep-grained swell of a voice. I don't know whose version coalesced first. I grew up on both of them.

Via

regshoe, a book meme.

General Questions

This week I'm reading: I am currently in the middle of Naomi Mitchison's To the Chapel Perilous (1955), the paperback reprint sent me by

boxofdelights in 2022 as a replacement for my long-lost, lent-out college copy. Also re-reading Yolen's Merlin's Booke (1986), the Ace first edition inherited from my god-aunt in 2000 which I had not then read since my childhood in the Cambridge Public Library. For the first time, Jonas Kreppel's Adventures of Max Spitzkopf: The Yiddish Sherlock Holmes (trans. Mikhl Yashinsky, 1908/2025), a present from my parents earlier this year. With snail-mortifying slowness, I am continuing to poke at the modern Greek of Nikos Kavvadias' Πούσι (1947).

My favourite book of all time is: Impossible to answer. I did that hundred books meme last spring and kept having to append titles that had slipped my mind.

My current favourite book (read or re-read in the last 3 months): With apologies to Molly Crabapple and Seamus Heaney, almost certainly Leon Garfield's The Stolen Watch (1988).

The last book I bought was: Joan Coggin's Dancing with Death (1947), a present for my mother which she promptly loaned back to me so that she could discuss it. The last book I bought for myself was Andrew Hiller's Hornytown Chutzpah (2026), brought to my attention by

mrissa.

The first book I bought with my own money: No clue. My first real job was in a science fiction and fantasy bookstore when I was fifteen and they might as well have paid me off the shelves.

The first book I received as a gift: Equally impossible to estimate. I can remember receiving Brophy's The Prince and the Wild Geese (1983) early on, but it would not have been the first.

The last book I received as a gift was: Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (2026), courtesy of

a_reasonable_man.

The last book I borrowed from the library: Either Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (1960) or What Time Is This Place? (1972), whichever was not checked out first.

The book physically closest to me right now: Robinson Jeffers' Such Counsels You Gave to Me (1937), the burgundy-boarded, jacketless first edition from my grandparents' house. After that, Imogen Sara Smith's Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy (2008), which I gave some years ago to

spatch.

Do you read bookfic, and if so what is your favourite bookshop fic? I don't think I have ever read a bookshop fic. I read Satoshi Yagisawa's Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (trans. Eric Ozawa, 2010/2023) when

spatch gave it to me for our last anniversary.

This or That

Physical book or e-book: Physical book if at all possible, since I process them differently. E-book in the inevitable event that I can't get hold of something and there's one copy digitized maddeningly on the Internet Archive.

Used or new: As a reading experience, I don't think it makes much difference to me. If I own a book, I try to keep it in good shape.

Fiction or non-fiction: At the moment I seem to be reading more fiction than nonfiction, which may or may not be the case in another three months.

Read at a coffee shop or at the park: I haven't been inside a coffee shop in years. Last Friday I was reading on the stone wall overlooking the water at Spy Pond Park while waiting for

ladymondegreen.

Paperback or hardcover: In terms of preferred reading format? I don't think it makes much difference to me, either.

Romance or Crime: More crime than romance.

Yes or No

Stream of consciousness? Yes.

Poetry? Yes.

Memoirs? Yes.

Philosophy? Yes.

Thrillers? Yes.

Chronicles? What?

Dialogue heavy? Alan Garner?

Current Music: Gordon Bok, "Peter Kagan and the Wind"

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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!

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Books
Finished T Kingfisher's Paladin's Faith, which I think was better than any of the preceding books in that series. I liked it a lot, and I hadn't really expected to, since neither of the protagonists had really appealed to me in the earlier books.

Read Isaac Asimov's 1957 short story 'Profession', which some website somewhere linked to as an example of Why LLMs Are Bad, but which read to me as a strikingly good fictional example of the social model of disability in action. Unfortunately, I don't think Asimov knew that was what he was writing, and I think we were supposed to agree with the historian informing the protagonist that he was the one in a gazillian very special snowflake who was smart and original enough to be worthy of the financial burden of individualised education.

Listened to the audiobook (read by Ali Stroker) of disability rights activist Judith Heumann's memoir Being Heumann, cowritten with Kristen Joiner. I'm unfamiliar with Kristen Joiner's work, but the writing style of the memoir made me think ghostwriter. The narrative voice was... well, the association in my head is "90s middle grade novel", but that might say more about me than it does about the authors. It's that in medias res, "Chapter One. Ring, ring! I awoke suddenly to the sound of the telephone. I started to get excited butterflies in my stomach. Who could be calling me at this time of night? I sat up in bed and reached for the receiver. It was 1991, and I was Claudia Kishi, secretary of the Baby-Sitters Club, and I had my own phone in my bedroom." kind of thing.

That said, nothing wrong with writing something in an easily accessible style so long as you're not leaving important parts out. Not knowing Judith Heumann's life well enough to know what I don't know, I can't speak to the facts, but I can say that the word "bullshit" appeared once in it, which wouldn't have happened in the aforementioned 90s middle grade novel. And she packed a solid amount of real, usable information about activism tactics and strategy, and real disability rights history and organising principles and also disability 101 in there, and with a minimum of inspirational glurge or undue optimism about the present political state of America (it was published in 2021, two years before her death.) It's simplistic but not trite.

Plus Judith Heumann did have a genuinely very eventful and interesting career.

Tech
I got my current self-hosting project working: I can now point my phone (or my laptop) at my RasPi and select a song from the disk attached to it and play that song through the phone or laptop's speakers. (The difficulty was that most of the guides I could find assumed I wanted to use my phone to control a RasPi with a speaker attached to it, so I could play music hosted somewhere other than on the RasPi.)

Weather
Wet and cold.

Cats
Dorian experimented with a salchow too, at least once. He also was kind enough to demonstrate for me today that he can reach the one remaining kitchen bench I thought he couldn't get up on. At least this way I know he can do that. Meanwhile, Ash has the salchow locked in, and is now innovating with other Birdie eradication methods, such as a crocodile death roll.

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The World Cup is upon us. Insofar as I have opinions about it beyond the strong feeling that this country is currently too authoritarian to have been allowed near anything that even pretends to internationalism, I am rooting for Cape Verde: it is their first year and the diaspora in these parts is second only to Brockton. I may also have found myself, for the first time in my life, in a house divided by team affiliation.

spatch ancestrally favors Scotland for this weekend's match and I am hoping Haiti beats the kilts off them. Anywhere the man in the White House disapproves of, let them shine. The 1936 Olympic spirit.

Current Music: Hila Ruach, "Sprint"

sartorias

It's pretty hot and humid here, but wonderful. But yesterday I was trying to cope with the news that Jane Yolen is no longer among us.

I got to know her through an apa we were in together; through that, I was invited along with a pair of other writers to stay with her in Hatfield, where she had a fifteen-room house, before going to World Fantasy Con. It was Halloween. Her daughter, in high school at the time, breezed in the night before we left for the con to report that she and friends had been going around smashing people's Halloween pumpkins on their porches, and Jane laughed like a fellow teenager, making me feel that she was ageless. Also I wondered if smashing pumpkins was a thing. (There was a band called Smashing Pumpkins.)

On the drive to the con, I was in the front seat and two other writers in the back. Jane was talking writing as she drove. (Very fast.) I gained the impression that she respected everybody who was trying to write, wherever they were along the path, but impatient with those who wanted to have written. (Writers know what I mean, for example the folks who say, "I've an idea, but I'm too busy to sit down and write it. How about me telling it to you, you write it, and we'll split the profits?" or, further along the weedy path, plagiarists who seem to need to be known as writers but can't quite do the work themselves.)

Then she asked us what we were writing, and my friends in the back described their project--they wrote together as collaborators. Then it was my turn and I said I was writing a sequel in a sequence. She said, "How many books are in this sequence?" and I said, "One hundred and thirty-five notebooks." And she slewed around to look at me--while still driving. The car swerved with a dramatic swoop and my friends in the back got saucer-eyed, but Jane straightened out the wheel as she said, "Are they any good?" "Probably not," I said.

Which was oh so true--it's taken me another forty years of slow labor to learn to RE-write, still learning--but that aside, it was a pretty funny episode. She then at that con introduced me to the woman who would become my agent. Which turned out to be problematical to a painful degree, but that was not her fault.

Subsequent meetings were always at cons, or in New York, which included insider data on how the publishing world worked, as she knew all the editors of the day. What a force of nature she was! And how generous to those of us further back on the path!

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Jane Yolen has died. Her books were some of the first I read. Even with my library in storage, I can see several of her titles just by turning my head. Her shadow sisters got into my Jewish demons. She ushered me through the corridors of the sea. I had the fortune of sharing some panels with her; I did have the chance to tell her how much of my sense of story she had shaped. Tam Lin and Commander Toad, White Jenna and Merlin, dragons and owls and selkies and golems and cats and always, unsentimentally, words. Which remain, but it still feels like a great light blown out.

I saw a sailor once
shed his skin
as quickly as a crab
sloughs its shell.
He danced alone,
easy in his bones,
amid the coral memories
of his sunken ship.
When he opened his mouth,
little colored fish
swam in and out,
avoiding his brittle teeth,
his stripped and shining jaw.
They were quick and bright
as laughter,
running their zigzag course
through the silent syncopation
of the sea.

—Jane Yolen, "Metamorphosis" (1982)

Current Music: Yene Velt, "Indwelling"

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I have partly triumphed over bureaucracy! The parking ticket which it made no temporal sense for the car to have incurred was dispelled by a perfectly friendly clerk, exasperated with his computer and overheated in his office whose fan seemed just as overworked. Other forms of bureaucracy remain to contend with, but nonetheless.

Hollywood Hotel (1937) is otherwise such a prefabricated meta-movie musical that neither

spatch nor I expected it to bust out with the three-minute jam of "Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing)" that directly encouraged the legendary 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, but it justifies the entire film especially when it's chased by the integrated magic of the Benny Goodman Quartet on "I've Got a Heartful of Music." I pulled myself upright on the couch at the speed of Pavlov at the instantly recognizable Gene Krupa. The proto-Singin' in the Rain (1952) shenanigans of the plot also offer a chance to see the normally prim and mustached Allyn Joslyn as a clean-shaven, fast-talking publicity heel, in which capacity he is a sarcastic delight, but the total experience really shoots one of its feet off when it sets up a very funny and totally deserved parody of Gone with the Wind and then tops it with blackface. Just watch Lionel Hampton instead.

It makes me happy to hear about the musical version of Pride, not least that the original miners and the lesbians and gays who supported them approve.

My mother wasn't joking about Mamdani repealing bedtime.

Current Music: Wet Leg, "Chaise Longue"

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I spent far too much of my day engaged in the further pursuit of bureaucracy. Ironically I feel that I may be coming out of the tunnel vision of the last few years when I was focused almost exclusively on not dying because I seem to be seized with chronic low-grade grief. I was able to present

spatch with his CD of Harpo Speaks! The Riverside Symphony Concert (1964/2026) which I had ordered for him the second I knew of its existence. Yesterday I did actually run screaming into the afternoon and took a couple of pictures to prove it.

( Thankfully, summer's here. )

WERS played the Last Dinner Party's "Big Dog" (2026) and I have been playing it ever since. I haven't heard someone wail like that into a chorus since '90's PJ Harvey.

Current Music: Armalite, "Metastic!"

rachelmanija

Obstetrix is a gripping suspense novella about Liz, an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult to provide care to their large contingent of pregnant women and girls. The cult heard about her because she was acquitted of charges for performing an abortion in a state where it's illegal except to save the mother's life, but of course the prosecution argued that the mother would have survived without it.

Kidnapping/hostage stories are always tense, and this one is additionally so because not only is Liz in danger, but so are her patients and a young teenager who's soon to be married off to a particularly sinister adult. Liz has no idea who's in the cult of their own free will and who isn't, so she can't confide in anyone. Books aren't allowed, except for a single Bible that's kept locked up. Liz's only refuge is her memories of her favorite comfort read, an 80s fantasy novel with a kidnapping plot, and her quiet determination to find a way out.

I stayed up till 4:00 AM reading this. There's not a ton of action per se, but the whole situation is so tense that I couldn't stop reading.

sovay

I have spent the majority of my day in the pursuit of bureaucracy, which is obfuscating and elusive and in our supposedly frictionless digital age requires multiple rounds of phone tag, and am seriously tempted to run screaming into the afternoon. I hadn't known there was a documentary about Pete and Toshi Seeger and the Clearwater, but it's playing the Somerville in July. Recent fruits of college radio include Violet Grohl's "Bug in the Cake" (2026), the Japanese House's "Boyhood" (2023) and Noah Kahan's "Doors" (2026), which the DJ at WERS declared would make her cry all summer as she drove around Boston, unless she'd actually just been looking at the price of gas. I took a picture of myself yesterday with the late-blooming dogwood in my mother's yard.

Current Music: Nxdia, "Nothing at All"

sartorias

This romantic comedy of manners features the next gen from

The Trouble With Kings

Here's the blurb stuff for Masques:

“Disguise your passion in masque; when the dance ends, peril begins.”

It’s nearly fourteen years since the Norsunder War ended on Sartorias-deles.

Sky Szinzar, Princess of Ralanor Veleth, has loyally insisted on the betrothal she made to Lexan Glenereth, a landless boy with no prospects, made when they were kids. Her peers utterly scorn a “betrothal” she formed at age twelve—a scorn led by sarcastic Prince Garian-Rafael.

Now it’s fourteen years later, and Sky is finally holding her coming-of-age ball, which is spectacularly ruined by her abduction. On horseback. Right off the ballroom floor . . . by the prince she hates most. A wager or a lark?

When courtship between him and her and him (or is that him and him and her?) wears the guise of high politics, the dance soon gets wild.

It's romantic fluff with some action here and there, lots of screwball interactions, as the new generation copes with (or ignores) the memory of war. The war is over, Norsunder is gone, and everyone is working vigorously on leading happy lives, but what really is 'happy? Come inside and find out!

Available from: Kindle Kobo Book View Cafe (cheaper!) B&N Print at Amazon (also at IngramSpark, which can be ordered through any bookstore)

sovay

Good Monday! I slept an hour and have to fight with both my insurance and the city parking department. Have a small number of links.

1. Thanks to the ongoing movement to eat the invasive green crab, I have discovered the existence of Maine Garum. Of course I want to order a bottle of their fish sauce; I haven't had garum in the kitchen since our last apartment. Then I want to order their crab sauce, because intense oceanic funk is most attractive to me.

2. Since I last checked in on Dermot Turing, he has produced two books of obvious interest to me: Enigma Traitors: The Struggle to Lose the Cipher War (2023) and Misread Signals: How History Overlooked Women Codebreakers (2025). The first makes me hope he has written about Leo Marks and Englandspiel, the second is right on.

3. Have a photoset of Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton outside a pub in Shepperton, 1963. They are obviously in the middle of filming Becket (1964) and just as obviously are the modern AU. "He's drunk and wenched his way through London, but he's thinking all the time."

I have draft schedules for both Readercon and NecronomiCon Providence. I like the looks of both of them. Wish my constitution luck.