long weekend
Mar. 19th, 2016 10:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitThis is Day 2 of my four-day weekend, for which I'm using two of my paltry five days of vacation this year. Is there a word for anticipatory sadness/anxiety you feel at the start of a vacation because you know that it will end? Because I was already sad about this on Thursday night.
I'm not going anywhere or doing anything in particular, just getting domestic. I've got some chickpeas in the slow cooker and I'm about to start some bread dough and probably some pizza dough as well (bread to be baked tomorrow, pizza dough to be frozen). I'll make soup later, one of those "stuff I have around" soups which will have chicken in it, and some little meatballs made of leftover pork mixed with raw rice which I'll simmer in the soup, and some spinach, and maybe one or two other things but maybe not. I tend to put too much stuff into soups so they all end up tasting the same, and I'm trying to restrain that tendency.
I also want to make brownies, and maybe another batch of scones so I can use up the last of the fantastic strawberry jam. And I just remembered I have some tiny eggplants that I'm probably going to roast and then marinate with garlic and oregano, following an Ottolenghi recipe. Some of this will happen tomorrow rather than today, I think.
My only non-domestic plan is to finally go and see Deadpool on Monday, as a bribe for going to the laundromat afterwards.
I've caught up on S2 of Grantchester, with mixed feelings. Leonard went on a date with a man! And although he freaked out and ran away halfway through, he got his courage back and went on a second date! (And, in a nice and reassuring callback, they met for the second date at the same park or whatever it is--there are deck chairs--where he met that young woman last season for his "I can be straight if I really try" date.) So I'm happy with Leonard's arc, although I'd like to see much much more of him. And, correspondingly, much much less of Sidney's love-life angst. It was a big feature of the books, but I was hoping, when they broke up Sidney and Hildegarde last season, that it would be downplayed in S2 of the show. No such luck. (I worry for Margaret, who is straightforward, emotionally honest, and more intelligent than either Sidney or Geordie gives her credit for. Because I think Sidney's using her to relieve his sexual frustration and prove he's not a saint, and he's going to drop her the minute Miss Suitable Vicar's Wife shows up. I don't think Sidney's doing it deliberately, because he's not evil, but he's awfully good at fooling himself.)
Incidentally if the writers wanted us NOT to ship Sidney and Geordie, they're doing a rotten job of it. Yes, by all means have Amanda directly compare her love for Sidney to Geordie's love for Sidney. By all means have Sidney and Geordie joke uncomfortably about how their relationship might seem gay to other people. Have Geordie say "You're not my type" with weird emphasis, and also show us Geordie troubled in some way that's straining his marriage and which he refuses to talk about with Sidney. All these things will prove how much they don't love each other That Way. (My new Geordie head-canon, which I will cling to for as long as the show allows, is that Geordie was a POW and fell in love with another POW. He tried to put it behind him, because everyone knows these things happen when men are locked up together and they don't mean anything. But since he met Sidney, he keeps remembering the man he loved, and worse still he feels things for Sidney that remind him of that time.)
In conclusion, Leonard sort of has a boyfriend now! And it looks like he's going to try to come out to Sidney in the next episode. Sidney, please don't be an ass about it.
I've been reading the books I bought from Lethe Press's $1.50 e-book sale. I got several Wilde Stories anthologies, which are sff with gay male characters and are as mixed in quality as you'd expect. The more recent ones seem to have a much higher quality overall, but even they have a few earnest, amateurish "gay person has a happy ending and isn't that amazing!" stories of the kind I remember from many years ago. (Anybody else remember Kindred Spirits from 1984?) I must also contradict myself by noting unhappily that a lot of the stories are very downbeat. It's as though a lot of pro writers still can't figure out how to do queer SFF that's neither a PSA nor a lament.
Also from Lethe Press I got Comrades in Arms, an anthology of queer war stories by Rita Oakes. They're well written and well researched, but perhaps a bit deceptively advertised? Several of the stories didn't include queer characters, or the characters' queerness was no more than mentioned in passing. Also there are several linked stories at the beginning that feature unexpected zombies and werewolves. I almost didn't keep reading, but subsequent stories proved more to my taste. I especially liked the one about the American airman downed in Poland, who is helped by a resistance fighter who happens to be a trans* woman. Some elements strain at the suspension of disbelief, but emotionally it works well. Another story, set during WWI, is the only one I'd call a love story, but unfortunately that element isn't especially well done and the author stumbles into a familiar hurt/comfort cliché. Still, people for whom queer war stories are an interest will find the collection worth reading.
My favorite Lethe Press purchase, by far, is Hal Duncan's Scruffians: Stories of Better Sodomites. This collection includes several linked stories about the titular Scruffians, a subculture of runaway and thrown-away young people who possess the Stamp, which writes a person's soul on their skin and "fixes" them at that state forever--unaging, undying, quickly recovering from any injury--unless the mark is rewritten. The Scruffian history is fascinating--the Stamp, it turns out, began as a tool of enslavement, because an immortal teenager is useful in a war or a workhouse, but then the Scruffians rose up and stole it for themselves--and I hope Duncan writes more Scruffians stories, because things are left in an ambiguous place in this collection. There are also a lot of non-Scruffians stories, riffing on genres from pirates to "gambling with the devil" to Peter Pan. Many of the stories feature Jack and Puck, Duncan's characters from the complex multiverse of his novels Vellum and Ink, but you don't need to have read those books. Just knowing that Jack and Puck exist in multiple iterations is enough. Anyway, Scruffians is a great read, with interesting language and some intellectual heft as well as compelling storylines.
In non-fiction, I just finished The Midnight Assassin, by Skip Hollandsworth, which I read as an Advance Readers' Copy and which will be published in April. It's the story of the first known case of serial killing in the United States, in which several women were murdered and mutilated in Austin, Texas in 1884-1885. Hollandsworth avoids focusing too much on the gory details and doesn't propose any suspects; instead, he uses the crimes as a frame to talk about broader cultural issues, from class and racism to the nostalgia for the "Wild West" which was already prominent in late nineteenth-century America. I liked it, though as is often my experience with history books written by journalists, I'd have liked more rigorous and in-depth analysis. (What I want in popular history books is generally the opposite of what most people want. I wish there was a genre of popular history writing that assumes a non-specialist audience but brings the tools of academic historiography.)
I'm not going anywhere or doing anything in particular, just getting domestic. I've got some chickpeas in the slow cooker and I'm about to start some bread dough and probably some pizza dough as well (bread to be baked tomorrow, pizza dough to be frozen). I'll make soup later, one of those "stuff I have around" soups which will have chicken in it, and some little meatballs made of leftover pork mixed with raw rice which I'll simmer in the soup, and some spinach, and maybe one or two other things but maybe not. I tend to put too much stuff into soups so they all end up tasting the same, and I'm trying to restrain that tendency.
I also want to make brownies, and maybe another batch of scones so I can use up the last of the fantastic strawberry jam. And I just remembered I have some tiny eggplants that I'm probably going to roast and then marinate with garlic and oregano, following an Ottolenghi recipe. Some of this will happen tomorrow rather than today, I think.
My only non-domestic plan is to finally go and see Deadpool on Monday, as a bribe for going to the laundromat afterwards.
I've caught up on S2 of Grantchester, with mixed feelings. Leonard went on a date with a man! And although he freaked out and ran away halfway through, he got his courage back and went on a second date! (And, in a nice and reassuring callback, they met for the second date at the same park or whatever it is--there are deck chairs--where he met that young woman last season for his "I can be straight if I really try" date.) So I'm happy with Leonard's arc, although I'd like to see much much more of him. And, correspondingly, much much less of Sidney's love-life angst. It was a big feature of the books, but I was hoping, when they broke up Sidney and Hildegarde last season, that it would be downplayed in S2 of the show. No such luck. (I worry for Margaret, who is straightforward, emotionally honest, and more intelligent than either Sidney or Geordie gives her credit for. Because I think Sidney's using her to relieve his sexual frustration and prove he's not a saint, and he's going to drop her the minute Miss Suitable Vicar's Wife shows up. I don't think Sidney's doing it deliberately, because he's not evil, but he's awfully good at fooling himself.)
Incidentally if the writers wanted us NOT to ship Sidney and Geordie, they're doing a rotten job of it. Yes, by all means have Amanda directly compare her love for Sidney to Geordie's love for Sidney. By all means have Sidney and Geordie joke uncomfortably about how their relationship might seem gay to other people. Have Geordie say "You're not my type" with weird emphasis, and also show us Geordie troubled in some way that's straining his marriage and which he refuses to talk about with Sidney. All these things will prove how much they don't love each other That Way. (My new Geordie head-canon, which I will cling to for as long as the show allows, is that Geordie was a POW and fell in love with another POW. He tried to put it behind him, because everyone knows these things happen when men are locked up together and they don't mean anything. But since he met Sidney, he keeps remembering the man he loved, and worse still he feels things for Sidney that remind him of that time.)
In conclusion, Leonard sort of has a boyfriend now! And it looks like he's going to try to come out to Sidney in the next episode. Sidney, please don't be an ass about it.
I've been reading the books I bought from Lethe Press's $1.50 e-book sale. I got several Wilde Stories anthologies, which are sff with gay male characters and are as mixed in quality as you'd expect. The more recent ones seem to have a much higher quality overall, but even they have a few earnest, amateurish "gay person has a happy ending and isn't that amazing!" stories of the kind I remember from many years ago. (Anybody else remember Kindred Spirits from 1984?) I must also contradict myself by noting unhappily that a lot of the stories are very downbeat. It's as though a lot of pro writers still can't figure out how to do queer SFF that's neither a PSA nor a lament.
Also from Lethe Press I got Comrades in Arms, an anthology of queer war stories by Rita Oakes. They're well written and well researched, but perhaps a bit deceptively advertised? Several of the stories didn't include queer characters, or the characters' queerness was no more than mentioned in passing. Also there are several linked stories at the beginning that feature unexpected zombies and werewolves. I almost didn't keep reading, but subsequent stories proved more to my taste. I especially liked the one about the American airman downed in Poland, who is helped by a resistance fighter who happens to be a trans* woman. Some elements strain at the suspension of disbelief, but emotionally it works well. Another story, set during WWI, is the only one I'd call a love story, but unfortunately that element isn't especially well done and the author stumbles into a familiar hurt/comfort cliché. Still, people for whom queer war stories are an interest will find the collection worth reading.
My favorite Lethe Press purchase, by far, is Hal Duncan's Scruffians: Stories of Better Sodomites. This collection includes several linked stories about the titular Scruffians, a subculture of runaway and thrown-away young people who possess the Stamp, which writes a person's soul on their skin and "fixes" them at that state forever--unaging, undying, quickly recovering from any injury--unless the mark is rewritten. The Scruffian history is fascinating--the Stamp, it turns out, began as a tool of enslavement, because an immortal teenager is useful in a war or a workhouse, but then the Scruffians rose up and stole it for themselves--and I hope Duncan writes more Scruffians stories, because things are left in an ambiguous place in this collection. There are also a lot of non-Scruffians stories, riffing on genres from pirates to "gambling with the devil" to Peter Pan. Many of the stories feature Jack and Puck, Duncan's characters from the complex multiverse of his novels Vellum and Ink, but you don't need to have read those books. Just knowing that Jack and Puck exist in multiple iterations is enough. Anyway, Scruffians is a great read, with interesting language and some intellectual heft as well as compelling storylines.
In non-fiction, I just finished The Midnight Assassin, by Skip Hollandsworth, which I read as an Advance Readers' Copy and which will be published in April. It's the story of the first known case of serial killing in the United States, in which several women were murdered and mutilated in Austin, Texas in 1884-1885. Hollandsworth avoids focusing too much on the gory details and doesn't propose any suspects; instead, he uses the crimes as a frame to talk about broader cultural issues, from class and racism to the nostalgia for the "Wild West" which was already prominent in late nineteenth-century America. I liked it, though as is often my experience with history books written by journalists, I'd have liked more rigorous and in-depth analysis. (What I want in popular history books is generally the opposite of what most people want. I wish there was a genre of popular history writing that assumes a non-specialist audience but brings the tools of academic historiography.)
no subject
Date: 2016-03-19 08:21 pm (UTC)Grantchester
Date: 2016-06-06 04:20 pm (UTC)