charlene's Friends

For the Fallen - Laurence Binyon
Most of us, at least in the UK, know part of this from Remembrance Day ceremonies. Written in Cornwall, 1914.

For the Fallen

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

A Leg to Stand On by Oliver Sacks

A Leg to Stand On by Oliver W. Sacks

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Sacks completely wrecked his leg in a run-in with a bull on a mountain in Norway, and barely got out alive. This is his memoir of his recovery, focusing on his post-operative distress to discover that the leg was psychologically absent from his body awareness, thanks probably to undiagnosed nerve damage.

I picked this up on a tangent from other research, and it was useful as subjective narrative. But it's also grossly overwritten in places. I'm kind of torn, because this book is clearly trauma post-processing from start to finish, and like a lot of post-trauma writing it's deeply self-involved and recursive and bound up in minutiae of memory that mean nothing to everyone who isn't Oliver Sacks. So kind of frustrating. But, I mean, I'm glad he wrote the book, because he clearly needed to.

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Also, the to-do list just grew.

( to-do, house buying version )

It's Veterans Day.

Thank you to my grandfather, my dad's cousins, and my grandad's brothers and grandma's brothers and brothers-in-law. Thank you to my uncles, and my cousins. Thank you to the multitude of veterans that pass through my classes at the community college every year (and are usually my best, most involved, most driven, most curious, most academically prepared students.) Thanks to

stagger_lee77.

I might not always agree with our government, or its actions, or going to war, but that does not mean that I'm not grateful to our veterans.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Short version: rocked my socks! Shame about the protagonist, though.

Longer version: Extremely gifted and alienated seventeen-year-old boy is swept away from his Princeton interview to the entrance examinations for a secret college of magic. Quentin passes, matriculates, learns magic, and emerges on the other side not perceptibly happier than he came in. Then he and his friends discover a way into Fillory, the not!Narnia realm of the fantasy novels Quentin has never outgrown loving.

Ooh. I could sit here and make intellectually satisfied noises about how well this book's meta works – the allusions and homage's to the genre greats (including Harry Potter, natch), the reflections on the shape of story, the thematic conversation about what magic is and what it means to be an adult who believes in it. And the book does function very well on that meta level. But it's also a damn fine fantasy novel, with momentum and wonder and terror and humor. And writing, oh God. Writing that, more than once, socked me in the stomach and knocked the breath right out of me. Every fantasy novel that talks about the learning of magic from now on will be measured against the first half of this book, and most of them will be found wanting.

The problem is, though, that I periodically wanted to punch Quentin in his privileged, self-absorbed face. Gaah! The only thing that makes it bearable is that just when you want to grab him and shake him and tell him to OMG grow the fuck up, that's when Grossman is exercising the finest muscular control over the story. Quentin has to be the way he is for the book to work, for it to deconstruct coming-of-age fantasies the way it does, and I'm really glad it does. And because Grossman has compassion for Quentin, I found a few grains too, because every character in this book is broken in an awful or interesting way, but it just happens that our protagonist's way gets right up my nose.

Did I mention the amazing writing?

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Inhuman

Go over to

pgdf posting in

theinferior4 and follow the links he gives to the amazing robots being built in Boston, which include a plan for a squishy robot -- soft-bodied and able to contract like a leech, but with legs like a millipede. No prototype on that one, but theo thers are up and (literally) running. Very Uncanny Valley. Comic, nightmarish, and wonderful all at once.

It makes you wonder what a species of discrete individuals powering themselves and moving in an environment (as opposed to a giant spreading fungus, or other model) has to actually possess in the way of powers, senses, etc. Depends on the environment, I suppose; but the models for these bots are clear (dog, bug, person). Does the physics constrain?

non-cryptic posts about awesome things
From: loan officer at Corporate Monolith
To: me

Good afternoon,

This is your final approval email.
Loan amount: [amount]
Purchase price: [bigger amount]
Rate locked: [damn fine fixed rate]
Premium credit: [not bad]
Rate expiration: 11/12/2009
Closing date: 11/12/2009

Title will be held as: JOYCE [last name]

Estimated funds due at closing: [incorrect number, needs fixing], our closing department will contact your directly with the final numbers once they have approved the final settlement statement.

Thank you again for choosing [Corporate Monolith]

What if. . . The Beatles had gone on SNL?
Chris Bird (AKA MightyGodKing) is better known for his comic pieces, See, e.g.MGK Versus His Adolescent Reading Habits. But his most recent blog entry, a little alternate history where the Beatles accepted Lorne Michaels' generous offer to appear on Saturday Night Live is a special sort of awesome.

How to Change a Frog Into a Prince // Anna Denise
How to Change A Frog Into a Prince
Start with the underwear. Sit him down.
Hopping on one leg may stir unpleasant memories.
If he gets his tights on, even backwards, praise him.
Fingers, formerly webbed, struggle over buttons.
Arms and legs, lengthened out of proportion, wait,
as you do, for the rest of him to catch up.
This body, so recently reformed, reclaimed,
still carries the marks of its time as a frog. Be gentle.
Avoid the words awkward and gawky.
Do not use tadpole as a term of endearment.
His body, like his clothing, may seem one size too big.
Relax. There's time enough for crowns. He'll grow into it.

- Anna Denise
from The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm's Fairy Tales, 2003

This Dark Apartment
This Dark Apartment

Coming from the deli
a block away today I
saw the UN building
shine and in all the
months and years I’ve
lived in this apartment
I took so you and I
would have a place to
meet I never noticed
that it was in my view.

I remember very well
the morning I walked in
and found you in bed
with X. He dressed
and left. You dressed
too. I said, “Stay
five minutes.” You
did. You said, “That’s
the way it is.” It
was not much of a surprise.

Then X got on speed
and ripped off an
antique chest and an
air conditioner, etc.
After he was gone and
you had changed the
Segal lock, I asked
you on the phone, “Can’t
you be content with
your wife and me?” “I’m
not built that way,”
you said. No surprise.

Now, without saying
why, you’ve let me go.
You don’t return my
calls, who used to call
me almost every evening
when I lived in the coun-
try. “Hasn’t he told you
why?” “No, and I doubt he
ever will.” Goodbye. It’s
mysterious and frustrating.

How I wish you would come
back! I could tell
you how, when I lived
on East 49th, first
with Frank and then with John,
we had a lovely view of
the UN building and the
Beekman Towers. They were
not my lovers, though.
You were. You said so.

A Man Said to the Universe - Stephen Crane

A Man Said to the Universe by Stephen Crane

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

Victory
After 8 hours of work, grocery shopping, lecture review, and popping the chili in the crockpot for the night, I think I can call it a day. If I hadn't accidentally quadrupled the cumin in the chili, I'd be feeling pretty good right now.

Weekend recap: half day of overtime Saturday, errands, crockpot chili thwarted by still-frozen ground beef, game night - Dominion the board game is pretty awesome, BTW - and Sunday morning I made beef stew and snickerdoodles before doing a carpool to the Baltimore afternoon/evening stich-and-bitch, chili thwarted once more, this time by unusable produce.

The next morning I went to work. But first I kicked an "off" button and spent 15 minutes convinced I'd killed the baby laptop's a/c port. That was fun like smashing my kneecap into a desk. Not that I've done this lately. Cough. So the good news is, the baby laptop is still alive! The bad news is that I have no excuse to replace the baby laptop, such as a grad school plan.

I am enjoying a fairly epic bout of life strategy angst, while reading Anathem, so my thought processes are cycling like this:

1.) grad school means Meaning of Life stuff here
2.) Is Neal Stephenson
a.) writing geek Gilbert and Sullivan on purpose
b.) reading whatever he wants, channeling it back through a keyboard, and laughing all the way to the bank?
3.) OMG grad school Meaning of Life stuff system malfunction TILT TILT TIL- oh hey my bus is here. Seriously, Stephenson; seriously?

I am delaying all Meaning of Life angst to Thursday night, when I intend to watch The Producers or The Bourne Identity, finish two months of book log, and drink heavily. By which I mean two beers or hard lemonades, on a work night. I am a wild and dangerous person to know.

Cooking is also conducive to Meaning of Life angst: so far I have made cookies, beef stew, and chili, and possibly I will do stir fry later this week. Mmm, food!

Current Mood: tired

Hello there fellow fish!

I thought you guys may appareciate this.

I've been wanting to write some fic for the book but had no idea how old Alan was exactly. So I asked. Not only did I get Alan's age - I got everyone's!

"Alan is nineteen. I carry on, possibly needlessly, to say that Gerald is twenty, Jamie is sixteen, Seb is sixteen-going-on-seventeen, Mae is seventeen-going-on-eighteen, and Nick is sixteen and the baby of the group. "
That ^ is the response she left to my comment. I hope you find this as joyus as I do. Okay maybe not quite so much but still.

Edit! If this shows up on your flist twice, I apologize. I accidnetialy posted it on mailmalade_fish too *blushes*

Demon's Covenant, chapter One

Because I don't know about anyone else but now it's up on SRB's LJ I need to start discussing it (:

( Under a cut for those who haven't read the extract yet )

-Play

The Sexual Politics of Disability

The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires by Tom Shakespeare

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
An issue survey book built around a structured interview study of a sample of British persons with disabilities. Thorough and inclusive – if anything, the author suggests he oversampled the LGBT population. It's particularly good on barriers to disabled sexual expression, and on unpacking the duel popular perception of disabled sexuality as non-existent but simultaneously perverse. Frustrating in the way of survey books in that I really wanted a half dozen books, each built off a fifteen page section here on the disability fetish market, institutionalized rape, sex surrogacy, etc.

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Hurray for all manner of things!
Happy November, oh internet of my heart. I have many exciting things to tell you.

The first and most important is a very happy thing. On Friday I went onto twitter, where I am www.twitter.com/sarahreesbrenna, as an oppressive twitter system denies me my last, delicious 'n.' And I saw people were congratulating me.

Since I had not even managed to get dressed for the day and was indeed cocooned in a fuzzy blanket, this struck me as odd.

When someone told me that The Demon's Lexicon had been nominated for a Carnegie award, I became hopelessly entangled in my blanket and almost fell down.

The Carnegie Medal is the British equivalent of the Newbery and the National Book Award. Richard Adams won it for Watership Down. Margaret Mahy, being a writing goddess, has won it twice. It is indeed an honour to be nominated, especially in the company of such people as Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Laurie Halse Anderson, and R.J. Anderson for her awesome book Knife.

When you have a book out, you spend a lot of time trying to find out what people think. A bad internet review can make you lie down in the floor cuddling a cup of hot chocolate and murmuring 'You are my only friend, Mr Cuplington.' (All right, maybe that's just me.) So something like this just transformed my day, and made me wander around in a daze of joy all weekend.

My book. Nominated for a Carnegie. Mr Cuplington and I are so happy.

In other news, Cassandra Clare's lovely fansite Mundie Moms have been so very kind as to make Demon's Lexicon their Book of the Month. There's a forum up where people are already discussing it, and on November the 12th, 9 PM EST, there will be an online chat. I will put up the link to it in this post on the day - hope to talk to some of you then!

And a present for you all: here is the first chapter of the second book, The Demon's Covenant, which will also be up on the website very soon. I hope you enjoy!

( The Demon's Covenant, Chapter One )

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: i'd lie - taylor swift (don't judge)

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Alternate history 1914, where the Austro-German contingent has massive, striding mechanical walkers, and Darwin's work gave the west DNA and hybridized living creatures for flight and battle. Franz Ferdinand's son flees west, while a British girl dresses as a boy and enlists for the coming war.

Heee. It's kind of like Fullmetal Alchemist with cross-dressing. The alternate world technology is the best thing about this book – giant hydrogen-floating whale ships versus Star Warsy many-legged metal walkers! The story is otherwise cute, and fluffier than you might expect for, you know, the first world war. Relatively light-weight young adult, with a lot of nice color and zing. I'm certainly intrigued enough to pick up the sequel when it arrives.

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Japanese science fiction
I can name plenty of Japanese science fiction movies, but I'm afraid I can't name any Japanese writers n the genre. Except perhaps Haruki Murakami, some of whose stuff might qualify as science fiction.

I'm sure there must be others. Does anyone want to recommend any?

Agha Shahid Ali, 'Beyond the Ash Rains'
'What have you known of loss
That makes you different from other men?'
- Gilgamesh

When the desert refused my history,
Refused to acknowledge that I had lived
there, with you, among a vanished tribe,

two, three thousand years ago, you parted
the dawn rain, its thickest monsoon curtains,

and beckoned me to the northern canyons.
There, among the red rocks, you lived alone.
I had still not learned the style of nomads:

to walk between the rain drops to keep dry.
Wet and cold, I spoke like a poor man,

without irony. You showed me the relics
of our former life, proof that we'd at last
found each other, but in your arms I felt

singled out for loss. When you lit the fire
and poured the wine, "I am going," I murmured,
repeatedly, "going where no one has been
and no one will be... Will you come with me?"
You took my hand, and we walked through the streets

of an emptied world, vulnerable
to our suddenly bare history in which I was,

but you said won't again be, singled
out for loss in your arms, won't ever again
be exiled, never again, from your arms.

Recent reading... Hiaasen and Kleypas

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=164952151&blogId=517732721

Skinny Dip (2004) by Carl Hiaasen.All right, I'm late to the party on this author. Been seeing his books around for years, but the descriptions never quite enticed. I'm very glad I, er, dipped in. ...

By small and small: midnight to four a.m & Michiko Dead -- Jack Gilbert

By small and small: midnight to four a.m.
by Jack Gilbert

For eleven years I have regretted it,
regretted that I did not do what
I wanted to do as I sat there those
four hours watching her die. I wanted
to crawl in among the machinery
and hold her in my arms, knowing
the elementary, leftover bit of her
mind would dimly recognize it was me
carrying her to where she was going.

Michiko Dead
by Jack Gilbert

He manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,
he moves the hands forward, hooking them
on the corners, pulling the weight against
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes
different muscles take over. Afterward,
he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood
drains out of the arm that is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now
the man can hold underneath again, so that
he can go on without ever putting the box down.

Jack Gilbert, "By small and small: midnight to four a.m." and “Michiko Dead” from The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992.

Fabio problem!
WOEZ!

We cannot erect Fabio until we have the key to his cabinet-stand.

And while we have lots of add-ons to that stand- they do not include THE KEY.

I will be calling Rio Grande tomorrow and whingeing about this.

I mean- sending a LOCKED CABINET and NOT sending the KEY??? Ridiculous!

Current Mood: frustrated

Sitting in a car all day should not make one tired, but here I am.

The wedding was lovely. We all had a very, very good weekend. Today was punctuated by lunch with

yesthatjill and

flummox, which was very very nice (had arepas for the first time. Very nice.) I will write up a trip report, eventually. Right now, though, it's hopefully (hopefully hopefully) going to be a very busy week, so I'm going to go faceplant.

The Master Speed - Robert Frost

The Master Speed by Robert Frost

No speed of wind or water rushing by
But you have speed far greater. You can climb
Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
And back through history up the stream of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste,
Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
But in the rush of everything to waste,
That you may have the power of standing still --
Off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with such a master speed
Cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar.

Of hedgehogs and freezers
A few weeks back, we found a very young hedgehog wandering around the place, and took it to a friend of ours who runs a small Hedgehog Hospital. He was declared to be so young he wasn't even weaned, and taken in for fattening up. Number 21, as he was named, has since grown into a big fat hedgehog, literally ten times the weight he was when we found him, and today we went back to pick him up and release him near where he was found. A "soft release", with nestbox (a Hogitat) provided, and we'll be putting out food and water for him for the foreseeable future. He seems happy enough in his new home, and we are resisting the sentimental temptation to name him. "I am not a number, I am a free hedgehog!" seems to be as far as we're allowed to go. He's aggressive, anti-social to humans, and generally shows all the right characteristics for a hedgehog who's going to survive in the wild. I still think that furry little nose is cute, though, even if it does want to bite me.

So, Number 21 released, all three of us were ready for food ourselves. Go out? - no, not the way I'm coughing. Phone for pizza? But they'd take forever. There's a big pizza in the outside chest freezer.... just a minute, should the freezer be making that noise? And aren't freezers supposed to, well, freeze things...?

Tomorrow, Dave will investigate freezer repair or replacement. Tonight, we have distributed freezer contents among our fridge-freezer, next-door's freezer, Hedgehog Expert's fridge and freezer, and our stomachs.

It's a good job we decided on the low-cost route - we caught the freezer before the contents had defrosted rather than afterwards.

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