Freeze, thaw, refreeze

The fountain is twice as tall as me.  And blue.

Due to shorter waits than I anticipated, I am reading too many books at one time.  In audio, The Man Without a Face, a biography of the current leader of that country that is about to ban all homo promo, by Masha Gessen.  It's been interesting to find out how little I really know about the glasnost years, despite studying the language at that time.

I'm reading The True Deceiver by Tovw Jansson, of Moomin fame.  The intro by Ali Smith is whetting my anticipation.  Jansson uses few words, but to great effect, and this is a tale of outsiders in a small town, a very Nordic town.

Then there's The Married Man, by Edmund White, alongside Nights In Aruba by Andrew Holleran.  The Violet Quill stalwarts do have a way with words.  I am slowly working through both their oeuvres, trying to savor them.  Holleran's prose really is magical, and he has intriguing insights into people's quirks and obssesions.

Otherwise, there is a lot of fresh snow.  Sneg!  I might be uninjured enough to ski, we'll see...  The writing project is slowly percolating, seems to be on track, if I can keep from jinxing it by saying this... 

MLK Day

Is tomorrow, so I've been listening to Nina Simone.  Natch.  "Sunday in Savannah," "The King (of Love Is Dead)," and a good dose of "Mississipi Goddamn," cos no one captures better that moment, the shock and horror of having to go into the future with only an idea left of the complex man, knowing ideas get twisted around, bent, and razed to the ground, like places and people. 

Then I've been watching Amy Ray sing her new songs in concert and old duets with Brandi Carlisle, while trying to get through Dale Carpenter's book Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas.  It's very readable - I love "behind the scenes of the big court cases" books, and this one has a fascinating back story.  Especially the part where Lawrence and Garner probably never broke that law together, and the whole thing was just one fluke/stroke of luck after another... 

Ray and Carlisle provide a good soundtrack, with Amy's southern grit and Carlisle's fiery hopefulness.  I grew up on Hardwick's hateful clinging to tradition to trump over all precedent and Constitutional analysis. I never have quite been willing to pay attention to Lawrence, as it seemed like a momentary lapse, or something.  So it's really interesting to actually read about what made it happen, with Carpenter's speculation about it's import, slightly jaded yet somewhat triumphant.

Another interesting thing about Lawrence I hadn't really noticed, in ignoring the whole thing, is that this was hardly a perfect test case thanks to the racial and class complications.  It's not the case the gay aristocracy made it out to be, kind of like Stonewall...

I'm also reading a novel by Tove Jansson (of Moomintroll fame), about artists and their oddities, Fair Play, translated from the Swedish (she was part of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland).  Ali Smith wrote the introduction, and it's very terse and understated, yet intriguing, like Smith's works but, honestly, more readable to me...  Can't wait for The Summer Book, which has more family drama.

Otherwise, I am being very antisocial while actually getting some writing done and still working out.  An artist friend calls it 'hermiting.'  Yeah.  Hopefully I can keep this momentum going without losing all my friends...

Some legal sanity

Apparently, although a corporation is considered a person under the law of California, a corporation does not count as a passenger when it comes to satisfying a car pool lane requirement that a vehicle contain two or more people... The details are actually kind of funny, 'cos it's a political stunt.   More here. 

This is an issue with many science fictional implications, as has been explored to some extent.  I feel like I haven't read a really good takedown, though.

Some Kind of Fairy Tale

I devoured Graham Joyce's new book, Some Kind of Fairy Tale, appropriately enough, sandwiched between two researchy  books about psychiatric ERs.  It earned the hype it's been getting.  (I was underwhelmed by The Silent Land, and therefore somewhat apprehensive.)

In a nutshell, teenage Tara goes missing and does not show up again until 20 (IIRC) years later, and her explanation is that a fairy man - though of course they abhor that appelation- abducted her (willingly, in the fairy sense of such things). 

As you might expect, a good deal of the book involves psychotherapy, with an oddball doctor who once subjected a village woman to shock therapy for a very similar story.  This was vaguely interesting, though his theories were purposely predictable, but the povs of the family and ex-boyfriend and their interactions with Tara were engrossing.

What do you say to such a story, in the English countryside, when so much rings true?  Lots of food for thought and clever language, without as much of the over- the- top grotesquerie Joyce often employs in the name of realism (like in The Tooth Fairy and Smoking Poppy).  I like his often grim, stoic character povs, as befits their stories, but a little more lightness was welcome here.

That said, though it might be a mistake to listen to this while falling asleep, next up for aidiobooks is Hell House by Richard Matheson.

Water takes time to freeze

Water main break downtown at 10 degrees F, but that's a lot of water... 

Some dramatic photos here, including the awesome one taken by Jim Llanas above.  I only saw lots of sirens and stalled traffic, trying to keep working...  Got lucky and the water started working again before I got done... 

The businesses all over downtown had no running water, and the library shut down, sending people out into the cold night early.  (Thursday night shelter til 9 pm)

Urvashi Vaid

Has a new book out, Irresistible Revolution.  It's top of my to get list.  I've been listening to interviews on podcasts like OUT FM in NYC and watching speeches and interviews on the web and remembering how cogent and incisive Virtual Equality, her earlier book, was.  And remembering what an inspiring activist "Urv" and others like Sue Hyde, Jerry Greenberg, Linda (I'm blanking on her name, but she was fierce), young folks working for NGLTF and moonlighting in OUT! like Scott and Mary, and old hands like Frank Kameny were when I was a teenager in 80s DC with homohatred and denial strong in the local and national culture and AIDS raging.  I was constantly impressed with her and their fearlessness and willingness to speak out despite all the shaming and silencing that was still the hallmark of the time, so many years post-Stonewall.

Besides having a hot, funny GF (Kate Clinton, yes, *that* Kate Clinton), Urvashi's wicked smaht.  And lived the movement history she's writing about.

Her site has a link to a study of lesbian participation in the first two "marches on Washington of the LG flavor-  labels changed for each one and 1993...   Some interesting observations. 

It brings me back... Queer DC at the time, like Boston and other cities was split between men and women, each divided by racial groupings, with a radical lesbian underground hosting women's music, collectives, a feminist bookstore, magazines like off our backs, and the like.  And some of us straddled that scene and hung with the radical guys in scenes like Gay Community News, ACT UP!, and OUT!  It was a bit of a mind- bender, ideologically and socially speaking.  Sexism, hostile defensive disinterest, and invisibility from one side and some whack ideological social policing and infighting/trashing like only women can do on the other...  For a teenage wannabe activist, there was a lot to learn and digest, all at once from all directions.  Urvashi had a way of cutting through the b.s. effectively, from understanding where everybody was coming from but calling them out too.  The way I remember it, anyway...

North Brother Island

I have a little sideline obsession with abandoned ruined buildings, particularly mental institutions, sanitariums, and prisons.  It started with Alcatraz and the abandoned farmhouses that list on rural properties in Virginia and North Carolina, and over time places like under-church grottoes in France, the Castell in St. Augustine, the Presidio in Tucson downtown, the Sutro Bath ruins at the edge of San Francisco have re-stoked it.

Plus Melody Gilbert's urban explorer film "Into the Dark" and youtube videos of urban exploration.  An old veterinary hospital in Wales, the catacombs under Paris, old train tunnels and graveyards, and all the old asylums can be explored from your couch or bus seat.  Without fumes, falling plaster or beams, and crawling through raw sewage... or law breaking and some such technicalities.

I'm particularly obsessed with North Brother Island, a small island in the New York Harbor that is near Ryker's Island.  It hosted a typhoid quarantine residence that held Typhoid Mary, a sanitarium, a juvenile drug rehab center, and more.  There's something about the mishmash.of architecture and history that fascinates me.  I keep trying to use it in a story but it is wily and elusive...

Cleaning out my bookmarks, I found this slideshow from North Brother Island.  Some really nice shots by Ian Ference, such as the one above, plus an overview of the island's past incarnations.  Enjoy.

Fellowship

In honor of the President giving us the day off and the need for some hands-free entertainment while baking, I'm listening to an audio production of "The Fellowship of the Ring." 

A tip o' the hat to Cle for inspiring me to pick this up at Magers and Quinn, our awesome general used book store (Uncle Hugo's rules used and new SFF). 

I have trouble reading fantasy, and especially epic/high fantasy, but it turns out audiobooks cut through the attention deficit quite nicely.  So far, it's very enjoyable.  I thought background music would be annoying, but it works well.

We went to see "The Hobbit" on opening weekend.  The others in the group were not as taken, but I found it funny and tense, in the correct parts.  I guess I'm a sucker for dwarves.  One looked suspiciously like Young Hercules.  I might actually have to see it again...

I also really enjoyed "Night Train to Munich," which is now almost 75 years old.  It soft-pedaled WWII and the Nazis a bit, with lilting British accents, but it was made in 1940.  Despite this, it actually managed to imply that much more horrible things lay beneath the surface of the Reich, and made it clear collaboration was inexcusable. 

And somehow it moved very fast and remained intensely suspenseful.  Very.unusual for such an old, mannered film.

Rex Harrison, Margaret Lockwood, directed by Carol Reed (a dude), and lots of double-crossing spy drama.  James Bond lifted the ending scene 35 years later, with Jaws on the ski trams.

Coldheart Canyon

I am feeling impatient for my potato water to cool so I can mix the sponge for Rusleipa, Finnish sour potato rye bread.  Experimenting with sourdough starter is starting to pay off, but I haven't mastered reading the recipes ahead of time to be able to plan for 12-20 hour sponges.

So instead, it gives me time to discuss Clive Barker's novel, Coldheart Canyon.  I was hoping to read something I'd heard

of by him, but this was the one available at the library, so I gave it a try.

Coldheart Canyon turned out to be very readable, though a real mishmash of a Hollywood satire, a horror novel, and erotica.  The different genres weren't blended so much as arranged like a collage, one, then another, then back to that, then that. 

The characters were pretty strong, even the villains, which made this work.  It also worked against falling into genre cliches.  The cheesy erotica parts were a little too horrific, and the horror a little to funny, or sexy, and the bits of satire added a nice edge.

It's ostensibly a ghost story- fading Hollywood it boy hides out in an old mansion and gets drawn into congress with the undead.  But ghosts, the Devil, his goat-boy son, and monstrous animal-human hybrids, plus some magic spells, make for a grabbag of horror tropes.  Hard to say more without giving too much away...

The ending kind of dragged on, much like Salem's Lot, but this paid off a little.better in the Barker novel.  I will definitely have to check out some of his other titles, while I'm on a horror kick.

Oh yeah

I have a summary of all the books I blabbed about here, basically, up at Aqueduct Press's annual year-end extravaganza.  Mine is  here.  I've got to go peruse the other lists for 2013's to-read list...