Busy day. Saw Moana. You should too. Sleepy now. Conserving mental energy for dealing with family tomorrow.
This probably won’t embed correctly since I’m on the iPad. You’ll live.
Month: November 2016
Nooooope.
I’m in this weird, needlessly crabby mood this evening, and I can’t shake it. I spent, I dunno, a week and a half or so trying to cut my brainmeds in half again, with the idea of extinguishing them altogether if that worked out, and… well, the election put the kibosh on that idea, because if there was ever a time in my life where taking anti-anxiety meds made really good sense, it’s the last few weeks. Making things worse, I started reading a book called An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States a day or two ago. As it turns out out that has not been a way to improve my mood– which, granted, isn’t history’s job, and I kind of owe it to myself to be as clear-eyed as I can about history. And then I run into paragraphs like this:
But scalp hunting became routine only in the mid-1670s, following an incident on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts colony. The practice began in earnest in 1697 when settler Hannah Dustin, having murdered 10 of her Abenaki captors in a nighttime escape, presented their ten scalps to the Massachusetts General Assembly and was rewarded with bounties for two men, two women, and six children.
I have bolded the words I find problematic; perhaps you can figure out why on your own. That and the author’s odious practice of using the phrase “U.S. Americans” when she ought to say “Americans,” a word that is entirely unambiguous in its meaning, mean that the book is a tougher slog than I’m really in the mood for at the moment. At least she’s not saying “USian,” a word that will immediately cause me to disregard everything someone has to say about any subject at all.
I probably ought to read the book sometime, mind you. I just don’t think it needs to be this week.
Gonna go see Moana tomorrow, I think. We’ll see if that helps at all.
Possibly not the best place to put this, but if any of you love me at all, and you have a couple of extra bucks lying around, it’s been a distressingly long time since I’ve sold a book. This is primarily because I’ve put little to no effort into such things lately, but if you care to help me out, it’d be great. Print books make great gifts!
In which daddery is exhausting
So, my kid. Three days a week I work from nine in the morning until eight at night, meaning that I really only see him when I’m getting him up and ready for school in the morning (which is all hustle, hustle, hustle, especially since in all honesty I’m not great at getting myself up on time) and for a few minutes at night before he goes to bed. My wife has given up on getting him to sleep before I get home so his bedtime has been adjusted so that I can see him and give him his daily allotment of hugs before he goes to sleep.
My son is fond of rituals. He is also fond of complicating things. To wit, each night he chooses several (as many as he can get away with) of the following hugs. Understand that this is probably an incomplete list, as I’m tired:
- JUMP HUG: He jumps three times. On the third jump, I catch him and lift him high enough to touch the ceiling, then hug him on the way down.
- CRASH HUG: He runs toward me on his bed, but doesn’t jump toward me. I’m just expected to grab him before he falls off the bed and hug him. He generally tries to do this head down, battering-ram style, and about half the time he manages to hurt me.
- CRUSH HUG: He lays prone on his bed. I’m supposed to lean over him and hug him. He insists that I’m crushing him as this happens. Occasionally this also involves attempting to eat his ears, nose, or chin.
- DROP HUG: I pick him up and give him a bunch of kisses on his forehead and cheeks, then abruptly drop him onto his bed without warning him first.
- TICKLE HUG: Like the drop hug at first, only I only drop his upper body, holding onto his legs, then tickle him.
- REVERSE TICKLE HUG: Like the tickle hug, only I make sure he’s facefirst on the bed so I can tickle his back instead of his stomach.
- NORMAL HUG: As one might expect. I insist on one of these each night.
- BOOMERANG HUG: Starts off like a crash hug, only I swing him around several times back and forth before putting him down.
- BATARANG HUG: Differs from a boomerang hug in a way that only he understands. Sometimes I get it right and sometimes he informs me that I just gave him a boomerang hug and I have to do it over. I think he’s fucking with me, honestly.
Lately he has been attempting to add “moves” to the bedtime ritual, which are a result of him reading Teen Titans GO!: Burger Versus Burrito too many fucking times. What that means is that I’m supposed to yell “Sleepy Smash!” or “Bedtime Bounce!” or “Nighttime Knockdown!” or whateverthefuck and try and put him to bed or tuck him in or whatever. It’s exhausting, especially since he wants me to come up with new “moves” all the time, and I’m not that damn creative at 9:00 in the damn evening after an 11-hour shift, and I’m trying to nip this one in the bud before it becomes any more of a monster than it is.
It may be time to start reading Go the Fuck to Sleep to him at night. We have a copy around here somewhere, after all.
One of these things is not like the others
Actual post incoming, but in the meantime this entertains me a lot.
Some quick reading notes
Yesterday’s post was about how I read The Wall of Storms by Ken Liu and it was great and everyone should read it.
Since then I’ve read two novellas, Hammers on Bone by Cassandra Khaw and The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson. Both are heavily Lovecraft-inflected and they were both amazing.
Last night I started reading Cherie Priest’s The Family Plot and I had to force myself to put it down after reading the first third or so. I may very well finish it tonight, despite having had an insanely long day at work and being very tired.
The reading is good this time of year, apparently.
#Review: Ken Liu’s THE WALL OF STORMS
When I read the first book of Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty last year, I had nothing but praise for it. The setting, a (very) loose retelling of the Han dynasty with giant whales, magical books, airships, battle kites, and two-pupilled warlords, was like nothing I’d read before, and the entire thing was fantastically inventive and entertaining as hell.
I read the book in April, and between April and writing my Best Reads of the Year list at the end of the year I read several fairly cogent critiques of the book that led to it not holding up as well as I’d expected. Chief among the complaints was the rather minimal role that women played in the text. There were more, but that was the biggest one.
Well, Liu either took that to heart, or had already planned for women to take a much larger role in the sequel, The Wall of Storms. One way or another, this book is stuffed with fascinating women characters. Hell, if anything, the men get shortsighted, as one of the main male characters from the previous book is dead (although his influence is felt throughout) and the other is not as foregrounded in this as he was previously. The book also shows why the series is called the Dandelion Dynasty, as Kuni Garu’s children move to the fore, and there are plenty of hints that the next book (I have no idea how many are planned for the series) will be moving down another generation again.
As a result, and because it doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting of creating the setting that Grace of Kings did, this book has a lot more room to breathe and stretch. It’s longer than the first, which wasn’t a short book, and while this one clocks in at around 850 pages it’s somehow a fast read at that length. And it introduces an entirely different culture, the Lyucu, who have antlered, fire-breathing dragons.
Garinafins are very cool, guys.
There’s also a great emphasis on scholarship and scientific advancement, particularly one great leap forward (pardon the pun) late in the book that allows the good guys a chance at victory in the book’s culminating conflict. Many of the main characters are scholars, and when the book occasionally allows itself to delve into, say, garinafin biology, it’s done for a reason and isn’t as much of a wanky infodump as you might expect. It’s true to the characters.
I loved this book, guys, and I loved it as much as I loved the first book. This book doesn’t have the first book’s flaws, either. I’m not sure yet whether it’s going to end up edging out The Girl with All the Gifts as the year’s best book, but I’ve got a month to let it marinate before I write that post. Either way, you should be reading it, even if you were scared off a bit by the first book.
On gestures, meaningless and otherwise
I got my first tattoo at a place called the Jade Dragon in Chicago. It’s a pretty famous tattoo parlor; there’s pictures all over the walls of various celebrities who have gotten work done there and there are billboards for the place all over town.
At the time, much like now, I was bald and had a goatee. In between my tattoo and the tattoo the friend I was with got, we ducked into a bar next door so that she could have a quick drink. It was her first tattoo too, and hers was a lot bigger than mine was, and she wanted a touch of liquid courage.
A guy at the bar, also bald and bearded, wearing a denim vest over a black T-shirt, made eye contact with me, did some sort of fist-pump gesture, and yelled “Skinhead! RAAH!” at us. We got the hell out of there– I told my friend to steal the fucking glass her drink was in if she needed to– and went back next door to get her tattoo done.
You get a T-shirt if you spend more than a certain amount on your tattoo, and the place is overpriced as hell so just about everyone qualifies for a free shirt. It’s got the logo of the place on it and a bunch of symbols all over the place. I figured they were just random flash tattoos. The shirt looked cool. I wore it as often as I wore any of my other shirts, I suppose.
Fast forward about a year. I’m chatting with this girl online and we get to talking about tattoos. I mention that I’ve got one and tell her it’s from the Jade when she asks where I got it.
“Ugh,” she says. “Don’t go there. The place is run by neo-Nazis.”
I flash back to that guy in the bar next door. And I do some research, and I discover that I’ve been wearing a shirt covered in white power symbols for a year. Luckily for me, a shirt covered in obscure white power symbols, as I’ve been wearing them on the South Side of Chicago and that could have ended up going very, very poorly for me.
The shirt is thrown away on the spot.
I am on an L train heading somewhere; hell if I remember where any longer. There’s a mom with several kids in the back of the train. The kids are being loud– not ridiculously so, but they’re clearly excited to be on the train and I get the feeling that they’re not from Chicago and this might be their first time. The train is maybe a third full; a few dozen people, perhaps. Some jackass starts yelling at the lady about how loud her kids are being and how she needs to keep them under control and it gets very creepy and threatening very quickly. The rest of the train car goes dead silent.
I unleash my teacher voice on the poor stupid bastard and redirect his attention from them to me. I am still bald and bearded and I’m wearing a black trenchcoat. I basically order him to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down and not say another word until either the family or him is off the train and then stare at him until he complies.
No one else on the train says a word. One person– a white guy, maybe in his mid-fifties– nods approvingly at me. I get off the train a stop early at the same place the family does in case he decides to try and follow them. The mom thanks me. The guy gives us the finger through the train window. I blow him a kiss.
My wife and son and I go to hang out with some of our friends a few days after America decides to elect a fascist. One of our friends is wearing a safety pin on her shirt. I am not wearing one on mine. I think about that family on that L train, and wonder about that safety pin. Were they supposed to look around for someone wearing a safety pin, to appeal to that person for help? If it’s winter, does the safety pin move to the outer clothing, or does it stay on the shirt, where you can’t see it under the coat? And if the person wearing the safety pin stands up and makes herself visible, or speaks up and makes his voice heard, is the safety pin really making any difference? Who is it there for? Is it a reminder to ourselves? A signal to other people that we are virtuous? Both? Neither? If it’s not combined with action, does it really mean anything at all?
My friend has five children. Those kids need to know to stand up, and she’s teaching them how. And she walks the walk and talks the talk. She will stand up. The pin represents something real, on her. I wonder how many others that’s true for. How many people are just trying to make themselves feel better? And do I have any right to criticize anyone else for making a small gesture that makes the world seem a little less bleak than it has recently?
I probably do not.
There is an American flag on the wall in my office. America decides to elect a fascist and I find that I can’t stand to look at it any longer. I order a rainbow flag from Amazon and hang it over the American flag, without taking it down.
I still believe in the things that America is supposed to represent, but I’m not sure the Stars and Stripes represents those things any longer. The rainbow flag is better. It expresses my ideals more concisely.
It’s on the wall in my office. No one but me and my family is ever really going to see it. I leave it there anyway, because I need the reminder. So, for that matter, does my son, once he’s old enough to understand what it means.
I find myself looking forward to the day when I can take it down.
Nothing tonight
Hellaciously busy day.
Best believe I’mma make up for it tomorrow.
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