What I'm Reading Now

Josephine Tey, Brat Farrar, A Shilling for Candles

These are rereads. I love Tey's books, which are British mysteries from that sweet spot of British mystery writing, the 1930s through the 1950s. A Shilling for Candles is her first novel, and she's already a pro. It's one of her Inspector Grand novels. Brat Farrar is about a British upper class family in which the heir was killed/went missing as a child of 13, except now that son returns. Or does he? (No, it's an imposter, which is not a spoiler, since the novel reveals that he's an imposter at the very beginning.) The mystery here is what happened to the missing child; but as always with Tey, the delight is in the setting and the characters. I recommend these highly if you want a 'nice' book to read.

K.J. Charles, The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen

I like Charles's books a lot, but they are mostly e-books, and I really like real books, especially for reading at night when I am tired. This is the first print-copy of Charles my library has purchased, so I snapped it up. It borrows a bit of its setting from that Georgette Heyer novel about smugglers, but it's a fresh take. The young heir to a smuggler's den strikes up a romance with the young baronet, and complications ensue. Charles does this kind of romance very well. I also love the smuggler's dialect, of course. Dialects are my jam. This one has a sequel coming out -- a sort of sequel, it looks like it's set about ten years in the future, and concerns a minor character in the first novel. Anyway, a ripping yarn. I need to seek out more K.J. Charles.

Jonathon Kennedy, Pathogenesis: a History of the World in Eight Plagues

Kennedy's thesis is that communicable diseases did as much or more to shape the world than any human agency, specifically by killing off great swaths of people whenever two previous isolate groups came into contact -- as, for instance, when h. sapiens met up with h. neanderthalenis; or when the Roman empire was struck by the bubonic plague due to trading and invasion from various points, leading to the the fall of the empire. And, of course, the Native American populations, both in North and South American, were nearly wiped out by diseases brought with explorers and colonists, which allowed European populations free access to the continents. In other places, Kennedy argues, such as Africa, where the local population infected the invading population (Europeans, mostly), such conquests did not happen as easily. He also cites Haiti, where a plague of yellow fever kept the French from taking back the country after the slave uprising. The slaves, many imported from Africa, were far more resistant to the fever than the French army, and so the uprising succeeded (at least in part.)

This is a readable book, if a little more shallow than it should be. 

Connie Willis, The Doomsday Book, Blackout, All Clear

These are a re-read. I do love Connie Willis. These books, which are all set in the Oxford Historian/Time-Travelers AU, have gotten a lot of (justified) criticism for their inauthenticity. Willis is an American, and writes about Britain, like, a lot. I don't think she's ever lived in Britain, or known a British person; she gets a lot of details wrong. Apparently she's basing her notion of the British world on the British mysteries/television/movies she's watched. 

Also none of her people in 2060 Oxford have cell phones or the internet. Instead they have to do research in newspaper morgues and by looking things up on microfiche. This was maybe understandable when she first wrote in this universe -- Wikipedia tells me "Firewatch," which I think was the first story featuring Oxford Time Traveling Historians, was written in 1982. But the later works, including Blackout and All Clear (a paired set of novels, a MASSIVE duology) were written after the internet had appeared, and our time traveling historians still don't have cell phones. This is so Willis can set up the problem/interference/interference/ solution pattern which she loves so much, and which to be fair is really effective.

Anyway, I started out saying that Willis's works have garnered a lot of criticism from British readers, but if you're not a British reader, these are wonderful books, especially The Doomsday Book, which I just love. Science fiction, or rather science fantasy. Passage is probably Willis's best novel, and probably the one which comes the closest to getting the science right. I might re-read that one next.

Summer Arrives

We had a very short spring here -- forecast shows highs in the 80s for the near future, and even when (as today) the high is in the 70s, it is too humid outside to open the windows or turn the AC off. Five more months until fall.

I have moved my office into my summer quarters (a fancy word for colonizing part of the living room for my office, in the space close to the heat pump, which is reliably five to ten degrees cooler than the rest of the house). This is where I now write:

Bonus cat in the foreground.

Links

Camestros Felapton cracks me up 

Are conservatives ever going to get tired of publishing this whine? Let's leave aside the fact that it's a great big strawman -- no one is stopping novelists from writing whatever they want, as shown by the fact that every single example Parker gives here is from a published work. What people *are* saying is that writers who have authentic experience in an area maybe have something to say about that area? So when you get John Boyne, for instance, writing about Jews in the Holocaust, or about trans kids, maybe what he has to say isn't as interesting as what an actual Jew who lived through the Holocaust had to say, or what an actual trans person might say? 

Maybe you thought Jordan Peterson was bad, but this video will surprise you!*

Florida:

Roads in Florida could soon include phosphogypsum — a radioactive waste material from the fertilizer industry — under a bill lawmakers have sent to Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Conservation groups are urging DeSantis to veto the bill, saying phosphogypsum would hurt water quality and put road construction crews at a higher risk of cancer.

Texas: 

A state house investigation last week determined that [Bryan Slaton] supplied alcohol to the intern and another young staffer, had sex with the intern after she had become intoxicated, and later showed her a threatening email while saying everything would be fine if she kept quiet about the encounter.

Tennessee and the Moms of Liberty attack a teacher because her mother's day lesson doesn't suit their notion of what "real" mothers are. (I'll save you the trouble of linking through: real mothers are straight cis women married to straight cis men raising children they have birthed with their own bodies. No one else is actually a mother.)

Louisiana, Kansas, New York, North Carolina, and Texas -- gun-toting conservatives shoot children in their yards. I used to stray onto my neighbor's property from time to time as a kid. Once I got collared by the neighborhood "mean lady" who yelled at me for five minutes. But I never worried about anyone shooting me.  

In Texas, abortion is murder, and murdering a woman who gets out of line is just what good men with guns do.

 

*I mean, seriously, who knew he was this bad? Okay, sure, all of us, but

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer, as did a novel I haven't read, called Trust, by someone named Hernan Diaz. I'll have to read that one next.

I've been reading Kingsolver since her first novel, The Bean Trees, which I liked a lot. I enjoyed Demon Copperhead, but as I recall it's not my favorite by her. I'm glad she got the prize, though!

The Kid is Twenty-Five

The kid's birthday was yesterday. He and the fiancé came down, and we had a dinner party to celebrate, with French onion soup, corned beef, asparagus, potatoes dauphinoise, rye bread, and cheese cake, all made by Dr. Skull from scratch except for the asparagus.

The Cheesecake

The Corned Beef

The French Onion Soup

How did he get to be 25 years old? One day at a time, I guess.

While We're Talking about Trans People

 Here, finally, is a non-ridiculous post about puberty blockers. Gender affirming surgery also gets a mention.

“From an ethical and a legal perspective, this is a benign medication,” Giordano says. She is puzzled by the extra scrutiny these treatments receive, considering their benefits and limited risks. “There are no sound clinical, ethical or legal reasons for denying them to those in need,” she says.

To McNamara, the widespread attempts to take these decisions out of families’ hands by banning care for transgender youth is a clear indication that the goal is not to protect the health of children, as proponents claim. “These bans did not come from a public outcry about concern for trans youth,” she says. 

Also, I love this thread: 

my dad has been speaking to a royalist in his street and when my dad said we should get rid of the monarchy this bloke said "who would you have in charge instead... a load of transgenders?" and im obsessed with the idea that you can either have a king or a council of trans people

— bruce bogbutter (@dorkusmalorkus_) May 6, 2023

The council of transgenders would be amazing though. Parliament having to justify every single new bill to an extended polycule living in a squat in Govanhill.

— Old Tup (@sivomengro) May 6, 2023

Tangential, but is “load” the correct collective noun for “transgenders”?

— Amy Noseworthy (@HiredHandStudio) May 6, 2023

Just a Reminder

 Fascists start with trans people

5/6/1933, exactly 90 years ago today the Nazis sacked Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexology, destroying countless scientific research into queer Healthcare including transition procedures for trans people. The most famous pictures of a Nazi book-burning are from this event. pic.twitter.com/1Q0yYxFBAA

— Pinko Scum (@kayla_denker_02) May 6, 2023

So if you're supporting this bullshit, congrats, nice company you run with.

 

Cat Pictures

 

Also the little dog with his squeaky pig:

Bye, Spring 2023

It's the last day of actual classes for me and boy are my arms tired.

I'm not teaching this summer, which is going to be sheer bliss. In the fall, it's back to four classes, two of them Comp I. At least they're all T/Th classes, so I'll continue to have a four day writing block.

Things I plan to do this summer:

• Finish my novel
• Finish writing the Asimov review
• Finish writing the review/s for Interzone
• Continue exercising (we've been going to the gym at least twice and usually four times a week for one solid year now)
• Start my fourth novel 
• Take care of various medical issues (standard tests, nothing's wrong)
• Sleep a lot. Like, a lot
• Learn to make baklava from my SIL
• Sleep even more

What are your summer plans?

Links

This is from 2008 -- I discovered it going through my old posts -- before I knew my kid was trans. It's the story of two families, one of whom reacts to their five year old being bullied by bullying her themselves, and the other who is their child's advocate. 

Also from my old posts: in May 2008, when Bush was in the last year of his disastrous presidency, gas was $3.89/gallon. Adjusted for inflation, that's $5.58/gallon. But this was okay, because a Republican was in the White House. It's like now, when the GOP is screeching about government spending, while -- when Trump was in office -- they did not care how much he put on the government's credit card.

Speaking of performative legislature

This, I'm posting because "conservatives" (they're actually reactionary bigots, not conservative at all) love passing around stories about trans people committing "crimes" -- generally the crime of existing in public. The facts are very much otherwise, but to quote one lovely Trump supporter who was confronted with a fact contradicting her cherished belief, they don't care.

At least 1 in every 231 people in Arkansas have died of COVID-19. About 3.4/1000 people in the country as a whole. This is a disease that the Far-Right has decided is a scam.

Remember when the Right threw a tantrum because the publishers of Dr. Seuss decided against reissuing a couple of titles? Now that's their playbook. But as with the Dixie Chicks, when THEY cancel someone, it's fine.

Everyday life in America

See also this

This is depressing

Rod Dreher's wife ditched him, and now Steven Crowder's wife has. Marjorie Taylor Greene's husband can't take it anymore. Tucker Carlson got fired. So did Rod Dreher! Is the world getting sick of reactionary bullshit? One can only hope.

The target might change but the playbook has not.

Stolen from Nicole & Maggie

This is a video from Hank Green, which I like for a couple of reasons. One, he talks about performative legislation and why legislators are doing it; and second, it's about TikTok bans and internet bans in general. My own university has banned TikTok from being accessed on university-owned computers, which I don't have a huge problem with, but seems, well, selective. God knows there a lot of potentially harmful things being accessed on school computers -- why chose that one? Performative, I expect, as Hank explains:

Visit Nicole & Maggie here!

Spring in Arkansas

We're having a cool, wet spring so far. The trees are thick with bright green leaves, and the grass is filled with wild flowers. I moved here during a ten-year drought, so I'm still impressed by how beautiful this place is when it gets enough rain.

Highs in the low 70s for the next ten days. It's bliss.

Also, I see the rabbits almost every day, so the fox hasn't gotten them yet. (My yard is a wildlife drama.)

ETA: I tried to get a picture of the rabbits, but they ran away, so I took a picture of the trees instead. Look how green!

ANYWAY

Before I noticed that one of my posts (blogger does not say which one) is too shocking for normal people, I was going to do a post called something like "Checking on the Right," but honestly, it's just too sad what's happening to that fragment of America which used to be called conservative.

They aren't conservative anymore. Now they're reactionary bigots, heading full steam ahead for fascism. The entire purpose of the party, at present, seems to be stifling -- and by stifling I mean attempting to make illegal -- any sort of behavior that doesn't fit into their rigidly narrow worldview.

So: the COVID-19 pandemic never happened, and vaccines are not necessary. In fact, COVID-19 vaccines probably caused all those millions of deaths.

So: parents of trans kids should have those kids taken from them, to be raised in good Christian foster homes.

So: trans kids AND trans adults should be banned from access transition-related medical care. And bathrooms.

So: all children should be kept from reading books about anything but white straight conservative Americans, and if libraries persist in having any other sort of books on their shelves, those libraries should be closed.

So: dolls, Santa, television shows, any sort of culture should only feature straight white "normal" people (Steve Crowder, that famed pro-lifer, mocks the release of a Down Syndrome Barbie doll, using the R-slur as he does so; and also mocks the release of a Black Barbie.)

So: trans people and black people who get elected to office should be banned from speaking in legislatures.

So: the state has a right to force people to continue pregnancies, no matter the circumstances.

So: we should ignore the fact that more "grooming" happens in good Christian churches and in Evangelical Christian homes than in any public school.

So: Public schools should be shut down, because teachers hate America and love LGBTQ people and teaching nothing but Marxism and how white people are evil.

So: Teachers in public school should all be armed

So:

So: 

So:

Now What Now?

I got a notice from Blogger that one of my posts has been "put behind a warning" for readers because it contains "sensitive content." I can't see any such thing on my end -- what did I write that's too sensitive for the average reader? I'm dying to know.

Ooo, is it the one about Manhunt? I admit that cover makes me flinch every time.

Bye, Tuck!

Both Tucker Carlson and Rod Dreher have been fired this year so far. 

Q: What do you say about two Right-Wing lying sacks of trash losing their jobs? 

A: It's a start!

I’ll be very disappointed if Tucker Carlson’s fans don’t blame trans people for this. We want credit.

— Charlotte Clymer 🇺🇦 (@cmclymer) April 24, 2023

ETA: From Pharyngula:

In another message, Carlson referred to management with an expletive: “Those f—–s are destroying our credibility.” He later wrote: “A combination of incompetent liberals and top leadership with too much pride to back down is what’s happening.”

The funniest part of that is not that Tucker thinks Fox News is run by liberals, but that he thinks Fox News has any credibility to lose.