chelseagirl | Reading

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I don't expect much from Goodreads, but I was still surprised to learn that Goodreads members have named The Hunger Games as the "best book ever"!

angrboda

My previous post has turned into a bit of a collection of other people's experiences with arranging funerals and their customs, which was unintended but which I've actually been finding quite helpful. There is a surprising amount of comfort in it, even if I haven't been replying (and am unlikely to do, sorry). I hadn't expected that. Aside from grandparents, it's the first time for me that it has been quite so close a relation.

conuly

And I'm getting paid for every last one of them, including the 6 hours when the house slept and so did I. Normally, we're not actually supposed to sleep on an overnight shift - but almost everybody really does, so it's more like "don't get caught" - but c'mon.

For everybody at home, leaving without a replacement is not simply a fireable offense but an actual, factual crime. Also, I'm not sure how I would've gotten to the bus. I mean, it's right outside the door, and buses were running all night, but man, it was brutal out there. We needed a little shoveling, and neither I nor manager wanted to shovel, so we had to wait for the neighbors to get their sidewalks and then sorta patch us into theirs. (The transportation issue is also why I'm not blaming any coworkers who didn't come in. It was impossible. I genuinely don't think that this was a fixable issue, Staten Island got a lot of snow.)

In retrospect, what probably ought to have been done would have had to have been done in advance:

1. Manager should've taken as much discretionary money as possible, agreed to let staff order Chinese or whatever for two, three meals - something that reheats nicely - and offered to pay all our carfare home in advance, and then used that to straight up bribe at least one extra staff member to stay over the storm. With three of us, we could've had one on each floor and also could've more easily arranged sleeping shifts so somebody was awake at all times.

2. She also should've called up the families of those residents who frequently go home for an overnight and asked if they'd take their relatives from Sunday afternoon until Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning. That's suboptimal for a lot of reasons - there's a reason they all live in a residence instead of with their families! - but it would've lightened the burden on us significantly if we'd had even just our two or three easiest residents away visiting their sisters and brothers.

But we all survived! My replacement actually showed up at midnight last night! But she declined to wake me on the grounds that I wasn't going home at midnight, and she was quite right. And then another staff member showed up this morning, and 90 or 100 minutes later my bus finally showed up. (And yes, I do insist on getting paid for that last hour and a half as well. I wasn't just sitting around, I was doing laundry, and supervising on the basement so that everybody else could handle the upper floors, and walking the guys out to their van so nobody slipped on ice.)

I'm home now, I showered, and I have the rest of the week off, off, off. Yay me!

If this happens again, I'm bringing a change of clothing.

earthspirits posting in

historium

Fandom: Wuthering Heights (Inspired by Emily Brontë's 1847 Novel + The 1939 and 1992 Films)
Title: The Courage of a Woman
Characters: Isabella Linton, Heathcliff, Joseph, Catherine Earnshaw + Original Character
Relationships: Isabella / Heathcliff - Catherine / Heathcliff
Era: Late 18th Century
Rating: Mature
Trigger Warnings: Abusive situation, unhappy marriage, references to past violence, references to past physical and psychological abuse, brief veiled reference to past animal abuse + threats of violence and some strong language.
Complete: 1/1
Word Count: 1,784
Summary: Isabella Linton has finally had enough.

Notes:

- Some spoilers for the novel and for the 1939 and 1992 films.

- Isabella in my tale is based on Geraldine Fitzgerald, as she appeared in the 1939 film. Heathcliff is based on Ralph Fiennes, as he appeared in the 1992 film.

Link: archiveofourown.org/works/79610331

musesfool

It snowed until around 3 pm today! Just...so much snow. Friend L sent me a pic from her building in Manhattan and it was like the storm had barely had an impact, yet by me, even though the street had been plowed, it was all snowy again. Anyway, thankfully, my boss is also under about 2 ft of snow out on the island, so we are not going in tomorrow (the person who was supposed to come meet with us had their flight cancelled, so they never even made it to NY, so that will all get rescheduled, too). Whew.

Anyway, have some brief thoughts on recent TV:

- Shrinking: ( spoilers ) This show remains hilarious and endearing.

- Pluribus: I finished it and I don't love it but I am interested in seeing where it goes. ( spoilers )

- The Pitt: ( spoilers )

*

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Irresistible - Fall Out Boy

muccamukk

The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue
Read this because a) I'd been meaning to, b) it was a yuletide EPH (which obviously I didn't fill, but you know... good intentions).

In the past, I've found Donoghue rather bleak, and preferred her non, fiction. (Maybe it was just that I read the one where everyone died of Spanish Influenza?)

This takes place across several hours, on a train that runs from the coast of Normandy to Paris, where it will famously fail to brake and blast through the wall of the train station (this was re-enacted in the movie Hugo, and captured in a tonne of contemporary photographs). Which is not what the book's about, other than as a driving sense of inevitable ruin. The book is about a few dozen characters, including the train itself, a slice of life as the world teeters on the edge of a new century. Many of the characters are historical figures, some of whom were on the train that day, a bunch more who might have been. There's an anarchist with a bomb, the railway employees, a painter, a secretary, several politicians, a sex worker, a medical student, some children, a variety of day labourers, all forced to into each other's company for the course of several hours. Many of them are some flavour of queer, several are not white, each has their own story. All have a complicated relationship with the racing pace of technological and cultural change, at a time when France has only been a Republic (again) for a few decades, and it's (again) not at all clear if this time will stick.

I often get confused by books with this many characters, especially when there's not much in the way of plot, and the book jumps between them pretty fast, but Donoghue makes them all so distinct, with their own voices, that I didn't have trouble this time. I also appreciated her deft touch at making the characters feel of that moment in history, rather than being stand ins for the contemporary reader. We hear about the Dreyfus Affair, for example, and mostly people just believe he's a traitor, even the anarchist, who theoretically should know better. If there's any author stand in, it's an elderly Russian lady's companion, who mostly seems to have things figured out, and is also a cranky weirdo. Actually, a lot of characters are cranky weirdos, and not necessarily good people, but also not the kind of vile that are terrible to spend time with.

I'm perhaps not at my most articulate explaining why I liked this, but mostly that it scratched my brain as a deeply considered idea of how life might have looked at another time, when people were like us, but also different.

"Mr Rowl" by D.K. Broster
I'm not sure if this is the second most popular one after The Jacobite Trilogy, or if The Wounded Name is. Anyway, another 1920s book by a lesbian author, about plausibly deniable Historical Gays. This one is set during the Napoleonic wars, and centres on a French officer who is a prisoner of war in England. He's initial held on parole in a bucolic town, but following Events, he ends up in a prison stockade, then on the prison hulks (de-masted ships floating in the English Channel). He has a low-key romance with one of the girls from the original town, and a series of oddly intense interactions with English officers (one of whom appears to be canonically queer). There's also crossdressing, and quite a bit of hurt/comfort.

Having come in to Broster on The Flight of the Heron, I was expecting the same kind of emotional romance plot, with the pivot of the story being around the relationship between the two main male characters. Thus was initially discombobulated by how meandering the plot ended up being. We follow "Mr Rowl" (the English pronunciation of Raoul) across a series of misfortunes as he wanders about England, not meeting either of the other significant male characters until half way through the book. The most intense action is packed into two chapters in the last third, which makes the structure a little lopsided; however, the plotlines that have been building do come together rather neatly, which I enjoyed.

I started watching the new Star Trek show not long after I finished this, and was immediately struck by the connection between how Broster writes honour-obsessed men in the 18th and 19th century, and the Klingons. Some of the "I must do this Because Honour" choices in this book—though they more or less made sense—did feel a little load-bearing in terms of plot. And the heroine did spend some time going, "Um, holy shit, why?" at a few of those choices. It does also lead to several of the most tropy h/c scenes, however, so I suppose I shouldn't complain.

I like that the main antagonists of the book were a) the controlling asshole boyfriend, and b) the British penal system.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey, narrated by Sarah Naudi
Firstly, I remember some debate about this when this came out: this book is not science fiction. It's literary fiction set on the International Space Station. If you wanted to have an argument for why it was SF, you could say, "Well there's an ongoing Moon mission, which there wasn't at the time of this writing." But there being a Moon mission has been on the books for a decade, so setting it slightly in the future so that the mission could be happening at the same time as the book is, frankly, not science fiction, and I don't know why people thought it was.

Secondly, oh my god why? I guess this was so popular because most people haven't really thought about what life on the I.S.S. might be like, and this was more or less informative on that point. If you've never even one time thought about the space program. It rapidly became clear that someone who's read multiple astronaut biographies may not be the target audience.

There were several neat scenes! I liked the bit about the cosmonaut talking on a HAM radio with random Earthlings, for example. However, the majority of the book was poetic reflections on either inane details of space life, or just looking at the Earth being pretty. Eventually the Astronauts go to bed, and then we just close out with long descriptions of the Earth being pretty. I may not have gotten the point of this book.

(While writing this, I discovered that www.HowManyPeopleAreInSpaceRightNow.com is no longer being maintained, which makes me sad.)

watersword

Well, that sure is 33 inches (84 cm) of snow out there, goodness gracious. (We beat the record from 1978! Wow.)

So far my power is fine, I have baked a loaf of bread and spent the day working my way through the manuscript for crit group tomorrow, which is another snow day. I don't think I've ever had two consecutive snow days?

The windows are completely blocked by snow, I tried to take a peek outside this morning and couldn't open the front door, it is still snowing. Hope everyone else in the path of this nor'easter is safe and warm!

ETA: Ducked out during a lull in the wind and threw some snowballs!

muccamukk

Watch on YouTube

The queen is back! Long live the queen!

conuly

And I am trapped at work!

I mean, the buses are running, but nobody else is coming in, and it’s not a job you can just shut down for the day.

brightknightie

I watch Masterpiece on PBS Passport streaming these days, not over the airwaves, but I still watch on Sunday nights, wrapping up the weekend as I have since at least Downton Abbey. Last night, I watched the finale of season 6 of All Creatures Great and Small (set at the first Christmas after WWII), which was a solid and satisfying, if busy, episode, and also the premiere of season 15 of Call the Midwife (set in 1971), which was also busy, but neither solid nor satisfying.

(On broadcast, Call the Midwife won't premiere until March 22 in North America. Come, support PBS and watch a month early!)

I love historical fiction, but I do need it to get the history mostly right. We all make mistakes sometimes! It's so easy to fall for an urban legend historical fallacy! But. This show has an entire staff, any of whom could have used even just Wikipedia at any point to spot-check this particular item and learn that it's not only false, but a deliberate slander/sarcasm against what the episode was trying ineptly to celebrate and ended up trivializing. Not every historical fiction show can be The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles for citations, but I remember when Doctor Quinn: Medicine Woman would sometimes end on a screen with a simple text paragraph about the real history of whatever the episode was depicting. Movies depicting real historical people do that regularly. And some novels. Maybe all historical fiction should try that, just to prompt someone to double-check.

Call the Midwife was so exceedingly excellent in its earliest days, when it was still directly based on the memoirs of the real Jennifer Worth. The farther it gets from that -- now in season 15! -- the more often it trips. ( Spoilers for what this episode messed up )

troisoiseaux

Read It's Not A Cult by Joey Batey, a debut folk horror novel about a band whose songs based on an invented mythology (the Solkats, small gods of wine stains and stubbed toes and untold jokes and bus stop fights and texts at three in the morning, etc.) inspire a literal cult following; I picked this up mostly because I know of the author for other work (he has a band, The Amazing Devil, and played Jaskier on The Witcher) and I'm not sure if it is, exactly, good— I suspect it might work better as an audiobook, because it has a rather distracting tendency towards draaaaawing out wooooords and phonetic spelling of accents ("updéeat")— but I did read the entire thing in one day. It's definitely a [Rod Serling voice] wouldn't that be messed up? kind of horror novel— very ambiguous ending, and a lot of ambiguity throughout; ( not a spoiler, exactly. )

According to an interview I read when this came on my radar a few months ago, either the novel itself or at least the idea for it (unclear?) pre-dates Batey's career(s) as an actor and musician, but it's a bit of context that I found impossible to shake in light of, a., the themes of artistry (specifically, as a musician) and fandom, and b., the way the narrative is entirely framed by camera lenses: if an action takes place on the page, it's because there's a camera pointing at it, from the narrator's coping mechanism of viewing the world through a camcorder lens rather than looking at things straight on, to vloggers live-streaming their every thought, filmed police interviews, etc., including some rather improbably convoluted executions of the premise.

Current Music: Farewell Wanderlust - The Amazing Devil

muccamukk

I just have such a strong reaction to the question: "Is it queerbaiting if straight actors play gay roles?"

My answer is neither "yes" nor "no."

It's "Not today, Satan!"

musesfool

I got up to watch the hockey this morning and despite Team USA pulling it off in OT, I do not accept that Bill Guerin was proved right in his choices. Eighty-five percent of the game was played in their defensive end and they only won because Connor Hellebuyck stood on his head. Maybe a little more scoring power on the team could have given them some breathing room. I am just saying. I'm happy for Hellebuyck and the Hughes brothers, and I got a little teary when they brought out the Gaudreau jersey and his kids, and I'm not gonna lie, watching Jon Cooper and Connor McDavid (along with Sam Bennett, Tom Wilson, and Brad Marchand) lose was pleasing to me on a deep, personal level, but overall, I'd still have preferred the Finns or the Swedes take home the gold.

I then baked some oatmeal for breakfast for the week, and made macaroni salad for a few days of lunch, and then for dinner, I made angel hair as planned, though when I actually read the recipe, it was not anything new to me - it was what I always do for a super quick tomato sauce, except they were adding chile crisp to it, which I guess is the thing nowadays - every recipe I read has chile crisp in it, but I'm not really a chile crisp person. I have the heat tolerance (in terms of spiciness, though I also don't like my food super hot temperature-wise either) of the whitest baby you know.

Anyway! It is a super easy but delicious meal and if you don't mind waiting a few extra minutes, you can do it all in one pot. Boil your pasta - angel hair is best for this, imo - and reserve a cup of pasta water before you drain it. Return the pot to the stove over low heat and add in a nice glug of olive oil (2 tbsp if you need a measurement), and then add a whole can or tube of tomato paste to the oil (so between 4 and 6 oz). Stir it around and season it as you like - I used garlic and onion powder, oregano and red pepper flakes and salt, but if you want to get fancy, you could probably saute a diced shallot and some minced garlic in the oil for a minute or two before adding the tomato paste - for 2-3 minutes, until it's all hot and sizzling. If you are so inclined, add chile crisp to suit your taste. Then add the pasta back, and about half the reserved water and toss it until the pasta is coated. I only used 4 oz of angel hair, so if you have more, you might need more water. Then put it in bowls and sprinkle it with parmesan cheese. If you are in an even bigger rush, you can sizzle the tomato paste in a frying pan while the pasta cooks and then combine it all back in the pasta pot. The couple of minutes you save isn't worth having to wash an extra pot to me, but it might be to some people.

*

Current Mood: productive
Current Music: Cruel Summer = Taylor Swift

conuly

I didn’t guess that I’d be stuck with the roads closed until at least noon tomorrow.

Well, I’m getting paid every hour I’m here, at least.

cupcake_goth

The background: last year MCR announced the second US leg of the Long Live the Black Parade tour, with the city/date closest to me being Oct. 24 in L.A.. The Stroppy One sighed at the inevitable, and cass404 braved the Ticketmaster queue to get us tickets. the Ticketmaster online queue to get us tickets. Then MCR announced the final two shows of the tour, both in L.A.: Oct. 30 & 31. Cue much wailing from me, because there was no way I could afford to stay in L.A. for a week.

Last weekend, the Stroppy One suggested I ask Cass if I could stay at her place for a week, and the we head back to L.A. for the concerts. I stared, asked if he was okay with me missing our anniversary to go see MCR. He pointed out that he wouldn’t have suggested it if he wasn’t, just see if tickets were available you silly head.

So! After conferring with Cass, I’m going to see if any tickets are available. Because spending time with Cass is something I desperately miss, and omg my precious cupcakes of bombast.

brithistorian

I was reading this morning's edition of Dan Rather's Substack newsletter, where he was writing about the song "Stand By Me". (Apparently he writes about a song or musician every Sunday.)

Anyway, he mentioned that "Stand By Me" was "numbered among the Recording Industry Association of America’s 25 Songs of the Century." This naturally got me curious: A ranked list of things? That's like catnip to me!

So I went to look for it. Turns out that there's no such things as the RIAA "25 Songs of the Century." What there is is the "Song of the Century" list, produced by the RIAA in conjunction with the NEA and Scholastic Inc. It's a list of 365 songs. So where did Rather get this idea of "25 Songs of the Century"? Because "Stand by Me" is #25 on the list, and the Wikipedia entry for "Songs of the Century" only includes the top 25 songs on the list. Apparently Rather (or, more likely, one of his research assistants) looked at the Wikipedia entry, didn't read the text carefully, and based on the table of songs assumed that it was a list of 25 songs.

If you read the text carefully, not only do you get the correct number of songs. You also start to question the RIAA's methodology for creating the list. According to the entry, "[h]undreds of voters, who included elected officials, people from the music industry and from the media, teachers, and students" were asked to select the songs. These voters were selected by the RIAA (and one is forced to ask "how many students does the RIAA know?"), and of the 1300 voters selected, only 200 responded. Seems kind of sloppy and haphazard.

Then, if you read the list, you see that the voters were rather sloppy and haphazard in their definition of a song: #7 on the list is the entire album of West Side Story, which is not "a song." Altogether there are 18 albums on the list: 11 Broadway shows, 6 jazz albums, and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Obviously I don't have a copy of the instructions that the RIAA sent to the voters, but I think we can all agree that (with the exception of Thick as a Brick and possibly a few others) an album is not a song.

Also, just as an aside, I think 2001 (when this survey was conducted) was a bit premature to be choosing the most impactful songs of the 20th century.

All that being said, I think any other such list would be just as subject to being haphazard and subjective, and on skimming over the list I do think it would be an enjoyable and/or interesting list to listen to. Plus, unless you were born on February 29, you can figure out what day of the year you were born on and then look at the complete list and see what song your birthday corresponds to. (Mine is "Fight the Power" by Public Enemy.)

umadoshi

Reading: Last week I finished Stephanie Burgis' Wooing the Witch Queen (fun!) and read Heated Rivalry. I opted to just skip straight to the actual HR novel rather than first reading the Scott/Kip novel, which worked out fine, since I also had that context from the show. I enjoyed it a fair bit, but now I'm in the awkward position of wanting to see the next chunk for Shane and Ilya but no more urgently than after I finished watching season 1 of the show. The choices now are a) read the entire series (presumably doubling back to actually read book 1), b) skip ahead and read The Long Game, or c) hold off entirely and wait for season 2 of the show.

I also read a few more volumes each of Hikaru no Go and The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, but I'm still in rereading territory with both. (I think I've already read up to vol. 12 of Kurosagi, but for Hikaru, I think the odds are against me really realizing when I've hit new territory until I go to enter a volume in Goodreads and find it's not already on my Read list there.)

Watching:

scruloose and I are caught up on both The Pitt and Frieren, and we finished Midnight Mass last weekend (a very solid, intense ending).

With my crunch time at work starting, it's not an ideal time for us to start a show that's a significant time commitment or that's going to leave me desperate to see a next episode when work is eating most or all of my evenings. It's possible this will result in me just showing

scruloose Heated Rivalry, since it's apparently our key cultural export of the decade and all. *g* Only six episodes and I don't have to worry about being impatient to see what happens next or about being spoiled.

(I still don't feel actively fannish about HR at all, but am enjoying being adjacent to it and seeing all the fannish excitement and meta and such. I have saved many fic recs to my read-later list on A03, but have yet to actually read a single one [and may never, given how slowly I go through fic--there's still a steady stream of Guardian fic I haven't read that also goes on that list].)

Weathering/Working: We have what sounds like a significant nor'easter blizzard arriving at some point tomorrow, with heavy wet snow. Will this be where our luck fails for the season and we lose power for the first time? (I'm completely astonished that it hasn't happened yet. Probably it's not really because the generator and backup power are warding that off, like carrying an umbrella around...)

And of course the spring crunch is set to start tomorrow in the late afternoon, right around when the storm is likely to be in full swing. Will the weather have much impact? (Mainly, I guess, in terms of Those Who Speak all being able to make it there safely; I kinda hope that there's some kind of backup power in their actual building, but I don't know for sure one way or the other.)

troisoiseaux

I took a day trip to NYC specifically to see the current cast of Hadestown— in particular, West End import Jack Wolfe as Orpheus and folk singer Allison Russell as Persephone— before the cast turnover in March, and it was absolutely worth the trip! I've loved Anais Mitchell's concept album for years and have actually seen the Broadway musical twice* before, although apparently it didn't stick, because I seem to have forgotten half of the songs...? Like, genuinely, I found myself thinking ...have I ever heard this song before? They can't have changed the musical since 2023, right? more than once. (The stage musical is substantially different from the concept album, both in terms of fleshing out the plot by adding new songs and in tweaking some of the original ones.)

In various assorted thoughts:
- Jack Wolfe was always going to be the best Orpheus I've seen, because the previous actor I saw was... not the strongest part of the show, but even without grading on a curve, he was in fact phenomenal, just absolutely perfect for the role. His Orpheus is so sweetly awkward and completely earnest it's no wonder that even street-smart, touch-shy Eurydice falls for his castle-in-the-sky promises of gold rings and wedding feasts and his plan to write a song that will bring the seasons— out of whack since Hades and Persephone fell out of love, all freezing winters and scorching summers, no spring or fall— back in tune, and he has the voice to pull it off: like, yep, this guy can in fact sing so beautifully it would make flowers bloom and the gods fall back in love, 100%, checks out. (I even forgive the musical for the lyric changes from Mitchell's original "Epic (Part I/II)", because the less flowery lyrics did in fact sound lovely when Wolfe sang them.) It perhaps made the ending even more devastating, because surely, if any Orpheus could make it out, this one... but no :(

- At least from the nosebleed seats, the actresses playing Eurydice (Morgan Dudley) and Persephone (Russell) looked strikingly alike, which added an interesting dynamic to both Persephone's and Hades' interactions with Eurydice— the parallels between Eurydice and Persephone, and between both couples, are written into the story itself, but I did find myself thinking, like, did this Eurydice catch Hades' eye because she looks like Persephone? Is Persephone's particular kindness to/sympathy for Eurydice because she sees her younger self, too? I think the fact that I'd particularly noticed their similarly braided hair, and how Eurydice's neutral-toned first-act costume and Persephone's colorful one (green dress, ocre-red highlights in her hair) felt like visual foils, made me look at Persephone's costume change into vintage widow's black when she returns to Hadestown for the winter with new eyes, too, especially the detail of her hair being hidden away in one of those fancy hair nets (snoods?).

- I really appreciated how this Hades (Paulo Szot) wasn't trying to copy Patrick Page's original performance, because I feel like the other actor I saw in the role was trying a little too hard to match Page's "sounds like the lowest key on a piano" vocal depth and it had mostly just sounded growly. This actor's voice has/he was going for more of a rich timbre(?) (I don't know music words) than sheer depth; I found out afterwards that he's an opera singer by training, which checks out. Actually, overall, I really appreciated how differently this cast played the same roles than the one I saw before— it felt like a really fresh take! (I would say that both versions of Eurydice and Persephone are a tie for me, I liked this Orpheus and Hades much better, and my favorite Hermes remains the understudy I saw in 2023.)

( Footnotes )