Asakiyume mita

Winged Histories

I made a tiny bit more progress. I liked this description of hope:

I know what I saw: hope, like a desert aloe. Hope, stubborn and bitter to the taste. that hides water. That bears the drought. An ugly plant with the power to heal.

Also, not quite a title drop, but:

Now often at night it seems as if there is something abroad in the wood with wings or something that breathes as it sits upon my chest. I get up in the night and go to the flap of the tent and open it ... The wind blows in my face and shakes the trees and powders me with rain. The cold rain and the warm dog by my leg. And far away in the dark the lights of the bridge. Everywhere the sound of wings.

The Souls of Black Folk

I finished chapter 2. The fine-grained-ness of the history, and the recentness, from WEB DuBois's perspective, gives me the same sensation I had reading Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. There's stuff there that gets flattened out in more-distant-from-the-time histories.

The beginning of these lines at the end of the chapter reminded me of the famous MLK "I have a dream" speech--only more somber:

I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there on the King's Highway sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which the traveller's footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries' thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

Consolation Songs: Optimistic Speculative Fiction for a Time of Pandemic
I'm reading this anthology in order. I've read five stories so far, and the ones I've enjoyed most have been "Girls Who Read Austen," by Tansy Rayner Roberts, which features protagonist Scylla and a succession of monstrous roommates and was very funny, and "A Hundred and Seventy Storms," by Aliette de Bodard, which was tense in a good way, as the mind portion of a mindship (the gooey human part, including brain, as opposed to the metallic ship part) has to weather a violent solar storm separated from its body. There's a great sense of family and family drama, people trying to balance the various demands put on them--it was good. Next up is a story by Adrian Tchaikovsky--looking forward to that one.