Just a thought

Luther M. Siler10 Comments

A warning: this post has the potential to start out sounding kind of grandiose, like I’ve got a Big Point to make and I’m Going Somewhere; don’t be fooled, this is just an anecdote that is a bit too complicated for Twitter or Mastodon. Calibrate your expectations accordingly.

My wife does the grocery shopping every week, on Saturday or Sunday morning. This started out as a Covid thing where it made more sense for just one of us to be out in the world being exposed to people and has more or less solidified into What We Do Around Here since then. While she’s gone, I clean up the kitchen and get the dishes washed. This involves emptying and refilling the dishwasher, which means I’m putting glasses and cups back into the cabinets.

How many of you put your glasses upside down in the cabinets? Is this something everyone does? An Indiana thing? I have no idea, because it’s not like I’ve paid attention in other people’s houses, and when I *am* in someone else’s house and getting a cup out of a cabinet, it’s likely that it’s someone related to me, so they have the same practices. I have no idea if this is “normal” or not.

Anyway, as I was putting a glass into the cabinet this morning, it floated through my head that the reason I have always done it this way is that it keeps bugs out of the glasses. That’s why you put them upside down. It’s so bugs can’t get in. That’s the reason.

And that thought kind of stopped me short for a minute. Like I literally froze, glass in hand, thinking about that belief that I’ve harbored, unexamined, for my whole Goddamn life.

Because you know what I’ve never had a problem with, not one time, in my entire life, from growing up in my parents’ house, to a couple of college dorms, to various apartments and now the whole-ass house I’ve lived in for the last twelve years? Bugs in cabinets. And one of those apartments had an ant problem for a while. I have probably at some point or another found a stinkbug in a cabinet. One. Because during stinkbug season those fuckers get everywhere. But that’s it. And this belief, that you keep glasses upside-down in the cabinet because that’s how you keep bugs out of them, has been hard-coded into me for my whole damn life.

Which got me wondering how many generations back you have to go, to find the ancestor who had cabinets and had a bug problem, one bad enough that decades later that person’s descendants are still automatically following this rule they– well, she, let’s be real– created. I know it came through my mother because when I was a kid mothers did all the housework, but my grandfather on Mom’s side had a lifelong, solid, post-WWII Silent Generation union job in a factory and if they were ever poor enough that keeping the bugs out was an issue I have never heard about it. So we’re talking probably at least three generations back.

It really makes me wonder what other things I do without thinking about it that can be traced back to, like, the Depression or something like that.

I dunno

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

As if we needed a reminder that 2016 is somehow still alive and kicking, and there are more calamities yet to come, the Queen is dead.

And I have no earthly idea how to feel about it.

As a God Damn American, of course, I don’t have to feel a thing about it. We made our feelings about monarchy well known in 1776 and in my lifetime I’ve seen no reason to revisit them, and at least for me the most intellectually interesting thing about this comes from wondering what exactly would have to take place to shut down the entire British monarchy. Twitter has been on fire all day, particularly Irish Twitter, and I have no beef with anyone who has chosen to spend their day gleefully shitting all over the entire establishment. This lady, to put it mildly, bears responsibility for a whole lot of genuinely terrible shit. I don’t need to give examples; they’re not hard to find right now.

Then again, she’s been Queen for literally my entire fucking life, and if I’m being honest I have some trouble reconciling the kindly-looking old lady in the brightly colored outfits that she has been for as long as I’ve been aware of her with the History’s Greatest Monster treatment she’s been getting online, and it’s weird to me to acknowledge the fact that it feels like we’re talking about two different people. Intellectually I know better, of course. I get that that’s a weird thing to say. But it’s how I’m reacting.

I’m not in mourning; I’m not going to miss her. I spend very, very little time thinking about the monarchy. I would be happier if it were gone, but my wife pointed out during dinner tonight that King Charles, who is 198 years old, an actual vampire, and is somehow this woman’s son, is going to be the first full-blown figurehead on the throne, and that’s kinda close enough? Take most of his money, turn Buckingham Palace into a museum, and let him cut ribbons at department store openings until he inevitably dies on the throne six months from now. But I don’t think it’s unfair to say that one of if not the most influential figures of the twentieth century passed away today, and that’s worth taking some time to reflect upon.

Fucking Christ, that’s enough

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

Damn near all of this is good news, one way or another, and you can imagine how jubilant I am that we might finally get a perp walk for that orange shitstain sometime in the near future. But all I can think about right now is Salman Rushdie. I don’t know why I haven’t seen the phrase “assassination attempt” used in any of the media accounts I’ve seen of the stabbing attack on him today, but the latest information I’ve seen (as of 8:23 PM) is that he may lose an eye, that the nerves in one arm were severed, and that he sustained damage to his liver as well. He is currently on a ventilator but I’m choosing to not read much into that given that he just came out of major surgery, and being on a vent after something like that is pretty much par for the course.

Initial reports (which may, of course, be wrong) suggest that his attacker is an Iranian sympathizer and he does not appear to have been provided with any security at the event where he was attacked. I don’t know how that happens. If he doesn’t make it through this it’s going to be the biggest loss to world culture since Lennon was killed.

I dunno, it’s got me fucked up. I hope he recovers. I can’t deal with Salman Rushdie being assassinated right now.

Out of town tomorrow for a birthday party in Indianapolis, and I’m back to work for real on Monday, so don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me on either or both days. The classroom is in decent shape (I’ll have all of Tuesday to finish it off; Monday is all meetings) but I’ve got a lot of writing and presentations to create so if I behave like an adult for the next couple of days I’ll be busy as hell.

On Nazis and pregnancies, but not at the same time

Luther M. Siler

I’ve been playing Sniper Elite 5 on the PlayStation 5 lately, because setting the difficulty to something obscenely low and shooting Nazis in the face from a hundred yards away has been about where my brain has been at lately. I like this series, but not as anything I take seriously; I don’t want to be challenged in Sniper Elite 5. I want to be an invincible force of death. I want the Nazis to tell their children that I’ll find them if they’re not quiet and well-behaved, and then I want those kids to tell me where their parents are, because their parents are Nazis and that means I can shoot them in the face.

Also, it’s the anniversary of D-Day. Also also, any time the anniversary of D-Day rolls around, I start thinking about my grandfather, who wasn’t actually at D-Day but joined the Allied assault in France a bit later, eventually being wounded in the Battle of Nancy, being handed a Purple Heart, and rotated back Stateside with a piece of a mortar shell in his ankle that, presumably, is still in his coffin with him, since the surgeons never bothered to remove it.

And today something hit me: I have an aunt named Nancy. And I tried to think about the timeline, and ended up calling another one of my aunts, the one I can bother relatively early in the morning with nonsense like this, and asked her about the timeline between Grandpa getting home and Nancy being born and named. Had my grandfather named my aunt after the battle in which he’d been wounded? It seemed possible, at least; I had to know.

No, as it turns out. Grandma was pregnant with Nancy when Grandpa shipped out, and she was born while he was overseas and named him herself. Tantalizingly, though, apparently my grandmother named Nancy herself and wrote Grandpa and told him the name, and my aunt tells me that his response was that she should “take it (the name, not my aunt) out and bury it, because it stinks.”

It is perhaps indicative of the type of woman my grandmother was– this is the one the name Siler comes from, by the way– that she ignored his, uh, suggestion, and her second daughter kept the name that she gave her. It’s also possibly an indication that Grandpa knew when he wrote the letter where he was heading and where he was likely to see combat, but I’d have to know a lot more about timelines– they’re both gone, so who knows where those letters might be– before I could make a supposition like that.

This led, somehow, to a conversation about the timing of the conception of various and sundry of my relatives; turns out one of my cousins is the product of a “lunch quickie,” and that my grandparents were in the house when another of my cousins from her was conceived. I changed the subject as soon as the phrase “lunch quickie” came up, by the way.

(My birthday is July 5; my mom’s was October 3. I have always assumed I was a birthday present; Dad, if that was not the case, I don’t need further details.)

#REVIEW: King of the Rising, by Kacen Callender

Luther M. Siler

I was not a huge fan of the first volume of Kacen Callender’s Islands of Blood and Storm duology, Queen of the Conquered. Feel free to click through to the review, of course, but the short version is that I felt like the book was both too ambitious for its own good and a main character who was not only not especially likable to the reader but was also flatly detested by literally every single character in the book. It had potential, though, and I decided to keep an eye on Callender in the future although at the time I wasn’t committing to picking up the sequel to the book.

Well. Kacen Callender is from St. Thomas, in the US Virgin Islands, and I hadn’t read a book from there last year, so …

It took a while to get to it; in fact, when I picked it up yesterday it had been on my unread shelf since 2021, and had spent more time there than any other book on the shelf. I honestly just picked it up to get it out of the way, and for a brief moment I considered not actually reading it, since it’s not like the Read Around the World thing is something official any longer.

*cough*

It’s a lot better.

King of the Rising begins exactly where Queen of the Conquered left off, at the beginning of a massive slave revolt on an archipelago colonized by the white-skinned Fjern, and if you want the historical equivalent you need nothing more than to recall that Callender is a St. Thomian, and St. Thomas was colonized by the Dutch. What makes this a fantasy novel and not just thinly-veiled historical fiction is the existence of Kraft, which is basically X-Men style magical powers that some of the characters possess. Kraft, if I’m being honest, is the weakest part of the book and in general its main role in the plot is to give the main character of this book and the main character of the last book a way to communicate with each other across long distances.

That switch in narrators is probably the singe change that that played the biggest role in my enjoying this book more than Queen. Sigourney was kind of rough as a narrator. She was very passive in a lot of ways and literally everyone hated her, and she just wasn’t a great choice as an MC. This book is told from the perspective of Løren Jannik, her half-brother, and while Sigourney still plays a pretty significant role in the story, Løren is a much more dynamic character than she was. He is still flawed, certainly; one of the major themes of the book is leadership during crisis, and the book isn’t interested in backing away from his failures as both a leader of the revolt and as a person in general. But the main thing is that he makes decisions during the book and while some of them are definitely bad decisions, at least he acts throughout the course of the book. Sigourney was just too passive, and pushing her offscreen or at least into the background made King of the Rising a superior read.

I probably should have put this first, but, like, you don’t need a trigger warning for this one, do you? Because this book is about a slave revolt against a colonial slave power, with everything that implies, and it can be a really fucking rough read. If you read Queen of the Conquered you should absolutely pick this up even if you didn’t particularly like it. If you did like Queen, I feel like you’ll really enjoy this one.