owlectomy

owlectomy @ 2025-12-22T21:50:00

2025-12-23T03:59:12Z

Hildy the Cat is currently Extremely Upset about my new CPAP mask. She sat on my bed for a good fifteen minutes sniffing it, with her eyes as wide as dinner plates, and then she ran away.

These are the facial expressions of somebody whose dead best friend came back from the underworld, but Came Back Wrong. These are the facial expressions of somebody who is exploring the spaceship looking for their partner only to find their partner half transmogrified into a cyborg creature. These are the facial expressions of someone who has just come face to face with some really gnarly body horror and can't quite deal with it yet.

Poor kitty!

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Rainbow Black - Maggie Thrash

2024-12-29T07:24:05Z

At least I read one book this year that wasn't for book club!

Rainbow Black by Maggie Thrash, which is slightly deceptively marketed as "part murder mystery, part gay international fugitive love story." Like: there is a part where someone gets murdered and no one knows who did it. And there is a part where the gay protagonist is in Montreal with her partner, having adopted a new identity and having not quite successfully escaped responsibility for the crimes of her youth. But it's nothing like a genre murder mystery; it's a little like a love story; the tagline makes it seem rather exciting and glamorous, and: no.

( minimal spoilers )

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owlectomy @ 2024-08-16T15:24:00

2024-08-16T20:48:20Z

One thing about me is that sometimes - for reasons I myself don't fully understand - I get enamored of doing things the hard way.

Maybe enamored is the wrong word. I become certain that This Way is the way I want to do the thing, and it really doesn't matter how difficult or inconvenient This Way is.

This time, I became certain that the way I wanted to do the thing was Acoustic Guitar Songbook for 70s Kids. (There's an Acoustic Guitar Songbook for 60s Kids, but not for 80s Kids, alas.)

The reason this book appealed to me was this: I do better when I have a set curriculum than when I'm just kind of learning things at random (currently, I'm working through the Canadian Royal Conservatory of Music books for classical guitar even though I don't have a classical guitar and don't want to play classical guitar); if I pick up an American book of acoustic fingerpicking songs, my absolute hatred of a handful of 1970s rock songs gets in the way; I liked the cover.

So I get the book shipped from Japan, and the book itself just has the vocal melody line and the chord names, and I'm thinking, OK, fine, I can work with that, BUT - if you buy the book, you get the password so you can get on the password-protected YouTube videos that actually demonstrate and explain how to play the songs.

In Japanese. So, although my Japanese is good, I definitely cannot understand "You put your ring finger on the third fret of the second string, and you put your middle finger on the second fret of the third string" without rewinding a time or two.

But the whole reason I got the book in the first place is that I do not want to play from a YouTube video! It's tedious! You have to spend all your time rewinding and playing back and rewinding and playing back!

And yet, I do understand why they did it this way, because it takes so much more page space to write out a guitar part in detail, and they couldn't have fit 100 songs into a relatively slim book.

So what I'm doing is laboriously transcribing from the YouTube video to actual sheet music. (Laborious because for this particular song, the guy's not great at explaining, and he's leaving things out, so it's 75% transcribing from his explanations and 25% filling in the gaps by ear.)

I am hoping that as I go on I'll start getting better at recognizing chords, recognizing arpeggio patterns, understanding Japanese guitar words, etc, and this whole process will become less tedious. Because... this kind of seems like the absolute worst way to learn how to play basic coffee shop fingerpicking acoustic guitar, and yet, that's what my heart is set on.

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owlectomy @ 2024-08-11T22:59:00

2024-08-12T04:14:15Z

It turns out I am still capable of getting enjoyment out of fiction.

My reading-brain is just a goddamned diva. Like my cat who won't eat fish, and won't eat pate, and if she gets something she doesn't like it's OH NO THE WORLD IS ENDING.

I gotta get better at

(a) getting books from the library, and
(b) abandoning them immediately if I don't like them, without judgment

(Yes, it's hilarious that I'm bad at getting books from the library, but the thing is, I don't have time and energy to go to the public library that often, and recent library ebooks tend to have very long waitlists, and the leisure reading collection at my place of work is quite small).

Actually looking forward to talking about this at book club.

And also caring more about the book than about what dessert I'm gonna make, for once.

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Am I reading bad books or do I just have the depression?

2024-08-04T01:32:59Z

That feeling when you start a new book that you're slightly excited about reading, but the teen-girl character is a wannabe influencer who's right out of central casting, and the voice is laying it on so thickly and stereotypically, and we're hitting all of the expected sentimental notes of Tragic! Backstory! for the dad, and...

It's like the Truck Driver's Gear Change, right? It works - it's crude but it works - but once you know it for what it is, once you see the gears turning, it seems like a cheap trick.

Everything that works just a little too well feels a bit calculated and pandering.

The advice I want to give myself is "Stop reading genre fiction for a second; read out-there litfic, read that queer one narrated by a mountain lion, read some difficult poetry," and I think that's correct but I also don't really have enough brain for it.

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I didn't dislike this season of The Bear as much as everybody else seems to, but...

2024-07-03T02:46:16Z

( Spoilers are a la carte )

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A very brief artistic manifesto

2024-06-27T03:27:59Z

1. To pursue joy; to pursue playfulness; to be looser, wilder, bolder, more reckless.

2. To be meticulous and precise, to sweat the details.

3. To not perceive (1) and (2) as being in opposition to one another (and I don't even think that it's a 'write drunk, edit sober' kind of thing.) But rather, the work of sweating the details has to be powered by joy and playfulness and recklessness or you don't have an interesting compass to orient yourself by.

4. To work hard when I can work hard, and rest when I need to rest, and not punish myself for whether I meet the yardstick in my head.

5. To prioritize, above all else, finding the good scent trails that make me feel like I have something worthwhile to say.

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Moving update

2024-05-03T17:51:57Z

The apartments that I tried to see were

1) Unworkable

2) Workable, but just barely

3) I scheduled an appointment but they canceled on me at the last minute and no longer have any availability

4) I was trying to schedule an appointment but it was a very VERY slow conversation of times that didn't work for me (I called them LAST Friday and as of this morning we were still trying to schedule a showing.)

HOWEVER - a TWIST! - After I submitted my Intent to Vacate notice to my current landlord, they emailed me to say that they had sent me the wrong lease renewal, and they were going to send me a new one, which ended up being much more reasonable.

Which is good, because I wasn't really up for moving.

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owlectomy @ 2024-03-13T22:51:00

2024-03-14T03:58:04Z

Hot take nobody needed:

Cleo in Cleo from 5 to 7 is not a hypochondriac, she is a young woman who's waiting to find out whether she has cancer, and OF COURSE she's anxious and dramatic about it. What if she's been in pain for months trying to get doctors to take her seriously? She knows that any serious illness is likely to be terrible for both her career and her romantic prospects; she's acting the way that any reasonable young person would in that situation!

(This is not a knock on the movie; it's a good movie! But the summaries describe Cleo as a hypochondriac, and I don't see how that's supported by the text.)

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owlectomy @ 2023-12-21T22:59:00

2023-12-22T05:22:25Z

The first time I read Ursula Le Guin's "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," I think I was between sixteen and nineteen (I have memories of reading it in North Carolina, but where would I have acquired it if not at the McGill library?), and I was annoyed, because I (wrongly) read it as saying:

To write fantasy well, you have to be able to write in fancy high-faluting language, and also, you need to know how to conjugate verbs properly with "thou."

This is not what Le Guin is saying (although perhaps she does think that conjugating verbs properly with "thou" is a fairly ordinary skill that everybody ought to have.) She is saying that the language of fantasy is different from the language of the everyday. Good writing in the language of fantasy may be archaic, but it doesn't have to be; it might be fancy, but it doesn't have to be; all writers have to arrive at their own solutions for putting some distance between their prose and the language of the everyday.

I loved The Boy and the Heron but the English dub did not really work for me. (I had intended to go see the subtitled version; I misread an ambiguous movie schedule listing.) I don't think that's (mostly) a voice acting thing. I think it's very hard to write English dialogue that bridges Elfland and Poughkeepsie. Heck, I suspect it's hard in Japanese as well; it's just that I don't see the awkward seams as easily.

You look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer and how effectively it used a contemporary Valley Girl idiom; it took place in a reality where the portentous prophecies and lore were always a little silly, but the relationship drama was deadly serious, so it worked as long as the contemporary characters and their dialogue felt real.

I decided after seeing The Boy and the Heron that I ought to read Tam Lin, and I think it's a bit the opposite of Buffy: Janet Carter is a person who already belongs to Elfland just a little bit, long before anything supernatural happens in the text. She reads everything. If the language is a little elevated, it makes sense for Janet as a character.

This is the big problem that I've had with the neverending WIP. I want the contemporary characters to feel real and weird and a little grimy. But I also want the magic in the book to feel vivid and threatening; it's not going to work with an everyday kind of prose. I want it to have a foot in Elfland and a foot in Poughkeepsie.

I think I need to be reading more horror. This is hard; I can't really handle gore.

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All of the story structure gurus are still wrong

2023-12-08T00:34:50Z

As story structure books go, Into the Woods by John Yorke is quite good. It's at least on par with McKee (who I don't agree with 100%, but who gets hated too much) and certainly less formulaic and prescriptive than Syd Field or Save the Cat (which raises the question, "Why do so many people want to take writing advice from a guy whose best movie is Miss Congeniality," but if we think about that too hard, why would anybody take advice from me?)

But there's one thing that it gets badly, incredibly wrong. It quotes E. M. Forster as saying that "story as such can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next."

Yorke parses this very simply: stories should make the audience want to know what happens next.

That's not what Forster meant. I think that if Forster knew he was being misinterpreted like this, he would be turning over in his grave.

I think that it would be more accurate to phrase his argument like this: If we try to isolate the "story" part of a novel, and look at it apart from all the other elements, then the only thing we can find to make one story better than another is whether it makes you want to find out what happens next. But Forster's point is that that's an incredibly reductive way of looking at a novel! If you look at a novel as just a vehicle for finding out what happens next, then you end up overrating The Da Vinci Code and other books that are propulsively plotted but don't have much else to recommend them, and you end up underrating Moby-Dick with its whale chapters and Les Miserables with its sewer chapter. You end up overlooking the philosophical novel, the travelogue-novel, the sociological-commentary-disguised-as-novel, the novel that's heavy on character study, and so on. A novel tells a story, but (in E.M. Forster's view) that's usually not one of the more important or interesting things that it does; in fact, sometimes "what happens next?" is just the shiny thing that's supposed to distract you so you don't notice the sleight-of-hand the writer's doing with their other hand.

Now, if you don't much like the sociological-commentary-disguised-as-novel, the novel where nothing much happens, the chapters that act as a place for the author to monologue about their hyperfixation... I don't necessarily disagree with you. There are some of these books that I love, but what I always really want is a book that's well-plotted AND has a lot more to offer the reader than finding out what happens next. Even with The Da Vinci Code, the people who loved it didn't just love it for the thriller plot; people loved it, in large part, for its church history nonsense. There's something (even if it's something very silly) to stay with you after the excitement of what happens next has faded.

And this, I think, is my problem with books on story structure in general. They rarely recognize that whether a book is well-plotted, badly plotted, or almost unplotted, many of the most interesting things about it are the things happening beside or underneath or orthogonal to the plot.

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owlectomy @ 2023-09-29T10:49:00

2023-09-29T16:00:06Z

In an effort to sharpen up my Japanese reading skills (I should actually be sharpening up my Japanese listening skills, but whatever) I am reading a book of essays by Miura Shion. I wasn't terribly familiar with Miura except that I really liked her 2006 novel (also a movie which I haven't seen) "Tada's Do-It-All House."

Not only is Miura a BL fan, but a bunch of her essays in this particular book ("Happiness Like a Dream") are from the early 2000s, right around the time when I was reading a lot of BL, and, indeed, the time when I was living in Japan. Which makes those particular essays feel hideously nostalgic - especially the one where she talks about going to see Fellowship of the Ring (which I saw in 2001 in a theater in Nagasaki!) and falling in love with Aragorn and going on English-language slash fanfic web sites and struggling through her own poor English skills to read the fanfic.

I mean, isn't it charming to think that I was struggling through a Fujimi Orchestra novel in Japanese right at the same time that Miura Shion was struggling through an Aragorn/Boromir fic in English?

(She also has an essay where she talks about getting mad at the teenage girls in the bookstore making fun of the BL section and saying "People who read this stuff won't ever get boyfriends," which makes her think, she almost wants a boyfriend just to prove them wrong... but ehhhh. I remember relating to that sentiment of ehhhh quite deeply.)

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Three things about the Barbie movie

2023-07-23T04:40:46Z

1. The central thesis of the Barbie movie is that the truly dangerous people are not those who pursue power for its own sake, but those who pursue power as a substitute for the love and respect that they want but cannot obtain.

2. Sarah Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology takes the "orientation" in "sexual orientation" very literally, conceptualizing the "straight lines" of family inheritance and reproduction. To be queer is to deviate from that straight path, to challenge the social order, to need to do some new wayfinding for yourself onto trails that maybe don't exist yet. I think the idea that being "weird and ugly" grants a kind of immunity against being brainwashed by the patriarchy connects to that in interesting ways.

3. There's a chapter in How to Read Donald Duck by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (a postcolonial critique of Disney in general and the Donald Duck comics in particular) that talks about the strange zero-reproduction world of Disney, where there are a lot of nephews and a few nieces but no sons or daughters. I wonder how their ideas relate to the strange almost-zero-reproduction world of Barbieland, where one person is pregnant but nobody ever gives birth.

4. Does the movie actually bear up to this level of analysis? I don't know, but it's fun to think about when you have to drive an hour in the dark and the rain, and I'll take it.

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My Thoughts on the ending of She-Ra

2020-05-26T03:44:06Z

( There are spoilers )

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owlectomy @ 2020-03-28T15:50:00

2020-03-28T21:01:27Z

Last time I traveled abroad: Montreal / Quebec City in summer 2016.

Last time I slept in a hotel: Fort Lauderdale in October, for my middle sister's wedding

Last time I flew in a plane: From Fort Lauderdale as well

Last time I took a train: A genuine long-distance train? I think it must have been the New York City -> Montreal train in spring 2013. (I took an Acela between NYC and Washington DC somewhere around this time, but I don't remember my dates.) I'm sad I don't live near a passenger train line anymore.

Last time I took public transit: I took the Ames city bus regularly when I lived there, so probably a little before I graduated this year?

Last time I had a houseguest: A friend came to stay at my apartment in Brooklyn in... 2015?

Last time I got my hair cut: Two weeks ago! It was one of the last things I did before I seriously started social distancing.

Last time I went to the movies: Knives Out around Thanksgiving last year.

Last time I went to the theatre: Must've been Into the Woods in Minneapolis, spring break 2019.

Last time I went to a concert: So long ago. So long ago!

Last time I went to an art museum: So long ago. So long ago!

Last time I sat down in a restaurant: Zombie Burger in Des Moines a couple of weeks ago (also right before I started social distancing!)

Last time I went to a party: I'm tempted to count the very small literary festival I went to in February as a party.

Last time I played a board game: Christmas - Machi Koro.

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owlectomy @ 2020-03-18T20:45:00

2020-03-19T01:58:23Z

We have one professor who requires, for who knows what cockamamie reason, that students use a print source.

Article in a database? Not acceptable. An article from the New England Journal of Medicine is totally acceptable if you get it from the magazine, but totally unacceptable if you download the pdf from the database which contains EXACTLY THE SAME CONTENT. It's silly and not educationally useful, but I can't make him change it.

So. What's going to happen now that classes are canceled, the library's open, but students are being strongly encouraged to not come to campus, and are being encouraged to instead do everything virtually?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I am perfectly willing to photocopy or scan a section of a book or magazine for someone, to make a home delivery, or whatever - but if there was ever a time to make an exception, surely this is the time!

(I don't think he wants to teach online, which I understand, but if this reluctance keeps him from asking students to go to the library to find books on color guard and global warming, I will be GLAD.)

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Gideon the Ninth

2019-11-20T01:22:06Z

I have been personally victimized by Tamsyn Muir but I'm okay with that.

( Spoilers for Gideon the Ninth )

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Liner notes for the soundtrack to "The Death and Life of the Blackthorn City"

2019-10-07T02:36:23Z

I have recently finished the almost-final draft of The Death and Life of the Blackthorn City, my thesis novel that's about what happens when the left-wing Quebecois insurgencies of the late 60s and early 70s result in the growth of an impenetrable thorn-hedge around a section of Montreal -- and what happens several decades later, when the heiress to the powers of the thorn-hedge falls in love with a Vietnamese-Canadian girl from the other side of the city.

So - for my own amusement - here is the playlist that I've made as I was writing the novel, and my notes thereupon!

( Read more... )

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Text, subtext, incidents & accidents, hints & allegations

2019-09-08T02:52:25Z

Writing any relationship - it's often most visible in romance, but I think it's true of any relationship - is about the tension between what you can say and what you can't say.

Because of course it's frustrating when characters mope and whine and pine and angst for eighty pages when that could have been solved by a three-minute conversation - but you don't necessarily want to do away with the moping and pining.

Speaking only for myself, I love unresolved sexual tension, I love pining, I love the slow burn. I love really hoping that these two failboats can just get it together. But I don't want it to feel artificial. I don't want to feel like these two failboats are failing to communicate because the author can't figure out any other way to reach the minimum page count.

This is the tension of all art, right? It's artificial, but often, it works only to the extent that it can allow you to pretend that it's real. When you can recognize it in your own life, that's one of the things that lets you pretend it's real. Not saying what you need to say because of pride or fear or vulnerability or because you don't know how to be the person who could say that kind of thing - that's relatable as hell.

There's also the argument from aesthetics. Which is that if your characters say what they feel, the dialogue lies there flat and limp and dead on the page.

So. Your characters can't actually say what they mean because then they'll be boring and the dialogue will be boring. But they also can't miscommunicate in ways that make readers roll their eyes, in ways that feel too simple or contrived or push the boundaries of just how much these characters can be failboats before readers stop caring whether they ever get their acts together or not.

I think getting it right comes down to characterization. If you can make someone come alive on the page as arrogant, afraid, insecure, vulnerable, then when they communicate badly because of it, it'll feel sympathetic (or at least understandable) rather than contrived. And I think that's hard to do because to do it well often means going into your own shame and regret when you write, and the ways you've made bad choices and miscommunicated. Plot points like "I wasn't cheating on you - I was just hugging my brother!" come from wanting the Big Misunderstanding but not having it based in any actual wrongdoing. That always feels like a cop-out to me, even more than the artificiality of the Big Misunderstanding. I love the way a good romantic story makes an argument for how love can push us to be better, and braver, and force us to confront our baggage - but it can't do that if the obstacles that have been set up in the way of love are paper tigers.

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Trial by fire

2018-07-18T06:09:46Z

I am alternating between being

(a) Extremely Pleased with the hotness level of my thesis - even though it as of yet has no genuinely explicit scenes and just one that is meant to be moderately spicy

and

(b) Extremely Embarrassed because the following people are going to read it: my thesis advisor, the three other men on my thesis committee, my entire cohort of ~10 ppl, and if it gets published then all kinds of friends and relatives and who knows who.

There is a chance that the draft that goes to my thesis defense will just say [[Here THEY HAVE SEX. It is NICE]]

People who've written more fanfic than I have have to deal with this kind of thing all the time, I know; I haven't had that sort of practice.

(Regarding the first third of the novel, which HAS been workshopped, people are telling me to make it sexier unless I actually want to present these characters as asexual - which I don't - but I'm still trying to figure out how much I'm going to tinker with it in revisions; I get awkward when it comes to how much I should write about the sex lives of fictional teenagers, as compared with the sex lives of fictional adults in the latter half of the book.)

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Reflections on Quebec nationalism

2018-06-01T02:33:19Z

1) The thing I needed most to understand about Quebec nationalist / separatist / independentist movements is an analysis I found that separated these movements into three groups:

a) Focused on the survival of Quebecois language and culture

b) Focused on political independence / the creation of Quebec as a capitalist state independent from larger Canada

c) Focused on decolonization / anti-imperialism / liberation more broadly - concerned, among other things, with how the United States was advancing an imperialist capitalist military agenda using Quebec's national resources (e.g. during the Vietnam war).

(c) is absolutely convincing to me, which is why it's a little discouraging that it's hard to find, now, any trace of that left-wing decolonizing fervor. Maybe it's there to a greater extent than I realize - and, on the other hand, I suspect that it wouldn't have had its moment in the sun in the late 60s to early 70s without the tinderbox of the Vietnam War, the American Civil Rights movement / the Paris 1968 unrest, the vast social / economic inequality between Anglophones and Francophones.

2) One of my Big Questions, I think, is whether the xenophobia in Quebec separatist movements is inevitable - whether it's possible to have a separatism that's non-xenophobic or whether that's doomed from the beginning. The nationalist logic is that English is the language of success in Canada as a whole and in North America, so allophone immigrants in Quebec (those who don't speak either English or French) are going to choose to learn English and not French as long as they're not absolutely forced to learn French, so immigration inevitably leads to more people in Quebec who speak English rather than French - and hence who are decreasing the chances for the continuance of a Quebec that's majority-French, the continuance of Quebecois culture, and the movement for an independent state in Quebec.

But that's exactly the same thing that British racists and French racists and Scandinavian racists say about immigrants. So is there a meaningful difference there? Ehhhh. I have much more sympathy for the idea that Quebecois language / culture is in danger of disappearing than the idea that the French language / culture is in danger of disappearing; that's just numbers, plus the fact of living in a majority-Anglophone country and next door to a majority-Anglophone country that has more cultural, economic, and military power than anywhere else in the world. But allophone immigrants in Quebec are required to educate their kids in French, and there are other legal and social measures that I think make the problem much less serious than the fearmongers would suggest. And, more than that, I think a non-racist nationalist movement would have to reckon more seriously with immigrants as people who deserve the same rights as anyone to work, to raise their kids, to try to make good lives for themselves - rather than just as a potential oppositional voting bloc.

3) I'm keeping a tally of how many times I yell "YOU DON'T GET TO ABSOLVE YOURSELF OF BEING COLONIZERS BECAUSE YOU'RE ALSO COLONIZED" into the depths of the McGill Library.

3a) Not really, because the 3rd floor is a zone silent avec collation: silent zone with snacks. (As opposed to the 6th floor, a silent zone without snacks.)

4) There's an aspect to this that kind of feels gross and concern-trolly to me, like, "let me, an Anglophone Quebecker who doesn't even live here anymore, tell you how to do your politics better." It is perhaps slightly ameliorated by the fact that I'm writing a novel and not a polemic. I am never going to 100% feel like a person who is allowed to write this book. But, like, Americans criticize China and Russia and Israel and Venezuela (etc., etc., etc.) all the time! And when I walk down Sherbrooke or St. Laurent I feel so so convinced and passionate about what I love about this city and - if there's anything I want to accomplish politically with this book, it's to make the argument for decolonization-as-in-(c) and multiculturalism not as things that are in conflict with each other but things that are both worth fighting for.

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A meme in lieu of actual content

2018-05-31T16:42:43Z

5 things you'll find in my bag:
1. (Paper) notebook, right now a small red Moleskine AND a thick purple Clairefontaine
2. Tablet for e-books
3. Passport
4. Pencil case
5. Two poems

5 things you'll find in my room:
1. Multiple extreme stacks of library books
2. Many skeins of yarn
3. An in-progress sweater
4. Perfume samples
5. Floordrobe

5 of my favorite things:
1. Weird DIY
2. Languages
3. Drinks with ridiculous or nerdy names
4. Lilacs
5. Cooking things for other people

5 things I'm currently into:
1. Walking around Montreal
2. The history of nationalist and independentist movements in Quebec
3. Border studies
4. Cross-stitch
5. Magic: The Gathering Arena (now that I finally got into the beta).

5 things on my to-do list:
1. Buy a new SIM card for my phone
2. Go up Mount Royal
3. Take architecture reference photos
4. Novel research at the McGill library
5. Meet with the volunteer coordinator about my volunteering

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owlectomy @ 2018-04-11T22:48:00

2018-04-12T03:49:20Z

MFA Sadness is the sadness that you feel when a classmate you genuinely like who genuinely wants to be a good guy writes a story that's kind of misogynistic and you don't want to tell him but you also kind of have to.

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Recent reading!

2018-01-03T03:26:12Z

John Darnielle, Universal Harvester

Evocative horror-mystery-coming-of-age novel loosely focused on a young man, working at a video store in central Iowa, who finds disturbing things recorded on some of the tapes that get returned to the store. Much less focused on the horror-mystery plot than the character interactions and the physical and cultural details of daily life in central Iowa. Sad and spooky in a way that I liked a lot.

Weike Wang, Chemistry

A graduate student in chemistry goes through a breakup and processes her feelings about love and her unsatisfactory family life and her failure as a graduate student. Nicely written. The ratio of internal monologue and introspection to things actually happening was a little much for me.

Sunil Yapa, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

Tight and compelling novel about the WTO riots in Seattle in 1999, centered on a white police chief and his estranged mixed-race son. I liked this a lot, especially in the way that the political parts managed to clearly and strongly advocate for certain values while not pretending to have solved all the problems of non-exploitative economic development in underdeveloped countries. The ending was a little sentimental.

Edward O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight For Life

Essays on ecology centering on the thesis that we should leave half the earth for the use of nonhuman species - focusing on biological hotspots and large contiguous areas of wilderness. I wish he were a little more interesting as a writer, because I like his ideas. (Although the chapter on novel ecosystems recalled a discussion I had with Nick from my Restoration Ecology class; Nick thought that accepting that there are some ecosystems we're never going to get back to a "pristine" or "undisturbed" state would lead people to be careless about turning land into gravel pits full of battery acid, while I thought that... hey, there are going to be gravel pits full of battery acid; I would rather we tried to do something positive with them than giving up on them entirely).

Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland, Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation

To be reviewed for Flyway Journal soon. There's a lot of good stuff in here, especially the poetry.

Caitlin R. Kiernan, Agents of Dreamland

A slightly Lovecraftian novella of cults and brain-controlling parasites. I enjoyed this the whole way through but could not tell you what happened. I think I've liked the other Kiernan books I've read a bit better because they've had more room for the characters to unfold - they're kind of ciphers in this one.

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My New Year's Resolution

2017-12-31T01:25:59Z

Is to consciously turn away from Self-Improvement as an ideal.

To read more books I'm excited about reading and fewer books that I feel bound to read by guilt or duty

To make time for cooking because I enjoy it and because I can cook better vegetarian food than any of the restaurants in walking distance

But also - to understand the difference between doing something because I genuinely enjoy it and doing something because I don't have the energy or brainpower to do anything else, and to try to get more genuine joy and less cardboardy joy substitute.

Going along with that, I am trying very hard to say no to all those promises I tend to make to myself right around the end of December about taking more vitamins and moisturizing my skin and having a clean desk. Because first of all, I probably won't. And second of all - I just really need to stop conceptualizing my whole life as a long list of tasks that I am failing to do. It gets in the way of understanding what you really value. It gets in the way of the few things that genuinely matter.

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