Stuff and Moonshine

I’ve been chickening out and trying to avoid reading online discussions about the shooting in BC—IYKYK.

Touch wood, but I think our apartment may be in remission from the Unpleasantness.

Andrew and I don’t really do Valentine’s Day, but e came with me to the mall yesterday—I needed to buy a broom and some groceries—and we had slushy fruit drinks and bought a small toy for the cats in the shape of an ice-cream cone. It seems to have gone over well.

Finished reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin, the sequel to Children of Time and just as enjoyable. Except for Dr. Avrana Kern, this one features a whole new cast of characters: humans, spiders, Humans, octopus, AIs based on humans, and one of the more frightening alien entities ever written, Us-of-We. Does Tchaikovsky count as hopepunk? He should: despite the many grim and horrifying things that happen in these books, they’re touchingly optimistic that peace, or at least detente, is possible if all sides can just communicate.

I did feel like most of the octopus characters were a bit underwritten, but that’s partly because it’s a plot point that their minds are even more different from human minds than the spiders’ are. That said, the scene in which the octopus flickers in response to Senkovi’s corny jokes, even though it doesn’t understand them, because it’s happy that he’s happy that he’s happy, is both touching and also a clue that they respond primarily to the emotional content of a statement. Sort of like how I’m told this song is a collaboration between Poland’s two best-known folk-punk groups/artists, and while I don’t understand the words, the tune is very catchy.

Other musical links: I’d heard of Viv Stanshall’s album Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead, but I’d never listened to it till this week, and it’s incredible—imagine if Eric Idle and Tom Waits got drunk together in a dive bar in Lagos.

Also—this M. R. James-esque report from the BBC on an apparent case of black magic.

Listened to an interview with handful_ofdust this morning, on the topics of her new novel, her life and stuff in general; at one point I kept wanting to shout at the device "Darmok -- the thing you're talking about is like the TNG episode 'Darmok,'" and of course she eventually did bring up the reference. Which I suppose is kind of meta.

I've been thinking a lot about magical systems of late; I think it started with reading handful_ofdust's review of Starry Eyes (which I still haven't seen), and the plot description pinging some nigredo/albedo notions about grotesquerie and decay being a necessary underpinning for glamour and power. Magic as sheer power isn't interesting; magic as cheat codes, workarounds, making the best of a bad situation, stone soup, the weapon of the weak, *is* interesting. This isn't just in supernatural stories, either -- I'm endlessly fascinated by what Peg Bracken, in the I Hate to Cook Book calls "shabby little secrets," mid-century recipes that claim that your guests will never guess the secret ingredient in your cake is... a can of tomato soup (and nope, that probably wouldn't occur to most people.) That just impresses me more, somehow, than all the stuff about locally-grown organic cooked with either exotic or minimal seasonings. I don't really know where I'm going with this, but it seems important to keep some record of what percolates through my skull these days.

Probably unrelated story: apparently Steve Martin is the only non-Canadian to have heard of the Group of Seven, but he's trying to change that. He's a big fan of Lawrence Harris and has helped to curate an exhibit of his classic works from the 'twenties and 'thirties, now showing at a gallery in Los Angeles. Harris' stuff is the sort of thing that makes me wish I could describe art without being flippant, because it's really very striking and grounded in his Theosophist beliefs and so on, but if you've never seen it the quickest way I can convey the look is "Caspar David Friedrich meets the backgrounds from What's Opera, Doc?" which sounds less respectful than I'd like to be (I'm a great admirer of the design of What's Opera, Doc?) Maybe I have to put things this way because Harris is the sheer-power, pure gourmet cooking school of thought that I just snubbed above. He was from the Harris side of the Massey-Harris company owners, and he could afford to go out to the Real True Canadian Wilderness and paint highly spiritual works. I don't want to bring him low, though, by comparing him to a cartoon; I don't think I even want to elevate the cartoon. I want to assert the existence of the cartoon, and the Road Runners that allow it to exist because they could be churned out to keep WB happy while the animators finished their crazy masterpieces.

Hey, The Long-Lost Friend, the classic book of Pennsylvania Dutch folk magic, is online as a text. It's even weirder than I thought it wood be.