Elizabeth/Lidabet

Absolutely loved Nicola Griffith's Hild. The beginning of a set of novels about the Abbess Hilda of Whitby, what we get here is Hild as a child who is supposed to be a seer, knows she is not, and nevertheless learns to give useful political advice to her uncle, one of many infighting kings in 7th century England. The politics are impressively drawn, as is the point of view, which remains firmly planted in space and time. Even when she's observing nature with pin-point accuracy and coming to conclusions that feel scientific, her frame of reference is still limited. She's not stupid, she never seems stupid, but she's working things out from first principles, it's not a surprise she only gets so far. Griffith is also very good at making sure that Hild isn't uniquely special in her ability to observe. She sees a little more than many because she has the time and inclination, but a large part of her skill is gathering information and putting it together: it's not that other people can't see, it's that they don't have the larger picture.

The thing I loved most was how much work we get to see everyone do. Women spin and weave constantly because it takes a long damn time to make anything. Hild is a seer and this means she has some different duties, but she also does all of the chores that women did in her period because royalty here still doesn't mean rich enough to do no work, it just means you don't have to do the very worst work. Designing your own weaving patterns is the fun part, and Hild knows that, even though she's also allowed to have moments when she's bored by textiles or doesn't feel like it right then. The other people around her are also allowed to have complicated feelings about work, while still knowing that work is important to keep everything from falling down! Gosh!

It's a fun read too, not just a Worthy Tome of historical accuracy about medieval work practice. Politics are going DOWN and because this is the 7th century, they're going down with some violence, and also some rapidly shifting allegiances. In some ways, I kept thinking that this is the kind of book GRRM thinks he's writing, with the complicated politics and the refusal to make a ballad out of the unpleasant task of cutting someone's throat, except that Hild doesn't just make the most unpleasant thing happen every single time there's a choice to be made, because people are assholes, but they aren't actually mustache-twirlingly evil. Also Hild knows she has no magical powers and is sighingly resigned to turning political philosophy into prophecy in a deeply endearing way. I'm looking forward to the next book tremendously.



I've also been enjoying the hell out of Allan Berubé's sadly small amount of historical writing (Coming Out Under Fire, which is USian queer people in WWII, and My Desire for History, which is collected essays) though he may have ruined me for more academic queer history. He has so many feelings! Which seems like a rude thing to say because his intellectual rigour is fantastic, and his research is thorough! But he's not trying to be the kind of formal writer who hides their perspective and it's really nice to hear about how much he cares about queer and labour history! It's not even that he talks a lot about his feelings on a personal level, but it's so obvious, even when he is writing about military policy, that he has an emotional attachment to the idea of queer communities, that it makes history written by people who are at pains to hide that attachment feel lacking.

I don't precisely mean to criticise people who are presumably attempting to get their work taken seriously by editors and academics who don't feel as I do, and it's not that they're being at all offensive, or that their rigour is substandard. These are not bad books. But Berubé did such a fantastic job of centering people in his analysis that it no longer seems adequate to begin with medicalised discussion of homophobia disassociated from even the people who propagated it. It just seems depressing to read now because I've had such a clear and well-presented example of how it could be done differently. Historians don't have to have affection for their subjects in all cases, but damnit, if we're going to get so many awkward biographers crushes on the deeply unappealing, then I want a whole team of Berubés with their affection and charm, and am terribly sad that he's dead and we will have no more of his incredibly compelling work.

I watched all the Brooklyn Nine-Nine that exists so far in about two days, so it's that kind of good. I am interested in the fact that it doesn't hit my giant embarrassment squick anything like as badly as it could have, despite being the story of a bunch of people who are very, very interested in embarrassing each other. This confuses me! Even Benton Fraser's refusal to be embarrassed by anything he did didn't always prevent me from cringing on his behalf! But everyone is so good at taking on the embarrassment, clearly hating it, and then moving the fuck on while actively demonstrating that there aren't consequences beyond people being a pain in the ass.

On a more general note, as everyone has already said, the show does a good job having a decently diverse bunch of cops who generally don't get to do horrifically illegal things on a whim. Being too cool for paperwork is an issue that fucks you over, even if paperwork is boring. You have to do just as many extremely boring cases as you do exciting ones, and it's all important work.

I could do with less Peralta, it's definitely not deconstructing the white cisdude=protagonist trope anything like as well as Community does, but at least there's a reasonable amount of screentime for all the other characters, who I mostly adore. I still think he wins just a smidge too often to get away with the shit he pulls, but at least he does get called out sometimes. Everyone else is pretty delightful (or if they're awful, usually the writers clearly agree), which does make up for it some.

I don't know if I could be fannish about it, but I could do with a regular 20mins of fluffy tv that generally doesn't make me angry.


Finished Dawn French's memoir, Dear Fatty*. Not a surprise that she's funny and charming and delightful, but I was particularly struck by her ability to tell funny stories about inexperienced sex had with entirely the wrong person in a way that was both humourous and not so caught up in making it funny that it sounds like she's never had mutually enjoyable sex in her life, which is an astonishingly rare skill in published autobiographical writing, for reasons I've never been able to fathom. Of course, there are also lots of fantastic showbiz stories and amusing family ones (and some sad family ones, told affectingly), and in general, recommended.

*Fatty=Jennifer Saunders, her comedy partner, and is an affectionate and consensual nickname. Not a book at all about weight issues, if that's a concern for you!

"One should not enlarge on one's animals - but I thought you might like to know what a charming pair [of cats] attend us."
-Sylvia Townsend Warner to William Maxwell

The life philosophy of the internet, is it not? Particularly when you know it comes at the end of a lengthy letter detailing her cats' charms: one of many in this small volume. I have been reading Warner and Maxwell's letters (the collection is The Element of Lavishness, edited by Michael Steinman) and they are most delightful. Literary - they began to correspond when he was editing her short stories in the New Yorker - but also a record of a warm and loving friendship. The writing is beautiful and they're funny and charming and just a joy to read. Much admiration to the editor because there must have been quantities of stuff cut out (they wrote constantly between 1938 and 1978 and yet the book is barely 350 pages, and no one could have achieved that degree of quality unceasingly, surely?) and it still feels like a smooth narrative without gaps. They talk about books and major political events of the period and family life, and it is all immensely enjoyable. Highly recommended.


And I wrote some fic:
Basic Lagomorph Persuasion (2892 words) by opusculasedfera
Fandom: Hockey RPF
Rating: Explicit
Relationships: Beau Bennett/Robert Bortuzzo
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Crossdressing, Halloween
Summary: Robert's life is very difficult and this outfit doesn't even fucking fit. Because there wasn't nearly enough porn about their halloween costumes.

I've been listening to more podcasts recently, and I like the idea of the You Are Not So Smart one, but also I want a rule (in life, not just in podcasts) that if you are studying something anti-social that people do, you have to study the effects. Not just the specific instant responses, but long term effects. Hopefully this would prevent people like David Buss from genuinely saying, in response to a question about warning signs of jealousy that people can look for, "well, if you're being abused, you're in more danger of being murdered by your partner." I do believe that he doesn't think doing terrible things out of jealousy is good, but it's kind of astonishing to me that he can study this and genuinely think being cut off from your social circles or "having your self-esteem lowered" are just warning signs for murder rather than actual abuse in their own right with massive consequences, and it skeeves me the fuck out about his research if he can do this much work on abuse and not know this. THIS IS WHY NO ONE LIKES EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGISTS, BRO.


I am, however, enjoying Amanda Downum's Necromancer Chronicles very much. A+ lots of queer relationships! Well integrated socially too: it's not just one queer couple and a lot of talking about how no one minds, there are lots of past and present queer couples, and people discuss operas featuring a variety of different relationships. And trans* characters! Also ( spoilers for very excellent trope )

Plus complicated politics and magic and people who actually feel like they have long histories, not just in their most deep and serious relationships, but equally in people they've known casually for ages, or unimportant shit they've done, and that kind of thing. Highly recommended.

This is Rosethorn's book, for those of you for whom such a thing would be a joy and a delight. It's also Evvy's book, and Briar obviously is in it and has POV bits, but it's the book where Rosethorn gets to have an arc.

Also the book where it is 100% on the page confirmed that she and Lark are both lovers and happily non-monogamous, which was obvious before, but is nice to have confirmed anyhow, especially in a YA book.

We also actually get some depth on what it means that some of the Emelan characters are religious dedicates and what that means to them personally rather than it simply being an alternative schooling system, which was nice! So Rosethorn gets that, and a little more family backstory and, basically, ROSETHORN. She's the best. I'm happy to have read her book.

( Additional thoughts, plus spoilers )

I have been...failing to post. :P


Reading Candace Dorsey's Black Wine and Fuyumi Ono's Twelve Kingdoms books simultaneously turns out to be really unsettling. They're not quite the same, but somehow the similarities in lanaguage and superficial content (lost strangers who don't know the rules of the places they have ended up interacting with complicated political situations, plus shifting POV/narrative strands) have made them merge in my head. It makes the Ono somewhat more tense if I'm expecting all the completely terrible things that happen in the Dorsey to be just around the corner, for one. (Black Wine is excellent, for the record! But a lot of horrible things happen. Warnings for sexual assault and assorted violence.) Very odd. I always read a million things at once and this generally doesn't happen to me.


Writing is failing to happen, which is irritating. I had one wip that I was very excited about writing, but I'm on a break with the characters in it (the hazards of rpf /o\) and now I'm sulking at everything else. In that spirit, if people want to leave me prompts (more than a single word, you know my fandoms), I'd love to see if that kickstarts anything for me.

Elementary! I am very bad at watching it on time, but this season has done some lovely things with character beats! Less lovely things with ripped from the headlines plots, but Joan and Sherlock continue to delight.


I read Sarah McCarry's All Our Pretty Songs. It's very well-written, and managed to have a first-person teenage protagonist who did not make me instantly fail out, which is difficult. However, er...( the ending (spoilers) )

Someone come argue with me about this because it was weird and made me cranky.


Something that does not make me cranky are Tripp Tracy being awkward about how he has so many feelings about EStaal because he watched him grow up, and he loves Brind'Amour, but it can never match his love for EStaal because he didn't get to watch him develop. Oh, Tripp. Never change.

I wrote more wingfic. I blame Aria for telling me that Nealer needed to deal with wings from all directions. Also for allowing me to title everything with puns. Love you!

Getting in a Flap (3960 words) by opusculasedfera
Fandom: Hockey RPF
Relationships: Evgeni Malkin/James Neal
Summary:"He's always like a bird," Duper says, flicking James in the head, "up here." James sulks.


Also I finally managed to finish Queen Victoria's Book of Spells, entirely because it needs to go back to the library tomorrow. I'm still grumpy about the amount of infodumping, but kyriacarlisle was right that at least the last story in the book wasn't unrelentingly bleak. I'm more or less okay with certain kinds of bleakness, like the story about the factory girl with phossy jaw where we all know she's never going to get cured, though that one could also have done with an editor to take a firm hand to entire pages of textbook prose about the Irish Potato Famine, but I just wanted to read about one damn relationship where people didn't love potion each other into friendship or marriage. These turned out to be few and far between. So, uh, warnings for assault, everybody!

Disappointed in Pratchett's Dodger. I feel like non-secondary world stuff is simply not his milieu. He seems to need the secondary world to keep him from going on and on about what research he's done. Leonard of Quirm is funny because he is clearly Leonardo da Vinci, only not. Joseph Bazalgette isn't funny because he's just Bazalgette, possibly with a slightly more humourous nose. There's no surprise of recognition, he's just a guy that existed. Even when it's not quite so on the nose as that, there are still only so many times one character can refer to "Karl, who I met once in Europe and who had such interesting ideas about the working class" before I want to beat everyone involved with the shovel of yes-I-HAVE-heard-of-Marx-thanks.

He appears to have forgotten that everyone finds his footnotes charming because they have jokes, not just because they say "yes, these things really did exist!!!!" We know that London, etc. did exist. We know that people were impoverished and smelly by modern standards. We know that women had a lot of social and legal problems. None of this is news. The book was basically Heyer-level farce plotting pasted over shouting about did you know that ladies and poor people had it difficult in past times and also people didn't bathe as much????? Only Heyer wrote lots of books about women having actual emotions, and this was manpain central.

I might have enjoyed it more if this was actually my first introduction to all of the history, but as it was, it was a disappointment.

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In other news, writing my bigbang sort of proceeds. At the moment, it's mostly self-indulgence about people falling over, and making bad jokes while they make out. We'll see if this actually transforms itself into plot/something readable.

Honour Among Punks by Guy Davis and Gary Reed is a comic about an AU punk rock female Sherlock Holmes. It's pretty fun, and actually does some interesting things with the Sherlock archetype.

Firstly, it's very, very AU. Sherlock is Sharon Ford, Watson is Susan Prenderghast, a med student from the States, and it adds Sam, Sharon's girlfriend. They live in a world that seems to have gone straight from the Victorians to the punks without any of the intervening social movements, which is fine, for a comic that mostly wants to deal with the amusing contrast between punks and dudes in 3-piece suits and hats, and have occasional dirigibles.

There are some great things. I really enjoyed how Sharon is not an independent operative because due process and the rule of law are just too, too tedious for us smart people. She has reasonable criticisms about the police as they are (there's corruption, there's bias, there's a refusal to actually learn things about subcultures that might affect your deductions, etc.), and therefore works independently in order to attempt to fix these absences. But she doesn't think that vigilante justice is a great idea either, which is a refreshingly sensible attitude.

It's also fantastic in terms of pictures of people with lots of different kinds of bodies dressing however the fuck they want. The bodies under the punk gear feel real and solid, and it's pretty good at not judging them for how they look in the clothes, unless it's people who are explicitly uncomfortable in them.

It has some problems. ( cut for transfail and spoilers )

The first half is great though, and some of the stand-alone art in the collected volume is wonderfully striking.

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Genevieve Valentine's Mechanique is about a post-apocalyptic travelling circus, and firmly in the tradition of "you know what would be great? If society came back." (Spoilers: it doesn't, not exactly, but, nevertheless, being able to hold people together to make things and create social groups is seen as a valuable skill.) It has massively, amazingly competent characters doing their best, and, while many of them have their own ends in mind, it doesn't presuppose that working together is for saps, and some of their ends are allowed to be unity and building and trying to fix shit.

It's a bit grim, in that way that apocalypses tend to be, but not unnecessarily grim, or grim for the fun of it.

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Learning things about hockey has made being in Canada odd. It shows up in ways that I never noticed before. Like a random book on language politics suddenly being super excited that Sid does French interviews as well as English. (It was from 2005, so the author had not yet had his hopes dashed.) Or 25 foot tall Jonathan Toews in the Canadian Tire. This isn't meaningful, I've just been finding it startling because these things have happened several times in the last couple of days.