Asakiyume mita

Thanks to osprey_archer's Newbery project, I got out The Flying Winged Girl of Knossos (thanks for catching that light_of_summer!) originally published in 1933 and reissued in 2017 by Betsy Bird, who's served on the Newbery Committee, reviewed books for Kirkus, blogs about children's literature, and has in fact written her own middle grade novel (Long Road to the Circus --I haven't read it).

It's easy to see why Betsy Bird and osprey_archer loved this story: it's great fun and excellently told. I loved it too. The author (Allena Best, writing under the pseudonym Erick Berry) was entranced with ancient Minoan culture, and that love shines through on every page. And in Inas, the daughter of Daidalos (she's genderswapped Icarus for Inas), she's got a great heroine. Who dives skillfully for sponges? Inas does! Who is the best bull vaulter? Inas is! Whose hang glider experiment leads to realization that flying into the wind works better than flying with it? Again, Inas!

The authorial voice is definitely not contemporary, but it's lively and fresh. Every now and then there's something about people's races or features that's winceworthy, but mainly the 1930s-ness of it wasn't intrusive in a negative way.

Tangentially, I loved this description of archaeologists, from the author's introduction: "Then in our own time came the archaeologists, those magicians who build authentic history out of lowly potsherds." Magician archaeologists.

I also read a hilarious short story about the foiling of a racist: "Supply and Demand," by f0rrest. Why yes, his user name is my IRL last name, but we are not related in any way. We stumbled upon each other quite by chance.

In "Supply and Demand" a pushy racist is hoisted by his own petard, his petard in this case being his successful participation in capitalism: he ends up supporting and promoting what he despises. I loved the hapless narrator (a young employee at a big-box home goods store) and the digs at retail training scripts. I will also offer a content warning, though, because the racist dude says alllllll the negative things you can think to say about "those people," as he calls them. There are no slurs, and he never specifies exactly who comprises "those people," but you may not feel like imbibing his nonsense, even if it's to see him taken down. His vituperations are pretty hilarious though, e.g, his rant about the historical Santa Claus (and later, his praise of Santa Claus as a hard worker up there at the North Pole).

Anyway, if you want to see a racist taken down in an unusual way, give it a try. It's about 7,000 words.

Ah, four good things on the docket right now, two of which were recommended to me by other people.

1. Journey, by Joyce Carol Thomas

I was intrigued by rachelmanija's write up, and when I said so, she said, "You specifically would enjoy it." And I DO. The language is gorgeous, and the story moves along. Rachel quotes the final line of a sermon in her post, but man, that entire sermon! Here's more from it:

"Death dealing is the devil's duty.

"The devil's still swishing his long reptilian tail, hooding his ruby snake eyes, walking up and down seeing who he can devour, strewing banana peels on the steep path of life trying to see who he can trick into slipping. Be aware!

"Carry a light in your heart. Some of you're already shining like neon. Don't even need batteries;** you've got everything you require to keep the light going."

2. The Apothecary Diaries, vol 1, by Natsu Huuga, trans. Kevin Steinbach

My first-ever light novel! I got into it because of reading really intriguing fanfic of it on Mastodon; I loved the intelligent MaoMao in the fanfic, and lo and behold, the actual character is equally intelligent. Pressed into service as a poison taster to an imperial consort, she uses her knowledge of medicine to solve mysteries ... appears to be how it'll go. So far she has correctly diagnosed that it was the lead-containing face paint that was causing mysterious illnesses among some of the consorts and killing off their babies (who weren't wearing the face paint but were exposed to it via their mothers). Apparently there's also an anime.

3. Saint Death's Daughter, by C.S.E. Cooney

Continues to be just a breathtaking tour de force.

The twelfth and most abject of the Quadoni apologies was the truest word Lanie had ever spoken. It could be no louder than a breath; it was that fragile ...

All three sounds hung in the air, and together created a fourth sound, an overtone that hovered so delicately, so tremendously, over them all.

And burst.

And rained down such music that all their voices fell silent.

4. The Book of Questions, by Pablo Neruda, bilingual edition with both the Spanish and translations by William O'Daly

I became interested in this from going to an exhibition on endpaper art at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art that featured endpapers from a picture book version of this featuring only some of the questions.

The questions come in fours that form a poem. Sometimes one question in the poem stands out to me; sometimes the effect of the overall poem is what does it. Here's one where I love the overall poem, but especially the second question:

Do salt and sugar work
to build a white tower?

Is it true that in an anthill
dreams are a duty?

Do you know what the earth
meditates upon in autumn?

(Why not give a medal
to the first golden leaf?)

~ ~ ~

Trabajan la sal y el azúcar
construyendo una torre blanca?

Es verdad que en el hormiguero
los sueños son obligatorios?

Sabes qué meditaciones
rumia la tierra en el otoño?

(Por qué no dar una medalla
a la priemera hoja de oro?)

I haven't read them all but I see repeated words, themes--bees, lemons, yellow, tears, clouds ... I love it. I think creating a concordance could be a meditative thing to do.

**Queue Sia: "Unstoppable" 🎶I'm so powerful, don't need batteries to play🎶

It's a cold, surreal post-apocalyptic world, plagued by meteor showers, crumbling apartments patrolled by tigers, one where former tar-spreading technicians repurpose themselves as morning soup sellers. Bobby is wakened by a knocking at his door. He doesn't open it, but he's told, through the closed door, that Belle-Medusa, an immensely huge jellyfish, needs his help. Belle-Medusa has a library of scents in her memory, but they're mainly ocean scents. She wants Bobby to collect and convey land scents to her:

In truth, she only had one passion anymore: she collected smells. Aromas, perfumes, whiffs, and scents of all types. She numbered them and she put them in tiny special cases in her memory, in a classification system that nobody, apart from herself, was able to understand.

For this purpose, Belle-Medusa has already "plugged into" Bobby. There are various ways he can convey the scents to her, but the way he settles on is to plunge his face into water and speak them.

I had my cheek pressed against the windowpane. Just under my nose, fed by the steam that escaped from my mouth, the frost drew branching ice wisps, which imprisoned the dust. If I had had to specify the smell that lingered on the surface of the glass, I would have spoken of a dusty ice floe, of frozen goose down, of dark sherbet. Wait, I thought, maybe I could send that to Belle-Medusa, in order to check that the communication between us is well established.

I left my observation post. I groped my way to the bathroom and I filled the sink with what flowed from the faucet, water that carried with it cubes and needles of ice. Before immersing my face, I had to stir it with my hand so as not to use the end of my nose to break the film threatening to form ... I sank my head into it to my ears.

"It's me, Belle-Medusa," I said.

( Heh, this got long. Let's put in a cut. )

It's a strange and wonderful story, and I recommend it. I read it in an anthology called XO Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, edited by Kate Bernheimer and published in 2013. The anthology was lent to me by a friend who had picked out that story especially for me to read because (I'm flattered to say), they said it reminded me of the story of mine they'd read--and also, I suspect, because the story's important to them: it's entered their vocabulary. They talk about their scent library. The other stories in the collection look promising too; while I'm borrowing the book, I think I'll read some more.

It also exists as a 64-page standalone publication, but only in its original French, as Belle-Méduse. For the anthology, the translation was done by Sarah and Brian Evenson.

*Manuela Draeger is a fictitious author, a librarian whose stories are intended as distraction for children in containment camps. The author of her world is Antoine Volodine ... which is in turn a pen name of the writer Jean Desvignes.

This flash tale is about hope in a world of hot rain and ashes. Hope in a cold bucket. Hope actuated by a bright, sharp trowel. A waitful silence.

And Mena’s walking faster than I would have thought she could. The soles of her shoes glint silver in the gray afternoon light.

It's about Billy Behind Me. Look after him, Mena says. But when he touches the narrator's hand, we can feel it's a mutual looking after.

Mena, Until, by Patricia Russo

I'm reading too many things to do them all justice, and then interrupting them with other things, but the things I've spent most time with are

--More of Life Is Not Useful, by Ailton Krenak. The first essay was good; I felt more at sea in the second and now the third--I can't quite follow the logic of where he goes all the time, and sometimes there are jargonish phrases that I don't get. Even so, there are moments I like very much.

This, for instance, is both serious but also amusingly expressed:

We can inhabit this planet, but we will have to do so otherwise. If we don’t take steps in this direction, it would be as if someone wanted to get to the highest peak of the Himalayas but wanted to take along their house, their fridge, their dog, their parrot, their bicycle. They’ll never arrive with heavy luggage like that. We will have to radically reconceive of ourselves to be here. And we yearn for this newness.

And this I love:

There are people who were fish, there are people who were trees before imagining themselves as human. We were all something else before becoming people.

--I also have been reading Eagle Drums, by Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson, a story of an Iñupiaq boy who's compelled to live with eagles to learn what they want to teach if he wants to stay alive. I got this one from the library based on what osprey_archer wrote in this entry, specifically, that it "is built on axioms about how the world works that are vastly different than the ones structuring most modern fiction." She's right! And I'm enjoying that very much.

--I started reading C.S.E. Cooney's Saint Death's Daughter-- I love CSE Cooney's writing so much! I just hope I can maintain momentum on it, because it's long, and somehow I don't apportion as much time to reading as I could (which is a terrible thing for someone who writes to confess to).

Meanwhile, here are some things that I want to read (or have read and want to call attention to):

Aster Glenn Gray's Deck the Halls with Secret Agents. Long-time rival Soviet and US agents meet at a Christmas party! I wonder what happens next ;-)

Iona Datt Sharma's Blood Sweat Glitter --Sapphic romance around roller derby!

This one came to me as a recommendation on Mastodon, and since I follow the author on social media but have never read anything by her, I'm very excited! It's also a podcast--not sure if I will listen or read it: "The Font of Liberty" by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall.

And then there's Kerygma in Waltz Time, which I've read and would recommend to fans of story retellings, fan fiction, and falling into stories--it's by Sherwood Smith, originally published under a pseudonym in It Happened at the Ball, an anthology of ballroom stories.

Quick! Before the day closes.

"Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather," by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny March–April 2021)

I came to this via purlewe (thank you!) It's done as posts on LyricSplainer, a site for talking about folksongs--in this case, the folksong "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather," which has many variants (of course), across all of which a man's literal heart is taken out and replaced with an acorn... Dr. Rydell wrote a paper about it back in 2002 and posted more about it on his blog, was even investigating a town that might have been the site of the original story ... but then he seems to have disappeared from the world of scholarship and the interwebs. So reports Henry Martyn, one of the commenters on LyricSplainer, who is following in Dr. Rydell's footsteps ... though one of the other commenters remarks that Henry Martyn's own last post to the site seems to have been a couple of years ago...

I enjoyed all the fun ballad-adjacent handles the LyricSplainer site users had, like Rhiannononymous, BarrowBoy, and BonnieLass67. Also, the author Sarah Pinsker is also a singer-songwriter, and among the links to [fictional] versions of "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather" by groups like Steeleye Span and the Decemberists, there's one actual live link to a version by a group called Moby K. Dick. Nice touch, Ms. Pinsker. If you enjoy folksongs and all the paraphernalia surrounding them, this is a story for you. All you folks who were reviewing Ellis Peter’s Black is the Colour of My True-Love’s Heart, if you haven't read this already, give it a try!

"Letters From Mt. Monroe Elementary, Third Grade," by Sarah Pauling (Diabolical Plots 3 September 2024)

Beginning in 1967, "a mere five years after Beacon Day," when Earth first received notice that a generation ship was heading its way from a faraway star, kids in an elementary school in Michigan have been writing letters to the Pilgrims, as the aliens are known. The letters extend to 2024 (the Pilgrims aren't due to arrive until 2090), and it's funny and touching to see the various preoccupations and stances of the children over time--also fun to see younger siblings appearing. One third-grader from 1967 later becomes the class teacher. One child describes a book she found in her mom's car that features a romance between a Pilgrim and a woman whose evil husband is trying to take over her ranch:

she was out riding her horse and when they started kissing all the rain turned into space diamonds that let them read each other’s minds. Do you think that will happen a lot when you get here?

But maybe most touching of all is the fact that in spite of the suspiciousness of some of the kids' letters, the framing of the story is such that we understand the coming of this generation ship has NOT been met with an all-out scramble of military preparedness. The assertion, never directly articulated, that we might--just possibly--welcome an alien generation ship is a beautiful statement of faith in humanity.

"A Theory of Missing Affections," by Renan Bernardo (Clarkesworld, September 2024)

Vanessa Fogg put me onto this story when she described it as a "fascinating story that considers big questions and ideas." The author describes it as "a tale about two sisters separated by distance, by their conflicting views on life, and by the devices left by an extinct alien species." One sister is into scientific investigation of the aliens; the other is an adherent of a religion that worships them as gods. The story is told from the first sister's perspective, and I confess I was waiting with bated irritation to see what was going to happen. But the author neatly dodged a facile ending, coming up with one that was emotionally satisfying. Similarly, the extinct aliens, who we're initially told "cherished torture" evolve in our consciousness as the viewpoint sister comes to understand them better. It's a carefully built story--nicely done.

I finished Rebecca Fraimow's Lady Eve's Last Con, which was rollicking good fun from cover to cover. A couple more quotes (nonspoilery) from further on in the story:

"I’d given her plenty of time to put me back in my place; she’d be faster on the draw next time around. It’s a bad habit to let yourself get caught tongue-tied. Life’s too short for should-have-saids." (51% in)

"I stuck my chin up, and tried to look like a person who was trying to look brave." (91% in)

I got one hilarious surprise, which was that one firm prediction I'd had since the very beginning ... didn't come true. All along I'd been congratulating Rebecca on treading a very difficult line to just about allow it to be possible--and then it didn't happen. I was so sure of my prediction that I had a hard time believing the evidence on the page, and then when I'd absorbed the fact, it threw what I'd seen as delicate treading into a whole other light (of the "No, actually it's quite simple: the obvious judgment is the correct one" variety). The way the story played out in reality makes for more satisfying storytelling, I think, and allows for more nuance and growth for one character, so I was pleased with it. It just took a moment of mental rearranging for me to get there (and I was retroactively a little ashamed of my prediction).

My morning morsel of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass brought a reflection on strawberries:

In a way, I was raised by strawberries, fields of them. Not to exclude the maples, hemlocks, white pines, goldenrod, asters, violets, and mosses of upstate New York, but it was the wild strawberries, beneath dewy leaves on an almost-summer morning, who gave me my sense of the world, my place in it.

I grew up in upstate New York too. For me it was the black raspberries of early July. Being with them was my everything.

Robin Wall Kimmerer went on to talk about how the nature of a thing can change depending on how it comes to us:

It's funny how the nature of an object--let's say a strawberry or a pair of socks--is so changed by the way it has come into your hands, as a gift or as a commodity. The pair of wool socks that I buy at the store ... I might feel grateful for the sheep that made the wool and the worker who ran the knitting machine ... But I have no inherent obligation to those socks as a commodity, as private property ... But what if those very same socks ... were knitted by my grandmother and given to me as a gift? That changes everything. A gift creates ongoing relationship. I will write a thank-you note. I will take good care of them and if I am a very gracious grandchild I'll wear them when she visits even if I don't like them. When it's her birthday, I will surely make her a gift in return ... Wild strawberries fit the definition of gift, but grocery store berries do not.

Continuing to work my way through Why Didn't You Just Leave, edited by Julia Rios and Nadia Bulkin. As usual with an anthology, some stories strike my fancy more than others.

In the Empire, both in its home territories, centered on the Eternal City, and in its far-flung colonies, such as Aquacolonia, the port city across wide Oceanus on the continent to the west, some animals are Knowledgeable—meaning they can speak as humans do—and some are not.

Quintus Shu’al is a Knowledgeable fox. In fact, he is the only Knowledgeable fox. Knowledgeable animals are made, not born, and Quintus was awakened on the Silver Roads, special routes like ley lines that allow for non-Euclidean travel and which he has a unique gift for navigating.

Quintus wants nothing more than to know his origin story. The high priest of the God of the Hinge, Scipio Aemilanus, purports to have answers that he’ll supply if Quintus does his bidding. So far Quintus has, and the result was the loss of an entire expedition that Quintus had been leading along the Silver Roads to the gates of Hell. And now Scipio Aemilanus has managed to manipulate Quintus into leading a second expedition to Hell. Only this time Scipio Aemilanus is coming along. So too is the grief-stricken and angry Octavia Delfina, whose sister Cynthia was the head of the last expedition. And so is Walks Along Woman, a bison ambassador from the Great Northern Membership, a polity on this continent.

That’s the set-up for The Navigating Fox--it’s a *lot* of information, and although it takes several chapters to get there, it’s not slow and relaxed; it’s fast and full. That could be a detraction, but for me it had a rich-strangeness that was absorbing (Zootopia-like explanations for how things are set up to accommodate Knowledgeable animals of different sizes, for example), so it was a feature, not a bug.

From here on, a double story unfolds: the story of the first journey—the one where all the explorers were lost—and the second one. By the time Quintus reaches Hell for the second time, the truth about what happened to the first expedition has been revealed and people’s hidden motives have been made clear.

But the real interest, for me, was not in those plot happenings, but in the conversations people have on the journeys, how Quintus’s (and others’) expectations and views of reality are contradicted, or maybe it would be better to say, exposed and viewed from completely other angles.

Here’s one about time, from the first journey:

“How are things going down there?” Cynthia asked him.

“I do not know,” he said.

“Which side is winning?” I asked him.

“I do not know that, either, for sure,” he said. “Probably not yours, though.”

“I don’t have a side,” I said.


Blue shot a curious look at Cynthia Benedictus. “How long have you known this fox?” he asked.

“I can’t say I know him at all,” she said. “I hired him about two months ago.”

“I like that word,” Blue said. “Month. I like counting time like you do.”

I think my favorites, though, were the ones about the nature of Knowledgeable animals. I love, love, love that the story raised this question, turned it around it its hands, held it up to the sun and saw how it caught the light:( a number of quotes! they are all so good... )

I think you can enjoy The Navigating Fox for many things, but I do think if you go in expecting something definitive about Hell or even about Quintus’s origins, you will end up disoriented. I think that’s part of the point. Scipio tells Quintus at one point that Quintus has been asking the wrong question. I think this story is about the possibility of other questions. The story is making other observations.

One final, beautiful quote, from when the party’s raccoon cartographers have made a portrait of a voiceless bison named Fondness:

“What do you have there, mapmakers?” asked Walks Along Woman.

Loci held up the sheet. It was a likeness of Fondness. It was one of the most beautiful drawings I had ever seen.

“She does not interpret images the way you do,” Walks Along Woman said gently.

“We know this,” the twins said, speaking atop one another. Their manner was an echo of the gnomic pronouncements of the Membership.

“Then why did you show it to her?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“Because we do not convey images the way you do,” said Loci.
Or Foci. Their scents were obscured by the mass of creatures around us.

I've been daunted by the idea of trying to do justice to Aster Glenn Gray's The Sleeping Soldier here on Dreamwidth. Somehow I did manage, finally, to say a few things on Goodreads, but when I think about writing a DW post, I think about saying more, or making it more personal, or something. And then I wilt. And that's a shame, because I love this book. All of AGG's books are fun, thoughtful tales, but this one really nails a central theme of hers, which is what friendship means or has meant for people at different points in time, and what romantic love means, and what sexual attraction is and how that fits in.

The scenario is that Russell, a young Civil War soldier, was cursed, Sleeping Beauty style, by a fairy, and has now awakened 100 years in his future, in 1965, where he's guided through his new life by Caleb, a miserably closeted gay college student. The story has plenty of the fun you'd expect from that setup, as Russell encounters the wonders of life in 1965--and also enlightens the college crowd about which things were, in fact, present in 1865 ("I know what ketchup is," he says haughtily at one point). But it also probes the grief and loss that would go with waking up 100 years in the future, and touches on how we understand history--or don't:

Caleb nodded. "It's hard for people to let go of their preconceived notions [about the past]."

"They don't really want my opinion on anything," Russell griped. "They just want to draft the whole nineteenth century into supporting what they think. As if we all agreed with each other! We had this whole Civil War, you might could remember."

And then there's that theme of friendship and romantic love, and what's appropriate to express and what's considered by society to be deviant at any given time. I knew some of this, but not much, and very little about how same-sex attraction has been understood. In fact, what little I know is mainly thanks to AGG's earlier stories. I'm humbled to say that her writing in this book made me understand the situation of a gay friend of mine (Caleb's contemporary) in new ways. On that note, I really love the character Michael in this story. What a good and patient friend.

I came across this in someone's Goodreads review of the book:

I felt sad because I honestly never knew how it was in the past (men being open with their affection to each other).

And this, from an Amazon reviewer:

I came out in my teens, in the Midwest in the mid-70s, and the novel captures that sense of isolation and self-discovery: reading The Charioteer, Giovanni’s Room etc. anything with gay characters while feeling like you’re the only gay person in the world and trying to figure out how you’ll make a life. I never would have expected this book to capture the profundity and comedy of this forgotten world so well.

Those comments say so eloquently what's important and special about this book.

... But past-meets-nearer-past moments were also great, honestly. I enjoyed the explanations of things like hot dogs ("Hot dogs are... um. A kind of sausage") and Russell's encounters with items such as escalators a whole lot too.

Joshua Barkman draws four-panel comics under the name False Knees--you've probably seen his images used in memes (like this one).

Some time ago he put a comic called Spores up on social media--it's a really lovely story of what happens when a meteorite crashes to Earth in the northern woods in winter...



And extraterrestrial fungi spread....



And creatures eat them.



It leads to creatures being able to communicate across species, and -- well, it's a really great story. And now you can order it at the creator's website. I got one for myself and one to send to a family member.