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Book Review: The Clansman
At the time, I was still studying history in grad school, focusing on American history around 1900, and this just happens to be one of the most influential books in the time period - perhaps in all of American history. It was a historical romance (in both the old and new senses) which caught the attention of filmmaker D. W. Griffith, who adapted it into the 1915 blockbuster Birth of a Nation, which led to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.
So of course I took the book, but what with one thing and another I haven’t gotten around to reading it till now. In the intervening period I’ve read a lot of other books from the time period, which helps put it better in context.
In particular, it helps put into context just how racist Dixon was. He’s not merely reflecting the prevailing attitudes of his era (as most writers do, whether they want to or not) but actively arguing that the prevailing attitudes of one of the most racist eras in American history aren’t racist enough.
It would therefore be pleasant to report that Dixon is also a terrible writer, like Nikolai Chernyshevsky who wrote What Is To Be Done?, another book that inspired deadly political cosplay on a vast scale. (Although it occurs to me that I haven’t actually read Chernyshevsky, and in fact may have received this opinion from people who only read it in translation.) But stylistically Dixon is pretty similar to other popular historical romances of the time period. His tale is slower-paced than an adventure story would be nowadays, but in its own literary context it zips along. You can see why a film director would find it attractive. Plenty of incident, and two love stories for the price of one!
This is especially true since Dixon, a devil quoting scripture, presents his story as a variation of that old American favorite, indeed that foundational American myth, that blockbuster gold of plucky underdogs rebelling against tyranny. American colonists against the British, William Tell against the Austrians, Rebel Alliance against the Empire; or (Dixon’s favorite analogy) Scottish Covenanters worshipping in the hills rather than bow to the despotic English demand that they accept the established church.
Dixon’s Southerners are descendants of those Covenanters, fueled by that self-same love of freedom. Like their forebears, they refuse to bow down to the demands of the despotic conquering power, but form a heroic resistance (the Ku Klux Klan by way of les Amis de l’ABC) to the horrors of racial equality visited upon the South by the cruelty of a vengeful United States Congress.
In particular, this policy of racial equality is driven by Senator Stoneman, Dixon’s Thaddeus Stevens expy. In Stoneman, Dixon achieves a surprisingly complex character: a man kindly, even generous, in his personal life, but so politically so driven by his ideals that he will adopt any policy that seems to further those ideals, no matter how terrible the results on the ground.
This is interesting. You’ve got shades here of the French Revolution, idealistic leaders driven by lovely visions of freedom and equality which somehow end in rivers of blood from the guillotine. I was genuinely surprised that Dixon managed to achieve such a multifaceted view of his arch-enemy.
Except it turns out that Stoneman’s apparent complexity is completely accidental: in the last few pages, it’s revealed that Stoneman never cared about racial equality at all! After a Southern raid during the Civil War destroyed Stoneman’s Pennsylvania factories, he was consumed by the bitter desire for vengeance, and racial equality was his weapon of choice against the prostrate Southern people.
This is a very interesting book on what you might call an anthropological level, as a document of a certain kind of southern viewpoint around 1900. It’s also interesting as a piece of historiography, as Dixon has to thread a very fine needle to argue that the South did no wrong in seceding, but having lost is now VERY loyal and has learned to love the noble Abraham Lincoln who by the way DEFINITELY would have been nicer to the South than Congress was, but as Congress WAS mean the South HAD to break the laws, and this definitely doesn’t undermine the fact that the South is now very, very loyal. Very!
And you could undoubtedly write an excellent paper about The Clansman as a (mis)use of classic tropes of resistance to tyranny. For goodness sake, Dixon even throws in a Sydney Carton scene. It’s a fantastic example of how you can keep the outward form of a kind of story intact while completely reversing the meaning.
But for obvious reasons I cannot recommend it as light and agreeable reading.
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Friday Five!
- Amadeus
- Kind Hearts and Coronets
- Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
- Inception
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier
4. Name four areas of interest you became interested in after you were done with your formal education.
- Ancient Greek culture
- Music theory
- archaeology
- linguistics
3. Name three things you would change about this world.
- anyone hurting someone else non-consensually would feel the same pain
- no hoards over $1 billion.
- discovery of permanent solution to anthropogenic climate change
2. Name two of your favorite childhood toys.
- Escape from Colditz board game (endless games of this the winter my mother was in hospital)
- Martini, a small yellow plush rabbit (who now lives in a basket on my top shelf)
1. Name one person you could be handcuffed to for a full day.
Ewwww, people....
- Penelope of Ithaca (yes, I know she's long dead, that's the point).
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2025/110: Mythica — Emily Hauser
It’s also cuttingly symbolic of our hunt for Late Bronze Age women that the eponymous lions of the Lion Gate have been systematically misgendered as male – when they’re actually a fierce and gorgeous pair of female lions. (If you visit Mycenae, I encourage you to annoy as many people as you can by pointing out that this is, in fact, the ‘Lioness Gate’.) [loc. 5624]
An examination of the role of women in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and in the wider realm of Greek myth. In her introduction, Emily Hauser says she's exploring 'what new discoveries about the real women of history can do to help us understand Homer – not what Homer can tell us about the Late Bronze Age' [loc. 819]. And she points out that, although women are treated as secondary, as property, as lesser, they are essential to the stories. The Iliad begins with two men quarrelling over an enslaved woman (Briseis): the Odyssey ends with Odysseus going home (via Calypso, Circe and Nausicaa) to Penelope.
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thursday reads and things
What I recently finished reading:
The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison, the third book in the Cemeteries of Amalo sub-series of The Goblin Emperor books. I had gone into it with mixed feelings; not that I strongly cared about
spoiler
the Thara Celehar/Iäna Pel-Thenhior ship, but I had heard that the way it was sunk was awkward and issueficcy and felt like "I was going to write this relationship in but it felt pointless after all the fanfiction", and - yeah, it wasAlien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky, stand-alone SF. Again, a lot of people whose reviews I follow didn't like it, but I did; Tchaikovsky is hit and miss for me, but this was a hit. A biologist who is also a political dissident on an extremely authoritarian Earth is exiled as prison labor on a planet with native life that is very weird and apparently hostile. This is basically another exploration of Tchaikovsky's Theme, which is at core, I think, "How can we see the Other as a Person? How do we overcome the instinct to be closed and tribal, and instead practice empathy, leading to discussion and exchange?" There are echos of the Children of Time series, in particular Children of Ruin (the second book), I think. There is also the strong contrast between a culture which gives lip service to the importance of individuality, but demands conformity, and a culture which emphasizes the communal and the good of the community. And of course, the importance of resistance, of holding to one's core beliefs even in the face of a terrible horrible authoritarian government.
I mostly enjoyed the style except for a few references which seemed a little too grounded in 21st century reality for this future in which humans are mining multiple far-flung planets. The structure and pacing worked well for me. Warning for a terrible horrible authoritarian government that doesn't give a shit about human lives other than their own, and body horror, and an ending which may strike some people as not entirely happy, but which satisfied me.
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"Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy" by Martha Wells, a Murderbot short story, in which Murderbot doesn't explicitly appear, but ART | Perihelion has recently met it for the first time. It's from Iris's point of view, on a mission with the rest of the crew, and really the mission is just a framing device McGuffin for "Peri has changed because it met someone?!?", and I agree with
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What I'm reading now:
Just started on the seventh and last Shardlake book by CJ Sansom, Tombland.
What I recently finished watching:
Murderbot! I enjoyed it! I (mostly) appreciate, or at least understand, the changes they made in adaptation. (Not sure why it's not enough for Pin-Lee to be Space Lawyer, but also must be Badass Fighter? And the Arada/Pin-Lee/Ratthi thing didn't seem to have any reason for being and just felt a bit cringe.) I really loved the ending, and Gurathin's whole general arc, and SANCTUARY MOOOOON, and Mensah is chef's kiss perfect.
Speaking of Sanctuary Moon, Murderbot vidded it! Okay, it was really
What I'm watching now:
Arcane, because B watched the first episode during the winter, riding the stationary bike, and decided I might like to watch it with him, so moved on to something else so we could watch it together. Not very far into it yet.
What I recently listened to:
The third episode of S3 of The Strange Case of Starship Iris, which, I really liked this one!
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Book Review: Queer Person
He grows up an outcast, called Queer Person and considered a fool by most of the people in the village, although Granny and a few friends learn to talk to him with their hands (using, I think, an expanded version of the Plains sign language) and recognize his talent for building things. In his teens, a bout of heatstroke causes a couple of hard worm-shaped objects to fall out of his ears, enabling him once again to hear. Granny explains that sometimes fevers plug the ears like this. She suggests that he should hide his new abilities until he’s mastered spoken language.
Meanwhile! We veer into Problem of Tomboys territory! The boys of the camp are riding a yearling buffalo, which came into camp as a pet but has now grown too big for comfort. One of the boys dares the girls that none of them will dare to ride it, at which point the chief’s daughter Singing Moon rides the buffalo across the plains, jumping off just in time before it rejoins the buffalo herd.
Impressed by her bravery, Granny and an older warrior suggest that Singing Moon join the next warrior raid - in disguise, of course, at least at first. After all, Granny did it herself in her youth, and her presence rallied the warriors to great feats of bravery! And so does Singing Moon’s, but the greatest feat of all is her own success in counting coup on an enemy, knocking him off his horse and taking the horse for a trophy.
Singing Moon is of course the love interest, and the next bit of the book involves Queer Person proving that he can match her in bravery - not through the traditional route of going into battle, but by saving Singing Moon’s kidnapped little brother. Queer Person sneaks into the camp of a rival tribe, where he’s captured, but they’re so impressed by his bravery in coming into their camp unarmed that they decide to subject him to tests rather than kill him outright, ending in a test where he has to battle an old warrior who has decided that he’d like to go out gloriously in single combat with this brave outsider.
The old warrior is, of course! Queer Person’s father.
Then Queer Person heads home, returns the kidnapped child to his family, reveals he can talk, sleeps for three days, and then marries Singing Moon.
Ralph Hubbard (also known as “Doc” Hubbard) was a professor who promoted Native American culture, and he clearly put a ton of research into the background of this story. (He also later had an asteroid named after him. And he was the son of Elbert Hubbard, who wrote “A Message to Garcia,” founded an Arts and Crafts community called the Roycroft Shops, and died in the sinking of the Lusitania.)
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2025/109: 1983 — Tom Cox
At the end of the day, when the shops closed, the city felt like the bottom of a glass that too many people had been drinking from. [loc. 1830]
Set in a village on the outskirts of Nottingham ('the UK city where you're statistically most likely to be assaulted by a stranger') in the early Eighties, this is the story of Benji, an only child aged seven, who spends his time playing with the ZX Spectrum at school, building a nuclear fallout shelter in the woods, listening to The Teardrop Explodes and waiting for the aliens to come and return him to his home planet. (He glimpsed the aliens, which can shapeshift, during a hospital stay some years earlier.)
Benji's parents are outsiders in the village, due to their Penguin paperbacks and modern jazz records, despite his dad having been born less than ten miles away. Benji, though he has plenty of friends and is happy at school, is a bit of an outsider too. He is aware of, though doesn't understand, the sense of social change and industrial decay, the rise of Thatcherism and the rage of the underclass.
But that's an undercurrent, considerably less foregrounded than the crew of shapeshifting aliens from the planet Vozkoz, who need to abduct a particular human whose essence is the only thing that can save their world. Another plot thread involves neighbour Colin, who builds robots out of scrap and whom Benji is convinced (after research conducted with the library's microfiche archive) is actually Bruce Lacey, as featured in the Fairport Convention song 'Mr Lacey'. (You can hear the robots at around the 2-minute mark in that video.)
Intercut with Benji's narrative are various uncaptioned photographs, and diverse other voices: Benji's parents, a headmistress, Benji's cousin, an alpaca, Colin, a drunken fuckwit, some daffodils... All contribute something to the story, though it's Benji's voice, and the events of that one year, that pull it all together. I enjoyed it immensely and nostalgically, and I loved Cox's inventiveness and the discursive winding of the story. The fantastical elements were (mostly*) cleverly woven in and, frankly, made just as much more sense as nuclear war or Margaret Thatcher. And there's a strong sense of affection blooming through the novel: a love of life with all its imperfections.
*I don't believe you could buy six blank cassettes for 49p in 1983, even in Nottinghamshire.
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UPDATE: Tempestuous Tours + news
BLOG FICTION
Tempestuous Tours (Crossing Worlds: A Visitor's Guide to the Three Lands #2). A whirlwind tour of the sites in the Three Lands that are most steeped in history, culture, and the occasional pickpocket. ¶ Latest installments:
- The Royal Sanctuary: Historical background.
- The Royal Sanctuary: Jackalfire Grove.
- The Royal Sanctuary: The corridor.
- The Royal Sanctuary: The altar.
NEWS
About a millisecond before I was about to release my next ebook, a medical crisis occurred in my family (though not to me or my companion). It's the sort of crisis that involves dozens of members of a support team, professional and nonprofessional. I'm one of the two people coordinating all that. I'll continue posting blog fiction here whenever I can, but expect my presence here to be light for a while.
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Wednesday Reading Meme
I continue to progress in my quest to read the books I took from my grandmother’s house after she died. This time, Lucy M. Thruston’s A Girl of Virginia, which I took because I had started reading it and wanted to finish it (although clearly not enough to get to it any time in the last decade…), in part because it has that “(A Girl) of (Someplace)” title style so popular around 1900. Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Alice of Old Vincennes, Rose of Old Harpeth, Beverley of Graustark... this last one is a cross-dressing Ruritanian romance. I should read it sometime.
ANYWAY. A Girl of Virginia is set at the University of Virginia, and offers a fascinating picture of life at campus and more generally in Virginia society at the time. Also the heroine picks the right hero in the love triangle! Heroines are so rarely allowed to pick the man that I personally believe they should pick. GOOD FOR YOU, FRANCES!
Anne McCaffrey’s hilarious misnamed The Mark of Merlin, which is not even slightly related to Arthurian legend. The titular Merlin is the heroine’s completely non-magical dog, who neither has nor makes any plot-relevent marks. Our heroine, Carla, is a little tiny spitfire on her way to frozen wastes of New England, where she gets snowed in with her big, brawny, scarred-in-mind-and-body-from-his-recent-service-in-World-War-II guardian Major Laird.
Does the romance plot progress as expected? One hundred percent. McCaffrey loves a brawny man manhandling a bratty itty bitty girl. Does the plot otherwise progress as expected? Absolutely not. I was surprised at every turn, and not just because the title made me expect Merlin to be far more plot relevant than he was. A solid mystery with lengthy pauses for beef stew and apple pie.
Continuing my Tasha Tudor journey with The Private World of Tasha Tudor photographed in loving detail by Richard Brown, who also photographed Tasha Tudor’s Garden and Tasha Tudor’s Heirloom Crafts, the latter of which I also really want to read but also I can’t just let Tasha Tudor take over my entire life, can I? Can I? Should I. Would it be WISE. Will it end with me buying a corgi?
Like Tasha Tudor’s Garden, an enchanting book, putting the core in cottagecore. I especially enjoyed the details about Tudor’s dollhouse (there is of course a whole book about Tasha Tudor’s Dollhouse), and the marionette theater she and her children created, and her yearly holiday celebrations…
What I’m Reading Now
Slow but steady progress in Lord Peter. Most recently, Lord Peter found himself caught up in a ghost story, only the ghosts to turn out to have a non-supernatural explanation, of course. I would love to see him head to head with an actual ghost, though.
I also couldn’t resist starting Louisa May Alcott’s A Round Dozen, a dozen stories with illustrations by Tasha Tudor (which is how I stumbled across it). Most recently, a little boy witnessed a jamboree among the silverware set out on the dining room table awaiting the family Thanksgiving feast.
What I Plan to Read Next
The flesh is weak. I put a hold on A Time to Keep: A Tasha Tudor Books of Holidays. I love a holiday celebration, and I’m sure Tudor has some crackerjack ideas how to get the most holiday joy out of every season.
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2025/108: Code Name Verity — Elizabeth Wein
I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can’t believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant. But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old. [p. 114]
Reread after The Enigma Game, which features a younger and considerably more cheerful Julie. (My review from 2013.) This is still a very harrowing read, even though I know what happens.
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2025/107: The Enigma Game — Elizabeth Wein
People being nice to you after someone has made you feel like a criminal or an enemy is just like sticking cardboard in your window after a bomb has blasted all the glass out of it. The hole is stopped up, but the glass is still smashed and you can’t see through the window any more. Everything in the room is uglier and darker. [loc. 2523]
Louisa Adair is fifteen and orphaned: it's 1940, her English mother died in the Balham bombing, and shortly afterwards her Jamaican father was killed when his merchant navy ship was torpedoed. (He couldn't enlist in the Royal Navy because he wasn't born in Europe.) She telephones to answer an advertisement for someone to look after an elderly aunt -- the advertiser, Mrs Campbell, can't tell from Louisa's 'polite English accent' that she's biracial -- and finds herself escorting the redoubtable 'Jane Warner' (actually Johanna von Arnim, a former opera singer) from an internment camp on the Isle of Man to a pub in a small Scottish village.
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Life at the Hummingbird Cottage
Still no hummingbird sightings, but there appears to be an entire flock of ducks resident on the pond, although they only come out en masse in moonlight so it’s hard to be sure how many there are. (Ghost ducks?)
The herbs are flourishing, especially the lemon balm which is the chief weed. I’ve been procrastinating on pulling it out, but at last it occurred to me that if I rip out the clump in the front garden, I could replace it with black-eyed susans (a favorite flower) and purple coneflowers (not a favorite, but they look well with black-eyed susans), which are both native wildflowers and also flourishing.
The intentional herbs are also doing well! I just found a recipe for herb scones which I’m looking forward to trying, since as soon as one has a flourishing herb garden one must begin scrambling for recipes that use herbs in order to keep the herbs in check. The chives are especially happy.
The cherry tomatoes in contrast are NOT happy. They both have a few little green tomatoes and look rather wilty, probably a combination of being planted late and not watered enough. Also one of them is beside a twining vine of some variety which began to engulf its tomato cage, so I moved the tomato cage over into the clump of vines which have since completely devoured it (really ought to get an arch or something, these vines are SO ready to go), which left the tomato plant free but also, possibly, a bit traumatized. And I expect the vine is sucking up more than its fair share of water and nutrients from the soil.
In non-garden news, I got a bike! It is a used Elektra Townie step-through bike, cream-colored with teal wheel rims and a capacious basket on the front which is just crying out for a baguette and a bouquet of wildflowers. I rode it to work for the first time today, coasting down the hill with the breeze in my face and a song in my heart… I will of course have to go back up the hill at the end of the day, but such is life.
To the house itself, I don’t think there have been any major alterations. The wicker cart I mentioned in my previous entry has been spray-painted white, and currently hosts two pothos plants (birthday presents!), although I intend to move them to higher ground so they can show off their trailing abilities. First I need to get a step stool, though, in order to water the pothos at its higher home.
Long term plans: a four-poster bed with soft white curtains. A built-in bookcase with a ladder in the living room. Presumably living room seating of some kind? (The living room is currently empty except for (1) a cat tree, (2) the wicker cart with the pothos, and (3) a box spring which came at a discount with the guest room twin mattress, which is for one of my friends, who needs to come retrieve it.) I feel the rest of the living room will fall into place once I get the bookcase sorted.
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2025/106: Moira's Pen — Megan Whalen Turner
He should have recognised the danger when the king insisted on a formal introduction every time they met, forcing his sullen attendants to recite the diplomatic courtesies again and again, always with the pretense of never having heard them before, always with that same look of gleeful idiocy on his face. Beyond petty, beyond tedious, it was ridiculous. What kind of a king makes a mockery of himself? Melheret wished he'd seen the answer sooner... Only a king who was very sure of himself could afford to be laughed at. ['Melheret's Earrings, p.124]
A collection of short stories woven in and around the canon of the Queen's Thief series (which I have recently devoured and fallen in love with) plus maps, essays on archaeology and historical inspirations, and some beautiful illustrations. I'd read some of the stories and essays before, appended to the novels, but it is nice to have them all in one place. Even if that place is a hardcover book...
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Recent reading
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Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans (2010). I read this as background/research for potential Étoile fic writing, and it has been very informative. It covers the history of ballet from its emergence in the court dances of seventeenth-century France, through its development in various places through time, trends and arguments, the influence of other dance styles, its success and declines, etc. etc. Lots of interesting and useful little titbits, both generally and fannishly (I especially like the influential eighteenth-century French ballerina Marie Sallé, who—in a period when female dancers were more or less expected also to be courtesans and mistresses—developed a reputation for universally rejecting male attentions, and on her retirement 'lived quietly with an Englishwoman, Rebecca Wick, to whom she left her modest worldly belongings'; on the fannish side of things, I think I see why Maya Plisetskaya is Cheyenne's fave); I also enjoyed the discussion of how ballet has developed and been reinterpreted in widely diverse cultural and political contexts (the court of Louis XIV; post-Revolutionary Paris; the Romantic nineteenth century; the twentieth-century US and USSR). Homans, a former ballet dancer turned historian, is ideally placed to write a book like this; she writes very much from a perspective informed by direct practical experience of dance, and doesn't hesitate to express her artistic and professional opinions, especially in the final chapters on the flourishing of ballet in twentieth-century America. At the end she argues that ballet, having fallen from those heights, has entered a decline which is probably terminal, perhaps due to its incompatibility with modern culture. I don't know what to make of that; at least I'm sure the characters and presumably the creators of Étoile would not agree! I have seen very little actual ballet in my life—I must go and remedy that soon—and I'm sure someone more familiar with it would have got more out of this book than I did, but still a very worthwhile read.
Re-read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020), gradually over the last eight weeks with the JSMN fandom read-along Discord that
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Dr Wortle's School by Anthony Trollope (1881). Having finished the Barsetshire series last year, I wanted to keep up my tradition of reading a Trollope each summer but was dithering over where to go next; I didn't want to launch into the Palliser books, his other famous series, because from the sound of it they have less of the elements I enjoyed most about Barsetshire (church politics and rural society) and more of the elements I was less interested in (London and the nobility). In the end I picked a title from his bibliography on Wikipedia on the basis of, that sounds interesting, I'd like to see what he does with a school setting. Well, it is about a school setting in a sense, though it's not what you'd call a school story; Dr Wortle is a very Barsetshire-ish country clergyman who also runs a small preparatory school, so I managed to pick well for myself there. But if this book is half Barsetshire, the other half turns out to be a Wilkie Collins novel: the main plot turns on a reveal entertainingly similar to the inciting reveal in No Name (but made in hilariously non-sensation novel fashion: early on in the book Trollope spends several paragraphs telling the reader 'now, authors usually draw this sort of thing out for the drama and suspense, but I'm not going to do that, I'm just going to tell you the big twist now; perhaps some readers will find this boring and fun-ruining, in which case I suggest they put the book down'). It is an interesting example of how different authors with different priorities tackle a similar scenario: besides Trollope not being a sensation novelist, this story kind of returns to the themes of The Warden in being very much about the social consequences of scandal and the practical importance they have, whereas No Name is all about the legal consequences and the social effects that follow as a result. I liked it! I especially liked the character of Dr Wortle, who is principled and determined on following his conscience in the face of social pressure and serious threatened consequences, but who is also dictatorial, prone to poor judgement and not always actuated by purely charitable motives; I think Trollope is too sympathetic to his failings, but I nevertheless liked how he portrays his protagonist's complexity. The book is let down by a particularly annoying Victorian love subplot which increasingly eclipses the main story towards the end, but aside from that it was worth reading.
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Hurt/Comfort Exchange creator reveals
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I, meanwhile, was pleased to match on The Warm Hands of Ghosts and Laura/Pim again. It's a good pairing for the angsty kind of hurt/comfort where the hurt (of both characters) is bigger and more complicated than the comfort can fix, but it still matters...
A Relapse and a Respite (2411 words) by regshoe
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Warm Hands of Ghosts - Katherine Arden
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Laura Iven/Penelope "Pim" Shaw
Characters: Penelope "Pim" Shaw, Laura Iven
Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Unresolved Feelings, Wrapped in blankets while hurt/sick
Summary:
The flu isn’t quite done with Laura, after all; Pim takes care of her, but she has other things on her mind too.
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Sydney Film Festival 2025
This movie is set over the span of one day, starting in a hospital maternity ward and ending in a prison cell, giving glimpses into the lives of women under the Islamic State regime. A grandmother laments the birth of a girl because it will mean her daughter (the baby's mother) is likely going to be divorced by her husband; a young woman newly out of prison tries to secure passage home; a woman tries to secure an abortion; and so on, through all the hours of the day. It's so skilfully directed and so naturalistically acted and shot, each storyline bleeding into the next so simply. Panahi was present at this screening and took questions after the movie (some much worse than others, as is the way with public Q&As).
I also had a great time, in a very different way, with Lesbian Space Princess (2025, Emma Hough Hobbs, Leela Varghese). Princess Saira of Clitopolis, a world entirely peopled by lesbians, must go on a quest to rescue her ex-girlfriend, who has been kidnapped and held hostage by Straight White Maliens. This is a silly, funny and very Australian animation with art in a style that reminded me of Adventure Time. The humour is mostly as obvious and silly as indicated by the names; and the other villain of the story, aside from the incels, is Saira's own lack of self-esteem.
There's some very knowing nods here - there is a "problematic (space) ship", the main character's magical girl moment is straight from Revolutionary Girl Utena, one of the other main character is from a "gay-pop" group who runs away from overwork, etc. This session was introduced at the film festival by the directors, who said "we are two nervous people, between us we made up one confident person who could direct this movie."
I liked The Mastermind (2025, Kelly Reichardt). Set in 1970s against the backdrop of the student protests against the Vietnam war, a struggling suburban dad decides to rob a museum of several artworks. He recruits a few people and so begins a rather terrible heist. This is a slow moving, understatedly funny movie, watching all of his schemes unravel in the most obvious ways.
And I liked Twinless (2024, James Sweeney) - when Roman's twin Rocky dies, he ends up at a grief counselling group where he meets Dennis, who has similarly lost his twin Dean. The two strike up a friendship, with Roman the gruff hockey loving straight guy from Idaho, and Dennis the urbane gay guy. Then the movie flashes back, and there's several very funny and/or devastating reveals. It's structurally interesting and the black humour made my neighbour physically cringe at times with second hand embarrassment.
And then there were 2 movies I straight up did not enjoy. Both were documentaries unfortunately lol.
Tokito (2024, Aki Mizutani) subtitled "The 540-Day Journey of a Culinary Maverick" is purportedly a documentary about chef Yoshinori Ishii, who opened a new restaurant in Japan in 2023 after many years living and working overseas. I say 'purportedly' because this is nothing more than a glossy advertisement. It is beautifully shot, gorgeously filmed, but it is just an ad.
The Shadow Scholars (2024, Eloise King) is a documentary about Oxford Professor Patricia Kingori's research into the world of "contract cheating", focusing on the booming trade in Kenyan writers selling their work to students in the global north. The subject is fascinating and I was so interested to hear from the Kenyan writers - these intelligent writers who are capable of doing the work on their own merit but the credit and qualifications go to the privileged students who can buy their labour, reinforcing global inequalities. However - it's a very clumsy and vague documentary that spends a lot of time on filler interstitials - my god, yet another panning shot of Oxford?
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FIC: The Royal Sanctuary: The altar (Tempestuous Tours)
There is much to look at in the sanctuary, but let us start with the altar. It recreates the altar where drugged captives were once placed before undergoing the Rite of Death, which represented their entry into a Living Death. It was at this stage that new slaves had iron masks locked securely onto their heads, which could not be removed except in the unlikely event that they survived long enough to be freed.
Here on the altar, if you wish, you may place a piece of the jackalfire tree, representing your wish that the evils of the past may be transformed by all of us in the present, bringing about rebirth.
[Translator's note: Yet again, Death Mask is the place to learn more about such matters.]
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FIC: Establishing Shot (Iron Man, gen, T)
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, Iron Man (Comics)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Henry Hellrung & Tony Stark
Characters: Henry Hellrung, Tony Stark
Additional Tags: Character Study, First Meetings, Alcohol, Acting, POV Outsider, Comic: Iron Man Vol. 1 (1968)
Summary: When Henry Hellrung lands the role of Tony Stark on the upcoming Avengers TV show, he's thrilled. But first, he needs to know what makes this guy tick. But when the cameras are on... Tony's acting. Who is Tony Stark, really? Henry meets Tony in person, to see if he can learn the truth. What he finds is something he never expected.
It's been a while since I posted a fic, hasn't it? This is actually a gen fic written for the zine Transistor-Powered Heart.
It's also not actually as long as it looks; the second chapter is a bonus version with several deleted scenes.