Oached Pish

Here and There

2026-04-24T20:24:35Z

There's been a situation that has been making life stressful for the past year, and yesterday the stress doubled. My way of dealing with this kind of cosmic ass kick is to bury myself in writing, where I feel I have a pretence at control. I only say this because I might not be as responsive to posts as usual, and if anyone even notices a dearth of commentary from me (very small chance I realize) it's not you, it's me. Not gone, just coping and scribbling away.

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Here

2026-04-12T01:22:10Z

I just reupped my Dreamwidth blog for another year, though I realize I don't post much. I think of blog topics when away from my computer, then realize I'm reluctant to clog the constant stream Out There with my socially awkward and clueless maunderings.

But briefly: writing a lot, reading some. Of late, Katherine Arden's The Unicorn Hunters, which I really enjoyed a lot. Also going, Emily Tesh's The Incandescence, which is dark academia from the faculty POV, and the worldbuilding actually makes sense. Tesh thought about what magic in the world would be like. This is my walking book (audiobook).

Speaking of: it's dog walking time, which means some more Incandescence!

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Wednesday reading--Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens

2026-03-11T17:29:37Z

One thing that one has to accept with Dickens is that his heroines will be long-suffering, and that men will decide what's good for them, for which they will be grateful.

Given that, I think this the best of his books.

It has the fewest Victorian-plot coincidences, and it has the most and best swathes of bitingly funny satire of soi-disant high society. How the Lammle marriage comes about, and how each of them, in becoming a couple, brings the other down from spoken moral rectitude to the barest pretense of it is as horrific in a quiet way as all the rantings, drownings, and so on.

Bradley Headstone is a remarkably believable depiction of the stalker boyfriend who can't seem to stop himself from sinking into obsession--and violence. Eugene Wrayburn is a fascinating, witty guy for an idle dog.

There are some bits of brilliance--the depiction of the riverside society; Mr. Boffins' educational plan; the Veneering parties.

There were signs of actual personality on Bella's part (when we meet her, she is mourning over being forced to wear black because the guy she was engaged to--whom she had never met--had drowned, which pretty much has finished her socially. Why shouldn't she mourn?) even if the machinations behind her romance are quite wince-worthy.

Dickens also tries to make up for comfortably unexamined antisemitism, and the subsidiary characters are wonderfully memorable.

Altogether it's a real page-turner. Glad I reread it.

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Status

2026-02-27T22:56:37Z

Yu know the world situation, which adds its mite ( for definitions of "mite,"watch out for falling pianos) to the stress closer by. The worst of it is feeling helpless to do much besides donate money to the outer stresses and listen as I can to the inner. Which I have been doing, in spite of our income dwindling. But this is a common plight.

My brain did go into revolt, and a bit of OT3 fantasy comedy of manners unspooled itself over the past month and a half or so. I wouldn't mind that happening again because it keeps me busy--besides various books and TV shows. But none of those have lit my fire quite as much as having a brainmovie again.

I do have Katherine Arden's latest here, and it looks good. But it's called The Unicorn Hunters and appears to be based on the tapestries so splendidly displayed in New York. Very handsome tapestries, but whew. Those boys strutting their tight breeches and little short jackets and perfect hair were a bunch of brutes. The tapestries illustrate an exercise in human cruelty, and the news is kind of overflowing with that, so I'm waiting for the right mood for the book.

II've done some rereads, and some new reads, I continue to listen to audiobooks while trudging my daily steps.

Oh! edited to add: I watched the Plympics ice skating and ice dancing. Some really lovely stuff, though they do seem to be obsessed with the quad spin.

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Small Stuff

2026-01-29T21:21:00Z

I seem to be the respository for old papers in various lines of descent. None of them worth a damn, except their voices are such a joy to "hear". But on recent visit my daughter asked for the little iron box containing her great-grandfather's letters from WW I.

Jack Murray was a typical nineteen year old and it comes across so clearly. He joined the army early on, and was shipped from CA to Florida to base camp. There, they went around asking if anyone was familiar with automobiles. He said he fooled around with them, as many Los Angeles boys did.

They yanked him out of infantry and put him in the nascent motor pool, before shipping them off to France. The ship journey, their arrival in France, and the rapid development of Motor Transport is fascinating to read from his ground-level perspective. After the war, he was one of the last to leave France, as he was vital for the transport system.

My daughter commended on how very, very earnest he was about his longing to marry Great Granny (then seventeen or eighteen) RIGHT NOW. Also, she commented on the slang of the day. Everything was a peach. A peach of a car, a peach of a trip, a peach of a meal. She was a peach of a girl!

Next Ihope she wants to read the letters of a great-great grandfather through her grandfather's line--these beautifully written copperplate letters from California right after the gold rush, through a quake, and a riot . . .

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Pimpernel Smith

2026-01-25T14:13:02Z

What can I do to help besides donate? I am doing my best to target specific needs in donations, as our funds are pretty severely limited. But it never seems enough.

Last night I self-comforted by rewatching Leslie Howard's impassioned anti-war and anti-Nazi film Pimpernel Smith. It's all the more poignant considering the toxic hellspew going on now, and doubly so considering that he was shot down in 1943. So he didn't get to see the end that he predicted in a memorable speech in the film's final moments: he tells the German commander about to shoot him that Germany will not prevail, that they will go down an ever darker road until the terrible end. The lighting is suitably dramatic, only one of his eyes visible.

Among the many excellent quotations tossed off during the film is one by Rupert Brooke, who wrote brilliant and impassioned anti-war sonnets and prose before dying in 1915, so he, too, did not get to see the end of that horrible war. (This elegy to Rupert Brooke is worth a listen.)

Though Howard did not live to see the end, his film inspired Raoul Wallenberg to rescue Jews in WW II, which he would have applauded; the people Pimpernel Smith is rescuing are scientists and journalists imprisoned by the Gestapo.

The film is not just anti-Nazi, which is important. But unlike so many American films made at the time, with their guns-out, let's go blast 'em all attitudes, frequently using Nazi to represent all Germans, which was just as false as today's representation of all Americans as Trumpers.

It's worth remembering the Germans who did not support Hitler's regime, and lived in fear of the next horror their government perpetrated, whether on outsiders or on themselves. Many acted, many others froze in place. Kids, bewildered, tried to survive. I knew a handful of these: my friend Margo, who died ten years ago, was a young teen during the forties. Her mother had ceased communication with the part of her family that supported Hitler. She hid the books written by Jews behind the classics in their home library, and exhorted her two girls to be kind, be kind. Until Margo was sent to music camp on a Hitler Youth activity (all kids had to join) came home to find her home rubble, her mom and sister dead somewhere in that tangle of brick and cement after an Allied bombing mission. Her existence became hand to mouth, including what amounts to slave labor. She was thirteen at the time.

Another friend's mom, a Berliner in her mid-teens, had been coopted to work in the Chancellery typing reports for the German Navy, as there were no men left for such tasks. She lived with her mother, walking to and from work in all weather until their home was bombed. They lived in the rubble, drinking rain water that sifted through the smashed walls; her mother died right there, probably from the bad water; there was no medical care available for civilians, only for the army. This friend's dad was in the army--he had been a baker's apprentice in a small town mid-Germany until the conscription. He was seventeen. He was shot up and sent back to the Russian front five times. He survived it; I remember seeing him shirtless when he mowed the lawn. He looked like a Frankenstein's monster with all the scars criss-crossing his body, corrugated from battlefield stitchwork. That pair met and married while floating about in the detritus of the war. No homes, living off handouts from the occupation until the guy was able to get work as a construction laborer. (Few bakeries, though in later life, he made exquisite seven layer cakes and other Bavarian pastries for his family.)

What can we do? Keep on resisting, without taking up arms and escalating things to that level of nightmare. I so admire Minnesotans. I believe they are doing it right.

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Exordium, book 1, The Phoenix in Flight

2026-01-20T18:17:49Z

Our space opera Exordium began life as a mini-series screenplay over four decades ago, morphed into a mass-market paperback, returned as a hastily corrected e-book series, and now is relaunching for the last time after Dave and I, now retired, were able to go over it more slowly. It always needed a more thorough going-over. But also, over the years, so much has changed!

From Exordium’s beginning we’ve struggled with the skiamorphs (shadow shapes—like wood grain on plastic) that are left not only when you move between media, but when your forty-year-old vision of a technology’s cultural impact collides with present-day reality.

The world of Exordium was always a future world replete with echoes of a distant, earthly past that let us shove in all the things we loved in books, art, film, and TV and use them to create the kind of science fiction/space opera we liked.

We were a couple of twenty-somethings in 1977 when Star Wars came out. Younger readers probably can’t imagine the impact of that film on a generation accustomed to SF movies that were either glorified monster fights or preachy future-shock stories filled with plastic furniture and tight jumpsuits that would take an hour to get out of if you had to pee.

On our way out of the 2:30 a.m. showing, we looked at each other and said, “We can do that, but . . . tech that makes sense!”

“More than one active woman!”

“FTL battles that make strategic sense in four-space!”

“More than one active woman!”

Together: “Pie fights! Fart jokes! Ancient civilizations! Cool clothes and machines!”

Thus was born Exordium. At the time Sherwood worked as a flunky in Hollywood, so the first version was a six hour miniseries. On the strength of it we got a good Hollywood agent, and there was a bid war shaping up between NBC and the then-new HBO when . . . boom! The mega-strike of 1980. When that was over, the studios were so depleted that min-series projects were put on hold—for the most part a euphemism for “killed.”

So we decided to turn it into books—and that meant breaking the chains of “can’t do that on TV,” developing the sketchy cultures, and completely rethinking the necessarily limited space battles, which had been confined to bridge scenes with rudimentary 1980s style FX. Dave dived into military history to figure out more about how the ships and tech he’d come up with would fight. Sherwood delved into cultural history to develop the social and political maneuvering we wanted.

Dave also got into high-tech PR and started thinking harder about how the technologies of the future would change humanity. Our world acquired an interstellar ship-switched data network. Our characters acquired “boswells.” Today we call them smartphones, which don’t yet have neural induction for subvocalized privacy. Boswells were (and are) great plot devices, with an intricate etiquette of usage.

But we totally missed social media. That wasn’t a problem, of course, when we sold the series to Tor in 1990, where, despite an awesome editor and nice covers, it mostly vanished into the black hole of the mass market crash. But now we’re bringing them back. Thirty years into the future we didn’t see, which features a publishing industry that didn’t see it either.

The challenge with retrofitting SF is: what do you do with science fiction that purports to take place in the future, but contains elements that look, well, quaint? You either grit your teeth and reissue the book as a period piece, or you rewrite it. And if you choose the latter, what’s inside the can may be more Elder God than annelid.

A lot of what was daring in our original (in our future, everyone is brown, with white being the largely unwanted exception; gay relationships are a part of everyday life, as well as polyamory, etc) is now commonly found, which is great. But other aspects were tougher. In Exordium, we had to wrestle again with the original screenplay, much of which still shadowed the story, especially in the first book. The language that would pass Programs & Practices in 1980 required made-up cusswords; the default for soldiers and action characters was male; by the nineties Dave had developed the idea of the boswells but in Exordium, everyone seemed to be running to computer stations for communication.

We kept the cuss words. Many readers don’t like neologisms, especially for profanity, but the Exordium idiolect had become too much a part of the worldbuilding: for example, the word “fuck” is a great expletive, but it also carries centuries of negative baggage. In our world, sex had completely shed the guilt, especially for women, so we jettisoned slang and idiom that still evoked that old misogynism.

Everything else needed a serious revamp, including the complex battle scenes, which had to be purged of the last traces of non-relativistic widescreen physics. (It helped that some very competent military gamers had developed an Exordium tactical board game based on the paperbacks.)

Rewriting wasn’t all work. One of the joys of revisiting a world in this way is discovering the zings, connections, and hidden history you missed the first time around. Rewriting becomes like looking into a Mandelbrot kaleidoscope.

We kept the fun elements: A playboy prince with unexpected depths, a gang of space pirates and their ass-kicking female captain, ancient weapons from a war lost by the long-vanished masters of the galaxy, coruscating beams of lambent light, intricate space battles where light speed delay is both trap and tool, twisted aristocratic politics more deadly than a battlefield, a bizarre race of sophonts that venerates the Three Stooges, a male chastity device mistaken for the key to ultimate power…

And yes, a high tech pie fight.

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New Year

2026-01-01T01:25:31Z

Well, this sure was a roller coaster of a year, eh?

Wishing everyone a 2026 that brings peace and harmony. May all your dreams come true!

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End of Year . . .

2025-12-26T13:40:46Z

I hope everyone got as much peace, joy, and good surprises as possible during the year's end festivities!

It was very quiet here; last night son and I watched the third Knives Out film together. Tightly written, really well acted, but there were plot holes, and not nearly the tightness and humor of the first one.

LOVING the rain, so very needed.

Hoping my daughter can visit today--she had to work yesterday.

So! It's Boxing Day, pretty much uncelebrated here in the US (who has servants???) but! Book View Cafe is having its half off sale!

Giant backlist, and lots of new books since last year's sale. Go and look and if you've got some holiday moulaugh, buy some books! We all need the pennies, heh!

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Wishing . . .

2025-12-14T17:01:50Z

A peaceful Hanukkah to all who celebrate. And to all others (who are sane) let's wish that those who do celebrate can do so in peace.

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Thanksgiving

2025-11-27T20:37:05Z

Wishing those who celebrate a warm day with plenty of good things to eat in company you cherish.

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Wednesday . . .

2025-11-19T17:46:48Z

Finished unboxing the upstairs library. So, lots of books, though none read. But earmarked a bunch for revisit, such as The Gammage Cup, which had been shoved back and forgotten for years. Now neatly stacked, and ready to dip into again.

Also, after four days of lovely, lovely rain off and on, back to toiling my steps. To get myself moving again, I had to bring out the big guns: listening to Rob Inglis' enchanting reading of Lord of the Rings. Reflecting that, while in Middle Earth, their era has forever passed, I can be introduced to young Frodo and company all over again, and re-attend the birthday party, enjoying the humor anew.
Also reflecting on how much influence anime has had in so many fantasies written by younger authors.

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Halloween Pix I Wish I Had

2025-10-31T11:27:34Z

Such vivid memories! But when I was a kid, the camera was pretty much reserved for visits from rarely seen relatives, which required us to stand on the lawn facing the sun ("Stop squinting! Smile!") in a stiff cluster with said relations. I do treasure those pix, but how I wish I had visual backup for vivid memories. Like the year we put our bulldog into my little brother's pajamas. How people laughed to see him trotting proudly along!

Then there was the horse costume I made with a friend when I was ten or eleven. I designed it and we sewed it by hand--by then I had designed and made so many doll clothes out of scraps that coming up with a horse costume didn't seem all that hard, just more stitching. Our trick or treat bag was held by her dad, who insisted on coming along.

It was a huge hit around the neighborhood, but! Though we each had had to model the body in order to get into it, we hadn't thought to practice very long. We soon found out that one person bent over, hanging onto the other's waist was super hard on the back. When we first took off, her mom did want to take a pic, but we were too impatient, and promised to stand still at the end of the evening. When we got back, we were both so sick of bending over we refused to pose, so we never did get a picture, though her mom was willing. Ah, well!

When I was a teen, and deemed too old to go out, I made a robot out of cardboard to deliver candy down a chute. That was fun. my little brother adored it. Some of the neighbor kids came round a couple of times just to see it work.

In those days, pretty much all costumes were homemade. There were some for sale in stores, but they were flimsy, made of really cheapo material, and few parents in our neighborhood wanted to waste the money. I remember my first Halloween, when I was little, my dad had mom divide an ancient sheet and cut out holes for eyes, and we were supposed to save and use the sheet ghost costumes, but mom made some for us when I was about six. I remember a bride dress, which I loved. I kept sneaking out to the garage to put it on afterwards and getting scolded. (We--friends and I-- later scored give-away cocktail dresses for acting out our stories.) I started making my own costumes with the horse.

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Boston

2025-10-28T12:27:29Z

I love Boston so much, especially this area around Harvard. The trees are rich with color, the air is brisk, requiring all my layers of flimsy California-wear, and the sidewalks brick with lumps of tree roots. I love it all.

Yesterday I went with Nine to the Mapparium on the other side of the river. (The bus ride down Massachusetts Ave is great for scenery!) If you've never heard of it--I hadn't until one of the Viable Paradise workshop writers clued me in--it's an enormous glass globe that you can walk into, to see the entire world, worked in jewel-toned glass, as it was in 1935. It was constructed to be a reminder that we are all in this world together; a needed warning then, as now. (Naturally those who need it most won't see or hear.)

We had a great time looking, then testing the amazing sounds created by voices enclosed in glass.

Afterward we met up with Rushthatspeaks for tea and chocolate at L.A. Burdicks. Oh, they know how to do chocolate so, so right. Delish. We chatted and reminisced and cackled like maniacs. Today we'll visit the Fogg to see a Botticelli that is usually hidden in a private collection. I can hardly wait!

I'm coming down from the high of a very successful workshop, and a month of splendid visiting and seeing and fast-lane busy. The workshop writers are so talented and so focused, and all this in beautiful Martha's Vineyard.

Tomorrow homeward bound!

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Flashing by . . .

2025-10-19T00:01:46Z

Viable Paradise is about to begin, which means hunkering in the bunker.

But today the weather was perfect for the protest gathering at a very busy five-points intersection here on Martha's Vineyard, with A LOT of people and some winsomely unique signage. Lots of laughter and horn honking, and although there were two protesters for the current regime, and a couple of cars went by with passengers waving thumbs down, there was no violence whatsoever. Yay! I wish that would be true everywhere.

Interesting patterns in signage; many quotes from the Bible and from the Constitution, and so very many crowned clowns. One frog, one unicorn, and a bee. Many, but not all, were my age or older.

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sartorias @ 2025-09-24T10:28:00

2025-09-24T17:41:38Z

I'm up here at my sister's, not quite a hundred miles north of home, while the new floors are put in. It's all SoCal, and yet a completely different microclimate. I woke to the tut-tut-tut of some bird we don't ever hear at home, and other chirps and twitters equally unfamiliar. Over that, though, the very familiar caw of crows.

As I did the morning walk with the little dog, and listened to the local crows up in the eucalyptus and pines, I wondered if the crows that follow me at home were watching for me to come. Now that the sun is lowering a bit, we're back to increasing numbers, so I might have thirty or so swirling around me when I throw unsalted peanuts out. so exhilarating to watch them!

Here they don't know me, of course, so the calls can't be to let me know they are there. I'm sure the lives of humans are ignorable, except as annoyances that send them into the trees. I wondered about that sky civilization as I trod the path to the dog park. So much going on at the tops of the trees, that we barely notice!

It's such a relief not to be toiling with packing, though of course unpacking lies in wait to pounce when I get back. Then I'll only have three or four days before I take off for my October east trip, so most of my share of the unloading will await me on my return. The big job (and the fun one) is the library.

Speaking of, since it's Wednesday, let's see, what have I been reading? The Military Philosophers by Anthony Powell, which is part of a book discussion that I've been following since the start of the year. One book a month in Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time series. The discussion happens at the start of each month over Zoom, and what interests me is how folks from either side of the Atlantic read the work. Also, non-genre reading. This time I'll be on the train when the discussion rolls around, so I hope I have connectivity, but if not I'll listen to the recording. At least that way I can skip ahead if the fellow who leads it gets prolix over an obvious point as he has a tendency to do. The academic curse; students above a certain age level are too polite to say 'Zip it! We got the idea already." (High schoolers had no such restraint, and middle schoolers invariably signalled boredom by more physical means.)

Anyway I had the leisure, for the first time in a couple of months, to make chocolate chip cookies. So I can have those and tea and do some reading. Heigh ho, I will go do that now.

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September is nearly half over...

2025-09-14T01:33:03Z

We've packed what we can pack. The movers come Monday to take our library away. We will live out of boxes and suitcase for a week, then depart altogether while the floor peeps come in.

With library going away I've resorted more to TV, and I couldn't resist going back to watch Nirvana in Fire yet again. Between my last rewatch and this time, some team of actual humans (No AI) had gone through the, ah, somewhat problematical subtitles and cleaned up spelling, grammar, and meaning, clarifying a lot of small stuff that watchers who did not know Mandarin could only guess at.

It's just brilliant. Even though on this watch I see the problems with the end starting a bit sooner than I remembered, and I still believe that one more episode would have pulled together all the dangling bits and tightened up the emotional arcs, still the overall emotional velocity absolutely rams you straight through and beyond. For a couple of days I couldn't do anything but go back to look at scenes (some for like the twentieth time, or more). Not perfect, but even after ten years, for me it's the best television show ever made.

Well, back to your regularly schedule chaos.

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High School Survival

2025-08-16T18:57:45Z

A recent book review by rachelmanija reminded me of a forgotten, and now unmourned, novel I wrote somewhere between tenth and eleventh grade, about a high school that barricades itself in a "revolution" for a time. This wasthe mid-sixties, when student unrest was a news item. The escalation of the Vietnam war--the concomitant intensification of what we called the military-industrial complex--'Don't trust anyone over thirty'--no jobs for women except service (secretary, nurse, grade school teacher), and those underpaid--and meanwhile, the ferocious overcrowding caused by the world trying to squish the baby boomers into existing spaces while conveying, repeatedly, the message 'There are too many of you, you don't matter, you'll never have meaningful jobs'--you have the atmosphere.

But this high school revolution was really about the hypocrisy of teenagers using the news as theit excuse in their hierarchical battles with each other. What I was going for, in my clueless sixteen-year-old brain, was the lethal artificiality of being locked up with a few thousand of your age mates, which prepared you for. . . . what? In the workplace (or marriage, supposedly the destination for women) you weren't having to negotiate crowd of age mates suffering from the same hormonal chaos as you were.

But what came out was teenage boy violence for the sake of violence--something I knew firsthand--and the more insidious violence of mean girl crowds. My small friendship circle and I, experts at drifting into the woodwork to avoid attention, divided our gender into two groups, the indes and the pakkies. Indes--inde, for independent--were frequently the targets of the pakkies, the ones who roamed in packs, looking exactly alike in their teased behives, layers of Twiggy eye make-up, short skirts and t-strap shoes. They took over the bathrooms at every break and lunch, filling the air with hairspray and cigarette smoke, and the meanest would target any loner who dared to go in to try to pee. So you got used to holding it all day.

The novel had plenty of action, but central were the heroic indes, who of course knew how to survive, and when they didn't know what to do, they went to their retreat, the library. It all came to a satisfactory close, but I knew at the time that therre was something crucial missing, so I never typed it up and inflicted it on a New York publisher after scraping together postage from babysitting, the way I'd been doing with various other projects.

I finally gave it to a friend to rewrite, which was kinda cool, seeing what someone else would do with your story, but unsurprisingly the friend just doubled down on how great the indes were, and how stupid the rest of the kids. And so it finally went into a box, with varous other things piled on top over the years.

In culling all that old stuff, I rediscovered it. Glancing through, I wondered if there was any hope of resurrecting it as a period piece, but five minutes'perusal made it plain that it'd have to be completely gutted: the non-indes were all one type, even though on a personal level I knew better. The indes had no arc whatsoever, except in the wish fulfillment sense--they were the despised cool ones at the outset, then the heroes at the end, but Revenge of the Nerds did it better twenty years later (making me wonder if the originator of the idea was a peer). The story's potential interest would have to focus in on the pakkies, who would have to confront the very conformity they were trying to enforce. There was a possible story worth telling.

So out it went to the recycle bin. But it was fun to look back and remember the fierce pleasure I got in writing it and reinforcing the conviction that geeks are cool.

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Evelina again

2025-08-14T01:55:51Z

I don't know how many times I've read this, but as my book group is meeting Saturday, I dug it back out of the box and have been rereading it. The influence on Jane Austen is clearer with each reread. Astonishing that it was considered so genteel at the time, with all the thoughtless animal cruelty as well as abuse of the characters set up as comic villains.

The hero and heroine are dull as ditchwater, of course; she is unswerving in her maidenly modesty (and beauty) and purity, and he remains at a distance, regarded by all as a cynosure, and ever ready to rescue her though they scarcely have an actual conversation. But there's too much delicacy to actually get to know one another as people; she has to know that he's a gentleman, and he has to know her virtue before the wedding bells can ring.

The fun is in the secondary characters in all their vulgarity, and in the minute descriptions of life in London in the 1770s.

I'm halfway through, maybe more to come.

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Some reading!

2025-08-06T14:27:37Z

This replacing of the floors is turning out to be a long project, since most of the grunt work has to be done by us, two olds. It's basically packing to move sans truck. I'm doing more culling, noting my own inconsistencies in regard to what I keep and what I toss. What seemed a ream of letters from one person went out, except for a slim batch of early ones when X visited a country they felt strongly about. But the rest had begun so well, with many book and writing discussions, then became a long downhill slide over the years until I reached the point when I dreaded seeing their handwriting on an envelope. Out those go--those letters served their purpose at the time, but are not worth keeping to revisit.

And yet, I cannot toss old letters from relatives, which are largely reports on their daily doings. Some of those letters are more than fifty years old, so they've become curiosities, little reminders of what life was like in the late sixties/early seventies. But mostly I won't toss those letters because to do so is to silence those voices forever. Sorry, kids, you'll have to toss them when you toss whatever I leave behind.

Not much time for reading as I tear this place apart, and also cull more books. So far I've completely emptied three tall bookcases, and there's a lot more to go!

I've begun reading Emily Eden, whose writing shows influence from Jane Austen. Also, there's the monthly Zoom discussion of Anthony Powell's twelve volume roman fleuve A Dance to the Music of Time; I missed the August live discussion due to conflicting appointments, but they record it, and I'm listening in pieces. So far the talk re this book, The Valley of Bones seems to be circling around how much it's a roman a clef.

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PBS

2025-08-04T15:38:07Z

On their ongoing mission to reserve the entire national treasury to themselves and their suck-ups, the orange excresence and fellow scumbags have axed PBS.

But! For a few bucks a month (before they thieve those, too) you can view PBS's entire backlog, plus other goodies. And do some general good at preserving our culture while at it.

Okay, back to dismantling this entire house so we can replace the disgusting floors.

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Mulling rereads

2025-07-22T16:53:15Z

ambyr posted recently about culls and memory that got me to thinking about the complexities of reread, memory, nostalgia, and so forth.

For example, when I read Peter S. beagle's Folk of the Air it was the right time for that story. I've kept it ever since, but never reread it--his later work didn't click with me, making me hesitant to revisit that one lest the same thing happen.

As I keep culling, I've discovered books that seemed really progressive at the time--books I really enjoyed, or that got me through a difficult period--that time has caught up with and bypassed in significant ways. Patrick Dennis comes to mind. His book about divorce, The Joyous Season, got me past the emotional whirlpool of my parents' marriage breaking up when I was a teen. There were other aspects that I really liked, but there are now attitudes and language that makes me wince now. And yet I can't cull that book.

But others I can place in the donation box with a mental salute to fond memory, and hopes it finds its readership somewhere else. This ambivalence can go for problematical authors, too. But these things I think have to be decided for oneself. So many aspects to balance.

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Old-timey regency romances

2025-07-16T19:05:31Z

"Old-timey" seems to be an emerging term for stuff either set or written before the 21st Century. Here we get an amusing confusion: Old-Timey regency romances, I noted when scanning reviews by what appears to be younger-than-me readers, refers to the regency romances written in the sixties-eighties, even the nineties.

I used to collect these in my late teens, once I'd gone through everything the library had. They were sold by the bunch in used book stores, fifty cents for ten, which suited my babysitting budget--I could read one a night once the kids were asleep.

I did a cull of these beat-up, yellowing volumes with godawful covers 25-30 years ago, donating the real stinkers* and keeping a slew of others because my teenage daughter had by then discovered them.

But she left them all behind--she stopped reading fiction altogether around 2000--and I always meant to do a more severe cull, perhaps dump the entirety. But thought I oughht to at least check them out first, yet kept putting it off until recently. While I was recovering from that nasty dose of flu seemed the perfect time.

I finished last night.

Of course most of them are heavily influenced by Georgette Heyer, or at least in conversation with. Some were written when Heyer was still going strong. Authors from UK, USA, Australia, etc. For the most part you could tell the UK ones not only because the language was closer to early nineteenth century--these writers surely had grown up reading old books, as had Heyer--but their depictions of small towns in GB were way more authentic than those written by writers who'd never seen the islands.

But there were common threads. Good things, as one reviewer trumpeted: they wrote in complete sentences! They knew the difference between "lie" and "lay"! In the best of them, characters had actual conversations. Even witty ones! (There's an entire chapter in Austen's Emma, when we meet Mrs. Elton, which demonstrates what was and what wasn't "good conversation." I can imagine readers back then chuckling all the way through at Mrs. Elton's egregious vigor in bad conversational manners.)

But those are the superficials. What about the plots? Here were common tropes shared with contemporary romances of sixties and seventies. A bunch of these tropes have long since worn out their welcome. I didn't know why I hadn't culled some of the books containing the most egregious examples--maybe they were just so common that they were invisible, and there was some other aspect of a given book that had made me chuckle fifty years ago.

Dunno. But in this cull, as soon as I hit the evil aging mistress who will do anything to hang onto the (total jerk) hero, including setting the young and pure heroine up for rape and ruin (which she always j-u-s-t escapes), out it went, the rest of the novel unread: the plot-armored heroine will get her HEA. my sympathy lies with the mistress, whose grim situation veers closer to historical accuracy. Ditto I dumped unfinished the ones where the hero, who can't seem to control his raging hormones (or you know, talk like an adult) mistakes the pure and innocent heroine for a lightskirt and corners her at every opportunity for "can't-say-no" making out, while she castigates herself afterward, moaning, "Whatever is wrong with me?" Basically, while these heroines (and their readers) did not want to be raped, they did want to be ravished. And they weren't guilty of being bad girls if they were overpowered, right?

That was a VERY common trope in the early contemporary romances, the ones read by my mom by the literal sackful, and traded with other women at the local shop. In the seventies, Mom and her buddies organized themselves. None had the budgets to read everything coming out, so one woman would buy the new books from the Dell line, and another the Kensington line, and so on, then they'd trade them back and forth. Mom saved a sackful for my visits--she thought they were something we had in common, and I never disabused her of this, though I was fast getting sick of the "virginity" plotline. I read them all, noting patterns.

I could say a lot about why I think Mom and her buddies couldn't get enough of that plotline, but I'm trying to get through these regencies. In which the authors did understand the social cost of straying. But the heroine gets her reward at the (abrupt, usually) end, a ring from the guy who'd been cornering her for bruising kisses two chapters ago, and wedding bells in the distance. As I got older, I wondered if those marriages would make it much past the wedding trip. As a teen, I read uncritically for the Cinderella story--as I recollect all the weirdness about the heroines and their main commodity, their virginity (and their beauty) whizzed right over my head.

That said. Every so often you'd get a storyline that was a real comedy of manners, and while the research/worldbuilding was never as period-consistent as Heyer's secondary universe, they'd be fun stories. Like Joan Smith's Endure My Heart, which I'd remembered fondly for the battle of wits between hero and heroine--she the secret leader of a smuggling ring, and he the inspector sent to nab whoever was running that successful venture. Now, on rereading it, there were plenty of warts, but I remember the fun of the early read--and the only two attempted rape scenes were done by a villain, not the hero.

The regency romance has staying power, but it's evolved over the decades since these "old-timey" regencies for the 21st C reader who wants on-page sex, without real consequences. And only vague vestiges of the manners of the time. Few, or no, conversations or even awareness of the dynamics of salon socializing. Basically modern women in sexy silk gowns, and guys in tight pants and colorful jackets and rakish hats, with all the cool trappings--country houses, carriages, balls, and the elegant fantasy of the haut monde.

In the donation box the old ones go.

*I'll never forget the one that had to have been written in the mid-seventies, which had the pouting heroine stating on the first page that she was bored, bored, bored with Almack's and why did she have to participate in the marriage mart anyway? She wanted, and I quote from memory, "actualize her personhood!" Then there was the one that featured the hero, leader of fashion, sporting a crew cut and a "suit of flowing silk of lime green"--I think the author meant a leisure suit.

Then there was Barbara Cartland. Whether or not she hired a stable of writers to churn these out once a month under her name or not, she boiled the story down to the barest skeleton of tropes, padded out mostly by ellipses. Except for one early one, published in the thirties or early forties that lifted huge chunks of a Heyer, stuffed into a really weird plot...

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It's Wednesday! And I've been reading!

2025-07-09T21:29:34Z

Actually I've been doing a ton of reading while I shake off the last of this influenza, which is mostly now lingering chest crud and zero stamina.

While nothing has blown me away, and I've abandoned some other "not for me" books, I did make a virtuous start on The Cull. Beginning with C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, first published in 1938.

My copy, the 1965 paperback edition printed in the US, has a cover that actually sort of fits the book, unlike a lot of SF covers of the time depicting generic space skies and cigar rocket ships, with or without a scantily clad lady joined by guys in glass helmets and bulky space suits.

No woman on the cover here, which would have been false advertising as the only woman on stage during the entire novel is a distraught country housewife in the first few pages. (And no, I do not think that this is a sign that Lewis despised women, so much as that he had spent all his childhood and early manhood among males, so his default characters are going to be "he" among "hims". But that's a discussion for another book.)

I've had Lewis's space trilogy since high school (1968). This one I read I think twice, once that year, and then again when the Mythopoeic Society had branches and our West LA discussion group covered the three books.

Teen-me trudged through the first reading looking for story elements that would interest me, and though a line here and there was promising, I found it overall tedious, missing the humor entirely. On that second reading during my college years I saw the humor, and found more to appreciate in Lewis's thematic argument, but that was a lukewarm enough response that I never reread it during the ensuing fifty years.

Now in old age it's time to cull a massive print library that neither of my kids wants to inherit. What to keep and what to donate? I reread this book finally, and found myself largely charmed. The structure is strongly reminiscent of the fin de siecle SF of Wells, Verne, etc--inheritors of the immensely popular "travelogue" of the 1600-1700s--which means it moves rather slowly, full of the description of discovery (and anticipatory terror) as its protagonist, a scholar named Ransom, stumbles into a situation that gets him kidnapped by a figure from his boarding school days, Weston, and Weston's companion, a man named Devine.

As was common in the all-male world of British men of Lewis's social strata, the men all go by last names--I don't think Weston or Devine are ever given a first name, and there are at most two mentions of Ransom's first name, Elwin, which I suspect was only added as a nod to JRRT. Apparently this book owes its origin to a bet made between Lewis and Tolkien, which I think worth mentioning because of the (I think totally wrong) assumptions that Lewis was anti-science. The bet, and the dedication to Lewis's brother, make it plain that they read and enjoyed science fiction--had as boys.

I suppose it's possible to eagerly read SF and still be anti-science, but I don't think that's the case here; accusations that Lewis hates scientific progress seem to go hand-in-hand with scorn for Lewis's Christianity. But I see the scientific knowledge of mid-thirties all over this book. In fact, I don't recollect reading in other contemporary SF (admittedly I haven't read a lot of it) the idea that once you're out of Earth's gravity well, notions of up and down become entirely arbitrary. Though Lewis seems not to understand freefall, he does represent the changes in gravity and in light and heat--it seems to me that the science, though full of errors that are now common knowledge, was as up-to-date as he could make it. That also shows in the meticulous worldbuilding--and to some extent in the fun he had building his Martian language.

What he argues against when the three men are at last brought before the god-like Oyarsa, is a certain attitude toward Progress as understood then, and also up through my entire childhood: that it didn't matter what you did to other beings or to the environment, as long as it was in the name of Progress or Humanity. We get little throwaways right from the start that Lewis's stance clear, such as when Devine and Weston squabble about having a guard dog to protect their secret space ship, but Devine points out that Weston had had one but experimented on it.

Lewis hated vivisection. He knew it was torture for the poor helpless beasts in the hands of the vivisectionists, who believed animals had no feelings, etc etc. He also hated the byproducts of mass industrialization, as he makes plain in vivid images. Lewis also makes reference to splitting the atom and its possible results; I think it worthwhile to note that during the thirties no one knew what the result would be--but there was a lot of rhetoric hammering that we need bigger and better bombs, and splitting the atom would give us that. All in the name of Humanity. Individual lives have no meaning, and can be sacrificed with impunity as long as it's in the name of "saving Humanity."

As his theme develops, it's made very clear that moral dilemmas trouble Ransom--he's aware that humans contain the capability for brilliant innovation and for vast cruelty. He also holds up for scruntiny the idea that the (white) man is the pinnacle of intelligence in the cosmos. The scene when Weston talks excruciating pidgin in his determination to subordinate the Martians and their culture to the level of "tribal witch doctors" is equally hilarious and cringey.

In short, it took over fifty years for me to appreciate this book within the context of its time. I don't feel any impulse to eagerly reread it, but I might some day. At any rate, it stays on the shelf.

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Robert and Gracia Fay Ellwood

2025-07-01T17:21:42Z

I think one or two old Mythies might still be reading here; at any rate, these old friends had been on my mind this spring. Came back to discover that they died a week apart at the end of May/beginning of June.

They met in the very early sixties at the U of Chicago, where both were studying. Robert was a bit on the spectrum; he said, and he stuck with it, he would never date anyone who couldn't read and love Lord of the Rings, which had blown him away when it came out. In retrospect I don't even know how he stumbled across it because to my later knowledge of him he didn't read fiction. Maybe he thought it was a northern saga when he stumbled on the first volume? Anyway, his field was religion and Japanese literature, and I remember him sitting in his rose garden reading copies of ancient Japanese texts for pleasure.

She was also blown away by it, but not especially by him. But he'd fallen hard for her, and when she also loved LOTR, he wasn't about to give up. They married around 1963, I think; by the time I met them in 1967, they were living in West LA, he a professor of Religious Studies at USC. They used to host many meetings of the early Mythopoeic Society; he'd disappear while she socialized with us gawky teens. She was a great role model for us; she was a scholar, married to someone who respected her brains, which was tough to find during the mid and late sixties.

I was on hand to deliver both their kids, now middle-aged. He married my spouse and me in 1980. They became Quakers later; they were firm pacifists and human rights advocates.

Time is just so relentless! But they used theirs well, living gently and kindly, always loving beauty, grace, and laughter.

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