Sumana

Per wiscon (post) and per the official WisCon blog -- WisCon will include an in-person event in 2022.

I'm assuming I'll be there and that I'll host the first Otherwise Award benefit auction in three years. Right? So if I write a filk to sing it should probably cover fannish stuff from May 2019 through May 2022. Goodness!

Came across this a cappella cover of a sea shantey ("The Wellerman") and found out it is about whaling. My spouse loves whales and so he has improvised a new song that is about people on a boat tracking down "the world's coolest whale" just for the joy of seeing it. The whale emerges from the ocean wearing sunglasses.

He was unhappy with his first effort which borrowed heavily from the theme song to "Gilligan's Island" and so switched to one based on "What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor." Until he did this I did not realize that the "Gilligan's Island" theme song was a sea shantey but it totally is!

Watching: Enjoyed the National Theatre's Midsummer Night's Dream and started a FanFare thread about it.

Leonard and I are now partway through Season 3 of Schitt's Creek. Some thoughts so far:

* I am always surprised by the moment an episode ends and the credits start to roll. It always feels like "oh I guess that 2 out of three of the plots will not be resolved fully". A different rhythm or comedic expectation or something.
* I find it easier to relate to and sympathize with David and Jonny than Alexis and Moira, and I'm reflecting on to what extent that's about the plots and the characters and the actors, and to what extent (if any) that's internalized sexism. Of course I can more easily relate to a goth art nerd and an entrepreneur than to an actress and a carefree socialite. But still.
* There's a moment where Jonny is drunk and walks into a room and in that moment Leonard and I could see how much Eugene Levy does, or can do, an EXCELLENT Peter Falk impression.
* Because Leonard and I saw a season of The Great Canadian Baking Show (in which Daniel Levy co-hosts) before we saw Schitt's Creek, every once in a while we pause and give David a baking-related line.

And I watched an excellent Darius Kazemi talk called "How I Won the Lottery" -- it's in two parts, so if you watch it, note that the first part is not representative of the second.

Listening: The latest "Jedi Mind Tricks" was neat -- I love how Mike puts together a set of stuff that I usually had never heard of that tickles my ears nicely. I got a Laurie Anderson vibe from the Woodkid piece.

Roadhouse 797, "pragmatic optimisim; like things will be okay, even if the reality right now is a little tough", and Roadhouse 798, with Chicago blues.

Playing: You guessed it: Animal Crossing. We are now well-off-enough in Bells that we don't, for instance, pick all our exotic fruit every day to sell, and are adding more stairways and bridges to make it more comfortable to navigate the whole island without needing a ladder or vaulting pole. I hear there's a software update coming that I'm going to like but I have avoided spoilers.

Reading: I finished Servant to the Crown (followup to last week's midweek entry) and will not be reading the rest. A substantial part of the appeal of these books is meant to be that they have realistic fight scenes, and maybe they do. But I need the POV characters in a fighty book to also be fairly wise about whether to get into a fight. Our super-grizzled veteran Gerald is supposedly a solid fighter and sergeant, who knows from experience how things can go down in the city's poorer neighborhoods. So when his young charge, a noblewoman, wants to see the city slums for the first time, he could easily foresee that this might lead to trouble, and he doesn't do any of the preventive things that he ought to. It's like in my review of the technothriller Hackster -- it breaks my suspension of disbelief if I can easily see that a character who is supposed to be an expert is having a hard time with something I know is relatively easy.

I still don't know what caused past Sumana to want to look into those books. Maybe a social media post somewhere.

Zen Cho's The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water! A treat! Like so much of Cho's work -- funny, sweet, fast-moving, characters making realistic decisions and being real with each other. I am cis and I am curious what nonbinary and trans reviewers think of the book, because of the treatment of a trans character -- seemed fine to me but I'd defer to them. And I feel embarrassed to say this, but in this book I felt, more than usual with Cho's work, that I was missing stuff because I'm not Malaysian, both context and "wait does that word mean what I think?"... stuff that it's hard to look up. I feel embarrassed to say this because, like, that's not a problem with the book, Cho should write for her audience and I still had a good time and liked the story and the characters. There's a level of meaning here I can't access and that makes me sad, is all. Like, I did not know, until Cho mentioned it in publicity materials about the book, ANYTHING about the Malayan Emergency, so I'm glad I at least read that Wikipedia page before I started the book, but there's some stuff I know I'm not getting.

Also, more than in, say, Terracotta Bride (her speculative novelette), at the end of the book I really felt a "what happens next?"! urge. Maybe I just feel this way about novellas/novelettes that end in a particular way. The first time I read my husband's piece "Mallory" (about 11,000 words), I came to the ending and I called Leonard and was quite angry with him before I calmed down and said, it's a good story and I like it.

Because of a recommendation by an acquaintance I read The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary. It is a sweet romance of the "no sex on the page" variety. Fun timepass. Content note that one of the point of view characters is dealing with the aftereffects of an abusive ex-boyfriend.

Listening: Ex Eye!

Playing: Animal Crossing.

Watching: We enjoyed an episode of The Repair Shop today that had really neat incidental music (the one with the portrait of the judo master). Also, we watched and enjoyed The Madness of George III from the National Theatre -- funny, moving, taught me some stuff about history, fun banter. And we watched a Muppet-related Q&A that was diverting. Ask me privately if you want to hear the ageist joke about the Hallmark Channel.

Reading: Finished Smallbone Deceased -- fun and engaging and fast-paced and witty. A few jarring sexist bits. Reminded me that historical mysteries will probably be a reliable source of immersive timepass and that I should take advantage of that.

Bought Shoreline of Infinity 18 so that I could read the new Zen Cho story "Odette" -- it does an interesting thing with horror and family that felt understated and well-done to me. Like, the narrator-voice doesn't need to tell you a particular behavior is oppressive; Cho trusts you to see the manipulation. And it made me think about something Rachel Manija Brown wrote about one of the solaces that horror presents: "if things are going sufficiently badly, hearing nothing but 'No they’re not! Stuff like that can’t happen!' is unhelpful at best, crazymaking at worst, and definitely makes you feel like people aren’t listening." Interested in talking with people in the comments about "Odette" in particular, as well as all the other things I mention in this entry!

I have now, years after I read a little chunk of it, read the entirety of Joanna Russ's How To Suppress Women's Writing which is NOW BACK IN PRINT!!! (As of 2018. But still!) What a ride. What a furious, funny, "oh crap I probably do that on some dimension" ride (Jessa Crispin's great introduction doesn't let anyone off the hook). There's a quote partway through, one you might have seen, one that kind of sums up the book: "Without models, it's hard to work; without a context, difficult to evaluate; without peers, nearly impossible to speak." And the book made me think about what I make, about how I value it and how others value it, or don't. About polycentricity instead of a central canon, about inventing new forms of expression at the margins and then seeing those formative works drowned out when the dominant voices make a new center out of what was the periphery. I wrote a giant "here's what I did and why and how I did it" explanation of The Art of Python partly to attempt to prevent this happening to a thing I did significant work on. A stake in the ground. And back in 2018, as Jason and I were writing our end-of-show thank-yous for our plays, I wrote a line for him to say, explicitly and accurately crediting me with writing 17 of the 18 plays. And when he asked about that line, I said: you're a tall white man and I'm a short brown woman. If this goes big, if we start a trend and people start doing a lot of plays at conferences, people will be biased and assume you wrote most of it. I don't want to be Rosalind Franklin. And he 100% agreed and understood, and delivered the line as I wrote it. I shall be as exacting regarding attribution and credit for my work as I think is fair and necessary; I want my legacy (even though we're all writing on sand) to be commensurate to the fulfillment of my ambition.

The more I read Russ's nonfiction the more I think I need to read more of it. Jed gave me some tips, customized beyond the ones in his blog post.

I also read a KJ Charles romance, Unfit to Print, which costarred an Indian!!!! And then a friend told me that another Charles romance, An Unseen Attraction, also costars a character of Indian descent (in this case, half-white, half-Indian)! I'm halfway through that and liking it even more. Am also partway through a reread of the postcolonial sf/f anthology So Long Been Dreaming.

Some things I've been watching, reading, etc. Like half this entry is me talking about Anne McCaffrey's Crystal Singer so be warned.

Listening: Podcasts and playlist I mentioned last time and in late May.

Playing: Still just Animal Crossing.

Watching: Leonard and I started watching the National Theatre's Coriolanus (I had not read or watched it before, but I had attended the recording of a podcast about it) but didn't finish it... seemed really well-done but I didn't want the gory depressing stuff, I think, plus I think I wanted to read a lot instead of looking at a screen as much in the evenings. We've watched a bit more Repair Shop while eating dinner.

Reading: this past weekend I read the latest draft of my spouse's forthcoming military scifi satire, Situation Normal, which is forthcoming from Candlemark & Gleam in December. This is in the same universe as "Four Kinds of Cargo" and has some of the same characters, the crew of the smuggling spaceship Sour Candy.

It was so so good. I hadn't read a draft in at least a year, and this is the best draft so far. I understand better than ever now how one of his inspirations is Catch-22; on this read I also saw hints of Vinge's Fire Upon The Deep and Deepness In The Sky, and saw more clearly the subplot where he's talking back to Ender's Game. I also see more clearly his themes about what stories we tell ourselves and each other to understand ourselves, to rationalize our behavior, to cover our asses, to inspire us. And that's not even getting into the representation of queer people, and black and South Asian people and culture, and and how witty and funny it is, and the neat aliens and the identity and gender stuff. I'm so happy and proud of him, and I hope it gets into the hands of people who will appreciate it!

In the interests of comfort reading, I have also now reread Anne McCaffrey's Crystal Singer, rereading for the first time since like 2000 or so. Quite a trip, and overall still engaging and fun. There are a few "oh I hope a major author, and their editor, would not let that fly" sexist moments/relationships, and there's one place the "this book sews together 3-4 short stories that were previously published separately" seam really shows, near the end. But overall, what an interesting book.

Like The Babysitters Club and Battlestar Galactica, this is a story about labor. I realized just as I started rereading this week: like (the last bit of) Malcolm X's autobiography and (the second half of) Lee Iacocca's autobiography, Crystal Singer is the story of someone who got kicked out and rejected from the ambition they'd poured all of themselves into, and making their own path into the next thing. I read all those when I was a kid and I think they helped me know that if I got the "what are you gonna do when you grow up?" question wrong, I could choose something else. Also, rereading now, I see Crystal Singer's fantasy of an objective assessment process to see whether you'll be able to do a job, and a well-structured apprenticeship that trains us in all the skills we'll need -- run by a Guild that we (the workers) own and operate, and that takes care of providing housing, healthcare, cooked food, work equipment, and more. For so many of us who work in the typey-typey fields, that's such a fantasy!

( spoiler, I think ) the next time I go to Mountain View or Palo Alto I will have another metaphor to use as a lens.

Reading the book caused me to think about mining as a casual metaphor that we use a lot when thinking about creation and invention. Like, sometimes I come up with a joke and it feels like I discovered it and it was just laying there waiting for someone to pick it up and yet I hadn't heard it yet. ( COVID-19 one-liner ) And we talk about a vein (or a well) of creativity to mine, or of an idea as a gem. But that way of thinking is susceptible to -- and of course I am that free culture and open source software person who thinks this way -- treating ideas as property to be claimed, and running off claim jumpers. And in fact the annals of literature and industry are littered with examples of people who had brilliant ideas but did not execute them well, and with ghost works.

(This reminds me that recently I came across the Honor List from the 1998 Tiptree (now Otherwise) Award jury and enjoyed Candas Jane Dorsey's mention of Dragon's Winter (which I haven't read) by Elizabeth A. Lynn: "I enjoyed reading the book but felt that in the years since Lynn was out on the frontier with the phenomenal authorial courage represented by her trilogy and The Sardonyx Net, others have followed her into that territory and built settlements around her, so that now she sits firmly in the centre of a certain kind of intelligent, emotional, beautifully-written fantasy." What a loving way to discuss genre niches using the metaphor of land.)

There's so much of Crystal Singer I absorbed and loved as a teen without (I think) explicitly noticing it, even besides the giant wish-fulfillment labor and ambition parts. ( spoiler, kind of ) As a "uggh when do I get to leave this house!?" teen I probably loved this.

OK, one last thing -- the way that practically every character you are supposed to like drinks Yarran beer all the time (never even any other variety of beer!) reminds me of one of my spouse's gripes from when he first saw Armageddon -- that practically every book-smart character attended MIT. "MIT is a fine school, but there are others." (Leonard's review upon a rewatch in 2016 is worth reading even if you, like me, never saw the film.)

In the past week I also read The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune, and did not care for it. I saw recommendations where people talked about it as though it was fun, and indeed there are a few moving or joyous moments (in particular, a gay love story). But in this 400-page book, for the first 70 pages, our main character is being treated to relentless abuse from his supervisors, colleagues, and neighbor. I do not find that fun! At some point I don't think "this poor guy"; I think "this author is loading on the suffering to make me sympathize with this comprehensively dumped-on protagonist" and I wish I were reading a short story in Strange Horizons where the author took, like, 150 words to make this point. That cast a pall over the rest of the novel, for me. As a whole the book felt obvious, at the level of characterization and moral complexity of a picture book.

Now reading: Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert, a witty murder mystery recommended by singlecrow. Fun so far! Published in 1950 and takes place in a London law firm, so there are definitely references I'm missing (and I'm sure I am not noticing some of the references I am missing) but completely enjoyable regardless.

And I've reread further in Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho -- "The Mystery of the Suet Swain", oooooof, up there with "Women Making Bees in Public" (and a few other stories in Alexandra Erin's short fiction collection First Dates, Last Calls) in depicting the creepy horror of harassment, and how it tricks everyone into thinking it's acceptable.

In a 2015 interview, Cho responded to the question "Can you talk about the relationship of research and/or academic life to your work?":

My reason for featuring academic settings was mostly laziness! I drew on stuff from my life because it minimised research. “One-Day Travelcard” is set in a UK school attended by Malaysian students because I attended a school of that kind. “The Mystery of the Suet Swain” is set in Cambridge because I went to Cambridge, and “First National Forum” was inspired by my brief stint with a Malaysian NGO.

But I also chose those settings because I’ve always loved stories that examine the dynamics within small communities with their own rules and conventions — Jane Austen’s two inches of ivory, Enid Blyton’s school stories, L. M. Montgomery’s Canadian villages, Star Trek’s starships. Schools and universities are a great canvas for fiction, because they’re a bubble that feels like the entire world when you’re in it. Everything can be very high-stakes and intense, while still being small-scale and human.

I particularly love the bomb she drops nonchalantly, adding "Star Trek's starships" as the last one in the list of examples, observing how limited and domestic that bubble can get. Ooof.

Finally: A general reading note! In case anyone here is interested in reading short fiction for free online, you might like to check out my Pinboard bookmarks of short fiction recommendations.

I know many people use Wednesday as a regular "post to Dreamwidth about what media you're experiencing" day. I don't necessarily intend to keep up that tradition, but this week I add my voice to the multitude.

Reading: I just finished Phyllis Ann Karr's At Amberleaf Fair which I found via a Jo Walton list of books in which no bad things happen. Indeed it is very low-stakes compared to a lot of fantasy! Leonard heard me describe it and suggested the adjective "cozy". Maybe! It's a short and gentle read, and I enjoyed it in ways that reminded me of the bits of the Steerswoman series where Rowan spends time learning about, like, the Outskirters. Also I have been attempting to close tabs which means reading short speculative fiction and in some cases liking it well enough to bookmark it as a recommendation.

Listening: I've been listening to radio shows and podcasts that play lots of music, like my friend Mike's show on his old college radio station, this chill KEXP mix that reminds me of "Music from the Hearts of Space," and BBC Introducing Mixtape. RIVVRS's "Run" in this episode reminded me of Guster's "Center of Attention".

Watching: We're watching The Repair Shop for comfort some nights while watching dinner -- so soothing, people fixing things -- but also mostly keeping up with the same stuff that skygiants is, the National Theatre and Shows Must Go On plays. This past weekend Leonard and I decided to skip The Sound of Music because I didn't want to feel rushed trying to watch that and do WisCon. And we got about 25 minutes into A Streetcar Named Desire (I've seen a production before, he hasn't) and stopped and will not finish; I don't want to have to deal with watching Blanche duBois right now.

Playing: Just Animal Crossing, still. Less in the past few days because of WisCon and work. I wonder what the next big time-limited thing will be.

I wrote a blog post -- "Tropes, and Missing Stories, in Art about Programming" -- about the stories we tell & don't, and what I'd love to see and hear at The Art of Python and at !!Con.

You have 5 more days to propose to The Art of Python & till March 3rd for !!Con!

[I keep remembering stuff I didn't add in that writeup (I wanted to just hit Post instead of dawdling endlessly), like Vienna Teng's "Aims" album, the bit in "Amends, or, Truth and Reconciliation" about the magical war crimes database, Vernor Vinge and Neal Stephenson and and and. Feel free to add a comment to this issue asking for prior art you've loved!]

Completely separately, I wish to signal-boost an excellent idea for a card game, from the dreams of alias_sqbr!