child_of_the_air

I just got a letter from a doctoral student at the University of Pisa, working "on the sociocultural implications of fantasy literature." She very much admires my essay on "The Languages of the Fantastic" and kindly wrote to tell me so. I'm glowing.

Nine

kaberett

Reading. ( Bridget Collins, Feather (lalaietha), Jenny Lawson )

Listening. More Hidden Almanac, including First Appearance of Pastor Drom; slightly grumpy with myself for dozing through a chunk of it (to a greater extent than I realised; I did get snippets, but missed more than was apparent at the time) and am steeling myself to relisten.

Cooking. More from East: aubergine katsu curry with pickled radish (meh on my part, but A liked it), roasted carrots and cabbage with gochujang (meh on A's part, but I liked it enough to nibble at it between meals even though I'm unlikely to make it again), asparagus and mangetout with chilli peanut crumb (not actually worth spending in-season asparagus on outside the Cook Everything In This Book project, but pleasing given that context).

Eating. WILD ASPARAGUS is I think the most exciting thing I have eaten this week.

I have been Disappointed by Wagamama. Much less disappointingly, I have been plied with blueberries and yoghurt. Finished the hazel-bay-rye-and-rhubarb cake; have made some progress on the birthday cake I got sent home with.

Exploring. I am currently Away From Home. There are postbox toppers. One of them is Many Round Hedgehogs; another is Sea Creatures including Mollusc. I am sort of curious about who else I might spot in the area.

Making & mending.

Growing. ... I did not get cucumbers started. I did get some more squash into the ground (well, raised beds), and planted out a bunch of tomatoes, and at least two kinds of pea are now flowering, and I will be mildly resentful if I get home and discover all the strawberries have been eaten.

Did I mention that my established rocket remains established? I was a little concerned that I'd buried it under too much manure, and then it showed up in the next bed over.

Observing. BABY WOODPECKER.

sovay

The mail brought my contributor's copy of Weird Fiction Quarterly Winter 2025: Ghosts. It leads off with my poem "The Ghost Summer," inspired by the season I wrote it at the end of and given a gorgeously night-eyed illustration by Sarah Walker. Other contributors to its store of specters include Natasha Liora, Andy Joynes, Brandon Barrows, David Barker, Rebecca Buchanan, Maxwell I. Gold, Christopher Ropes, John Claude Smith, Lisa Morton, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, Daniel Braum, Can Wiggins, Mark McLaughlin, Duane Pesice, Ngo Binh Anh Khoa, Peter Rawlik, M Ennenbach, Robert Jeschonek, Michael Thomas Ford, Adam Bolivar, Russ Parkhurst, and dozens more. Check it out! Feeling like an apparition yourself is not compulsory.

Current Music: Primitive Radio Gods, "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth"

sovay

I hate that it had to be done in memoriam instead of normal celebration, but I love that Nathaniel Parker read Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" (1917) for Derek Jarman, from the first edition he was given when he played the poet in Jarman's War Requiem (1989). He made his feature debut clutching its holograph ink in his cold hand, laid out like an effigy with the mortal candle-flicker pinpointed in his dark eyes until the greatcoat he would no longer need against the slither and freeze of the trenches was flung furiously across him like a shroud: the author who has always been dead. He was perhaps more beautiful than the real-life Owen, but he had the mustache and the patent dark hair exact. I never remember him as the living man at work on his poems by the lantern-light of a dugout or kneeling beside the barbed-wire snarl of the friend he brought to his death, but on the other side of a fire-sheeted abstract of towns shelled to skeletons when the parable of the old man and the young has already killed him, his face a ghost-powder of lime and his notebooks and tin hat springing with the green turf of war cemeteries, the sacrificial Isaac himself led to a tomb of waste ground and slaughtered by a diabolical cardinal in a butcher's apron to the applause of a crowd of pantomime-rouged profiteers. The image haunted me, the poet telling his own death, writing his own ghost poem. It got into "Red Is for Soldiers" (2013), which I wrote for Armistice Day in a year the living links of memory had finally snapped. And Jarman who was already HIV-positive at the time of filming died younger than he should have, no government's hand stayed by a child-poet's angel to spare him, either. Any number of poems could have been read for his memory, from Christopher Marlowe to his own words, but this one had so many echoes. It makes me think well of Parker that he thought of it. He was not one of Jarman's muses, but he didn't forget.

Current Music: Peter Pears & Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, "It seemed that out of battle I escaped"

duskpeterson

All of the fiction below is free.

E-BOOKS (html, epub, mobi, pdf, and xhtml)

Law Links: Novel and Side Stories (The Three Lands). Few events are more thrilling in a young man's life than a blood feud between two villages. Or so Adrian thought. ¶ Torn between affection toward his traditional-minded father and worship of his peace-loving, heretical priest, Adrian finds himself caught between two incompatible visions of his duty to the gods. Then the Jackal God sends Adrian a message that will disrupt his world and send him fleeing to a new and perilous life. ¶ Mythic historical fantasy (secondary world, late antiquity). Reissued omnibus, with new front matter and back matter; no changes to the story texts.

Death Mask: Novel and Side Stories (The Three Lands). For eighteen years, he has survived in an army unit where few soldiers live more than two or three years. Now he finds himself in circumstances where his life is a living hell. Will the soldier who defied death find that life is too great a challenge? ¶ Soldiers, spies, slaves, rebels, assassins, gods, and men who set out to break him . . . The Lieutenant of the Border Mountain Patrol will learn that his greatest test is himself. ¶ Mythic historical fantasy (secondary world, late antiquity). New omnibus, with typos corrected and a new novelette:

Light and Love (Death Mask side story): In a world where two people who love each other must enter into the role of antagonists, what will preserve their love? ¶ Tryphena is a maiden. To her brother falls the responsibility of choosing her husband. ¶ Then war comes, and with it arrive a wise goddess of death and destruction, an enemy soldier of uncertain character, and a masked god who can turn evil into good. ¶ Who will rule Tryphena's heart and conscience? And how can she and her brother prevent war from breaking out between them?

BLOG FICTION

Tempestuous Tours (Crossing Worlds: A Visitor's Guide to the Three Lands #2). A whirlwind tour of the sites in the Three Lands that are most steeped in history, culture, and the occasional pickpocket. ¶ Mythic historical fantasy (secondary world, late antiquity). Latest installments:

( News )

( Ways to offer me a tip, financial or nonfinancial )

kaberett

Analogy of the day: car reversing sensors. Warn of impending, potential tissue damage, as distinct from actual tissue damage. Sometimes panic about A Plant, or The Bike Rack. Sometimes totally fail to miss the six-inch tall bollard that makes things go crunch in a way you don't notice until later.

Book purchase of the day: The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman, recced by a friend as popsci/popmed and one I'd nearly wound up buying yesterday anyway (... and a National Trust baking book to go with it).

Book purchase of the tomorrow, probably: Fitzgerald's Clinical Neuroanatomy and Neuroscience 7^th ed (2015), recommended via a NYU med student reading list (Cambridge's all appear to be paywalled and I'm sulking).

Links for further perusal: introductions to the nervous system on Biology LibreTexts and Health LibreTexts.

Reorganisation: possibly I am going to want to rewrite the introduction again (though the words do keep being useful), but crucially while murbling at A I think I have concluded that actually the reason the structure doesn't make sense is that neuroanatomy doesn't want to be the middle section, it wants to be an appendix. But I'll want to, er, know slightly more neuroanatomy before actually settling on that...

duskpeterson

The lower floor of the royal residence is guarded at its entrances, for obvious reasons. It houses only servants these days, but in past years, it was fully as active as the upper floors.

Left to right, you will see the former bedchamber of the High Lord, the former receiving chamber of the council, a former service chamber, the former and current royal receiving chamber and dining chamber, and the royal sanctuary. The last requires extended commentary.

sovay

I did not get out of bed until after noon. Hestia was curled at the foot of it to make sure. It was the first real sleep I'd gotten all week. Outside in breezy contrast to the last couple of days of November for May, we seem to be having a kind of spring-rinsed, sunshowery day. I have eaten a peanut butter granola bar. Hestia has wrapped her tail possessively, temple-cat-fashion, around my mug.

Because the internet is hazardous to the human condition, within the same five minutes I read some evolutionary psychology on atheism and ran into a reminder of the persistence of ace discourse and experienced a similar resurgence of antipathy. Any discussion of atheism predicated on a framework of faith would always fail to find purchase on me, but even when expounded by a self-identified atheist it grinds my gears to find the state explained only in terms of lack: an inability to imagine, a disaffection with religion, a failure to be socialized to it, a decision against it, all negative paths of arrival, no neutrally variant initial condition. Basically just replicate most of that complaint for discussions of sexuality, since if there is one thing the human species does seem to be majority-wired for, it's sloppy othering. It has occurred to me before that I was shielded from a lot of damage by coming at so-called normality from such an angle that not only did it make too little sense to me to feel aspirational, I didn't recognize for years what much of it was supposed to look like. But I'm also just kind of starting to have it in for the alpha privative. Defining by not still lets the thing it isn't set the terms.

WERS has been playing Jesse Welles' "Horses" (2025) on a near-daily basis for weeks now and because I too belong to this conflicting species, I feel that generally I agree with its message of letting go of self-defeating hatreds and divisions in the bigger picture of stellar time and at the same time the government of my country is pursuing policies of active harm to just about everything which seems to limit the degree to which I should be reasonably expected to let down my guard. Now I suppose I get to worry that finding a popular folk song naive means I have just flipped into the last verse of "Love Me, I'm a Liberal."

Current Music: Sea Lemon, "Stay"

sorcyress

I am at Pinewoods!

It feels nice to write that for this, the first time in 2025. I am at Pinewoods and I am sitting somewhere quiet and alone and I am about to take my covid test.

(Where that place is? Somewhere with enough wifi to make my computer go. What are you, a cop? If you wanna find all the places at camp that have wifi, you are welcome to, but I'm not gonna make it easy for you because I am a Jerk, tm.)

Anyways, it's just me, my covid test, and a chance to write my words and this is a pattern I got into in 2022 and have never really wanted to leave: the quiet joy of enforced time _by myself_ where I can write my words in the middle of the day instead of trying to do so very _very_ late at night.

I am at Pinewoods for the first time of the year, and I am quite happy, even though it's a different set of people than I mostly know and even though the weather is very damp and kinda grey. But the place is still good. I have chased some dragonflies to try and paparazzi them, I have had good mealtime conversations with people I know and like.

And I have done work, because this is a work weekend! And because I am very good at what I do¹, I got assigned dishes, as in, "wash all of them". Or nearly all of them, we are skipping the camper dishes which don't want to have to be spread out to dry in the same way everything else does because jegus what a pain.

So I did two shifts today with Brenda, who is going to be the Dishwasher for the summer, and it's her Very First Year doing so! She's been a camper dish-helper before (I remember working with her and being pleased) and so it's gonna be a good move up. I think she has a great attitude for it, and got the hang of a lot of things very quickly.

I interspersed actual work things with various ideas and advice as I thought of them, some of which were like "this is technically potwasher advice". And I ran...golly I can't even begin to approximate how many loads through the (only sorta working) Hobart. The Hobart wasn't sanitizing, so part of her clean-side duties² was to run everything from clean-side over to the potwashing sinks, all three of which had been turned into sanitation sinks, and to constantly drop stuff into the solution, and then run it all around the kitchen and stack it...virtually _everywhere_.

It was a lot of fun and we got _so much_ done. Maybe six total hours work? And I got to listen to my music in the first half and her music in the second and that all felt great too.

Of course, having done such an impressive job today, there's hardly any dishes left for tomorrow, so I'll probably be back to normal work weekend tasks, opening cabins and the like. Which is honestly fine, I quite like doing so! Lots of dusting, and wiping things down, and SWEEPING, and if you're lucky, getting to do a windows run.

I'm not sure what the plan for the rest of the night is. I am feeling a little people'd out, which means I don't necessarily want to be SUPER SOCIAL for the entire evening. Maybe I will read a book in a corner, maybe I will draw more pictures (yesterday I drew a dog, link is to Bluesky)

Maybe I will go for a nice stroll between now and dinnertime (which is over an hour, jegus, so late!) because if there's anywhere in the world I enjoy just prowling around by myself, it's camp. Bring my camera, look for bugs, visit Kitty Alone, see the new bathrooms, check in on El Nino, there's lots and lots of good things to do at camp!

Another day and a half of this, and I'm very happy for it. I hope wherever you are, you are also happy!

~Sor

MOOP!

1: I am using this (very common Kat-phrase) as a double meaning right now. Because first I am literally quite good at washing dishes, and second, I am good at working my way into the hearts of The People In Charge in order to get to do the things *I* most want to do. I mean, it helps that the things I want to do are often things that other people don't, but dang, I get away with a lot of special privileges just by being very open about my wants, and wanting weird stuff.

2: Of course I was working dirty side, I nearly always work dirty side, my absolute single favourite job in all of camp is dirty-side at the window as a camper helper. See footnote 1.

sovay

For the eleventh anniversary of Kittening Day, Hestia was made much of with ham and petting and tomorrow when the day is less frenetic, there will be salmon. Her brother is celebrated in memory, my flower-clawed movie cat.

I will not be attending the reenactment because my plans for tomorrow all involve absolutely not getting out of bed until after noon, but it is true that despite it being the first naval battle of the American Revolution, I had never heard of the Battle of Chelsea Creek. Then again, apparently I have to find out from the internet that I transatlantically pronounce "penalize." An envelope full of lino-printed stickers arrived in the mail from

asakiyume.

Current Music: Dispatch, "Whisk Me Away"

kaberett

Pain associated with sensory hypersensitivity, e.g. light and sound: is this primarily nociceptive (i.e. nociceptors are firing at a lower threshold) or a feature of central processing (i.e. brain goes "NOPE DON'T LIKE THAT" about stimuli the peripheral nervous system isn't reporting as Harmful)? Or, slightly more comprehensibly to people who are not currently spending lots of time thinking about this particular niche area, when normal light levels cause me pain, is that the nerves that go "YOU'RE LOOKING AT THE SUN AND IT'S A BAD IDEA STOP THAT RIGHT NOW" that are initiating those signals, or a... central... processing... issue... yeah okay maybe I should go to bed instead of trying to words this. BUT a quick shakedown of the internet revealed it's only in the last decade or so that nociceptive signalling relating to Loud Noise Bad has been demonstrated so that's cool.

sovay

I seem to have spent much of this day driving in a nor'easter, when all the potholes overflowed and every other driver in between the streaming gutters drove like a hydroplaning yak. I got to see

rushthatspeaks and secured a new inhaler and an appointment with a pulmonologist. Foods of the hour look like pastrami, scones, and a Zagnut.

Last night's shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum is still going around in my head, even if I didn't have people in the Jewish professional community of D.C. I don't want to entertain a referendum on the politics of the victims any more than I want to hear it about detained students or deportees, but it feels too cheap for irony that the shooter targeted an event with a focus on humanitarian aid in Gaza: all that mattered was that it aggregated Jews. The word antisemitism should be like hot iron in the mouth of the man in the White House. What he has to offer, none of us need.

In stark contrast to the mishegos with FB, when Criterion's website refused to honor a gift certificate I had received from them in the last month, I was able to get a real live person on their customer support staff who solved the problem for me so that I could ship a DVD of Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) to a relative who really needed it. Maybe I should try to bribe them for editions of my favorite films.

Current Music: Matt Berninger, "Bonnet of Pins"

kaberett

Wagamama have once again Done The Thing, by which I mean: the reliable Always Food For Alexes thing they've been doing for the last little while has rotated back off their menu.

The thing I tried instead today was sufficiently food for me to finish the rice but not sufficiently food for me to finish all of the toppings; I am suspicious of pho in "a clear yuzu broth" (which is not the same thing as "I won't try it").

(This is a Thing they have now done Twice, the first time about 15 years ago, and YES I AM HOLDING A GRUDGE.)

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Child of the Air

October 2019

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Child of the Air

Reading

Aglow

vital functions

Moonlight spills on comic books and superstars in magazines

I mean the truth untold

UPDATE: Light and Love (Death Mask side story) + Three Lands omnibuses + news

E-BOOKS (html, epub, mobi, pdf, and xhtml)

BLOG FICTION

[pain] notes

FIC: The lower floor of the royal residence (Tempestuous Tours)

Why not loosen your tie for the park?

Pinewoods Work Weekend Day 1

Once in a while it's all about a girl in Boston

today in idle reading about pain

It's a cup trick shell game, it's a puff of smoke

[food] ... :|

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October 2019

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