Happy holidays

I am too darn busy.  And still reading Reamde.  Along with Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls.  It's as good as everyone says.  I have so little to say these days.  I did a year end review for Aqueduct, no. 15 here.  In which I tried not to squee too much about Rick Bowes and get put next after his entry...

I had to put the old cat to sleep, afyer 22 years, 20 with me.  RIP, Hazy.  The brat misses you, he's actually being snuggly, for now.  Enjoying it while it lasts...

I'm being snowed on in a bus shelter.  Gotta love it.  Two feet or maybe 3 inches for Christmas, we'll see.

Some really nice photos

 Of lesbian/queer writers.  An intereznii site I had not run across yet.  Nice series about pulp and interview of Ann Bannon, which is how I found it...

"...and go in peace"

For some reason Najara from the Xena:WP episode "Crusader" is on my head talkin'...  Sitting on the couch warming up while tofu is cooking, watching "By Hook or By Crook" again with my lady, decompressing after skiing (cross country) at Fort Snelling.  Twilight snow, it's pretty.

A Viking stirs stuff up

Our not very winning football team who spent the last few legislative sessions thrusting their stadium proposals down our throats (and into our tax bills) finally shows the other side of having so much influence.  (The Lynx, our winningest team, in contrast, plays under Timberwolves logos and does not have a link on the Strib front page, unlike the losingest men's teams.)

Punter Chris Klewes has been thumbing.his nose at a lot of ideas about what NFL and football players should and should not do:  a summary.  Dave Kopay, our local E and all the dudes who waited or never came out should be happy.

Meanwhile,  this and  this are complicating football's very small world lately...

Reading the NYT and listening to Wiscon panels

both remind me of how opposed het feminist and lesbian agends can be.  The book about girl pilots in WWII who befriend each other...  especially if you know anything about how freeing service to their country was for dykes of a certain generation, such as Mary Renault... ending up just a smart book about the power of female friendship, it *is* like Neverland. 

In that "you will never be represented properly because our needs come first, always" kind of way.  I hate listening to how disappointing it is for a subtextual situation to become textual canonical lesbianism.  Will we ever move past Xena wank, really?

The vendor selling X:WP merch at Wiscon was kind of a throwback.  But it was refreshing, nonetheless.  What kickass at least arguably lesbian heroine has surpassed her, truly?  Plus it was "Bitter Sweet" X n G.  Still stunning.

Here's half of what  I'm crabbing about: Rowr.  We're looking for diametrically opposed experiences from that rare book with no cute-boy (or Alpha male) romance...   I get it, but I can't agree you should win every time in books that sell wide.  It's privilege and power.  I usually don't give a dime, but this stupid electoral ploy has gotten my dander up.  Must you claim exclusive rights to evrything, particularly our subcultural subversive liberatory histories?

Divided attention

I got on to reading The Hunger Games so we can go see the movie, mostly so I can gripe about it in an informed manner.  It hasn't really held my attention yet, 75 pages in, but the GF liked it, so I'm plowing forward.

Meanwhile  I'm also well into Celluloid Activist, the recent biography of Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet and a stellar gay (GAA) and then AIDS activist in NY.  Here's a rousing speech from him.  Here's an interesting interview with  Rachel Maddow about her AIDS activism, on a sort of tangent. 

Well, then I am also taking notes on Queer Injustice, by Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock.  I went to college with Joey, who is now a fierce lawyer and directs the Civil Rights Clinic at DePaul.  Watching a bio of William Kunstler a couple weeks ago made me remember I'd never got to this book.  A much-needed look at the stuff the large G-and-other-people organizations don't address, or at least not well.  Speaking of which, the City Pages had a weird article about local woman CeCe McDonald, who is on trial for murder after being trans-bashed and fighting back.  A glass in the face and all.  The City Pages has difficulty actually formulating ideas in their reporting on local people and events.  It's very post-Facebook coverage.  Typos and all.

Have I mentioned

that Newsweek bugs me?  Why they're sending it to me is a mystery. 

I'm reading a book that just got to the part about the emergence of feminist agitation from within the New Left back in the late 60's, and... yeah.

Foodie moment

Mmm.  This was good with tofu, fried crispy with a bit of drizzled sauce before adding to the rest:   Japchae.  The noodles are silky and very absorbent, fun to work with.  I had eaten them but not cooked with them before.  Missing out.

Future rhubarb raspberry sorbet is on the stove.  My freezer is almost ready for summer.  Or spring, since rhubarb is going to come early with all this warm weather.

Never give up

The three-legged dog is determined to eat every last itty bitty lump of snow.  She is from Hibbing, the hometown of Robert Zimmerman and site of the film North Country.  They get lots of snow.  Plus she was living free in a graveyard with a black Lab for a year or so.  Snow and squirrels were staples.  It's kind of.funny though.

Hometown proud...

Not.

Spike Lee is apparently making a biopic about Mayor Marion Barry starring Eddie Murphy.  Wow.

Three-legged dog tracks

Freakonomics Friday

Going to work this morning the light rail was filled with sleepy teenagers with full shopping bags coming home from the Mall of America, and going home it was newly awakened teenagers heading there.  And a few middle-aged people who also had the apparently requisite Abercrombie bare-chested man and Ho_er(?) bareass kissing couple bags.  I felt like I was back in the late 80s Castro, except so not.

Turkey day

I managed to knock 6 minutes off my 10k time over the last year, with six months off running.  Not bad.  Tired now.

Uplifting reading of the day

I bet he swore a lot, though.

Relaxing after my long run, which went ok, if very slow, after a week of for foot and ankle pain, some overdue shoe shopping, a slow short run and a memorial semi-kamikaze run with a pack of crazy runner types.  That one started out too fast and ended up too slow, as I accompanied the friend who was not up to the mileage or the original big dogs' pace...

As usual, I am reading at least four things at once, including a vegan cookbook which actually has a few things I had not considered  in terms of food combinations, and some books about foot care from the 70s with great drawings of dudes with bouncy hair and long 'staches in tiny shorts and singlets and tube socks. 

I just finished Embassytown by China Mieville, and it actually finished strong and made sense, but not too much sense.  A very thought-filled and -provoking book.  People who read a lot of linguistics or Joseph Campbell type stuff about the stages or development of consciousness should find it interesting.

Anyway, back to the real learning.

Orangevwie

It's hard to believe it's time to rake, except that I helped the GF buy a snowblower last weekend, on order to ensure that winter comes late and only with snow too light or wet for the machine to be worth using...  The firefighting 20 something son shovels better, but he somehow managed to nge gone for all the many big snows last year.  Anyway, I can't believe it's October.

I'm reading about the history of punk, homocore, psychiatric hospitalization, and informal economic networks.  That and a cold, the marathon runner's recovery from knee surgery and other  assorted mishaps, plus my own 10k training and that work thing are keeping me off the webs. 

I have come to really dislike having to turn on a computer when I'm not at work.  Not sure how to reconcile that with the writing goals just yet, except that I tend to do a lot in notebooks the old longhand style.  I need to look into Dragon, which some of my co-workers use quite effectively.  To not be tied to the box and keyboard might make it fun again.

Change of the season

It is suddenly brisk out.  Fast running is much more fun in cool weathet, IMO.  The sky has been really colorful the last couple days, especially over the lakes.  The other day the rising sun turned the downtown skyline metallic orange over Lake Hiawatha, with hundreds of Canada geese squawking on the shimmery water.  And the full moon has been out too.  A few leaves on the ground and tonight possible frost.  Time to go to the Kingfield farmers market for cider and donuts...

Things I didn't know before

1) I could run four miles of intervals.

2) I would become able to run two days in a row (which injury prevented until now)

3) Jay McInerney's short stories are really funny, as well was full of great turns of phrase...s...ss.

You live and learn. 

Mpls is cool and breezy right now.  An earthquake in my hometown and hurricane threat on the coast are just surreal.

Loch Hiawatha

It looked like one today, with mist hanging over the water and the edges all lavender and pink from reflecting the sky.  Maybe more Mists of Avalon meets my little pony, I don't know...

It was cool, anyhow.  And a relief to run in cold air, though still weirdly humid.

I see Ted Chiang won a Hugo for "The Life Cycle of Software Objects."  I was sort of rooting for N.K. Jemisin, because Ted has already won a lot of awards, but I tend to like SF better and TLCOSO was probably one of the best SF books I read last year.  Moxyland is up there too.   The Ten Thousand Kingdoms is dang good for the kind of gods and kingdoms kind of fantasy I don't usually like at all, though.  Well worth checking out. 

N.K.'s short fiction is da bomb, though, like  Non-Zero Probabilities.  (In audio too.)  Anyway, time to get some coffee and head to work.

Chioggia beets

First of the season, destined for a mezze - cuisinarted with garlic, olive oil, salt, pepper, basil, balsamic vinegar, and a little rice or potato.

William Gibson's trilogy is SF

Every Wiscon of late, on some panel someone mentions William Gibson and says his latest books aren't science fiction.  (I've read this elsewhere. It's not just a Wiscon thing.  There's just something ironic about people at this con drawing the hard science line against him; a good bit of the discussion is about inclusive reading.

Reading this brain book, which dwelled a lot on the reasons why various social networks online have risen and dwindled, made me think about Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History, which I just finished.  People who say they're not SF tend to focus on how the setting is not 'the future.'  They miss how the story is hinged on science and technology, and about it.

Because it's 1) 'soft' science... sort of.  And 2) new science, in a category less recognized as science because non-traditional companies are employing it.  Advertising, fashion, the music industry... they're not science.  But they are employing, or deploying, both computer science and neuroscience quite effectively.  As the brain guy argued pretty strongly.  No coincidence one of the topics he covered was pattern recognition. 

More on this later.