This seems so weird to me. I grew up on reading books that had lingered for however long on the shelves of the children's dept of the local public library - which were all bound in that standard hard-wearing public library binding so one did not have any sense of shiny newness or otherwise - along with my mother's old books, some of which were works of a yet more previous generation which she had loved in her youth.
And that's before we get into the oddness of the Alice books and the talking animals and so forth.
Do they have no imaginations? Are they only supposed to identify with recognisable experiences?
Read somewhere about (in this case I think actually adult readers) who could not deal with subtext, foreshadowing, and other Litry Devices.
Sometimes books have their time and it is past. And sometimes they are just not the right thing at that moment.
And I also think of times in my past when I had fairly long commutes and other stretches of otherwise dead time that I could fill up with doing perhaps rather dutiful reading of those things One Ought To Read, and whether this is not only my experience. And then one's life shifts and these spaces go away.
Two paths diverge in a wood… and what happens when, in fact, you can travel both? In her debut novel Sublimation, author Isabel J. Kim looks at what happens when the road less taken is never not taken, and how a question in school set her on a new path.
ISABEL J. KIM:
I am going to tell you a story that I have never publicly told before. It is about the ignoble origins of Sublimation. And for context, Sublimation is a speculative fiction novel set in a universe where when you cross a border with the intention to leave, you split into two people. Literally.
Sublimation is about other things, too—the artificial nature of borders, the way in which human beings impose their technological will on natural processes, control and, freedom and the unhappy marriage of big tech and government and how it is hard to talk to people when you don’t know what you want—but the crux of it is: Sublimation is a story about being confronted by a life you didn’t lead.
When I was seventeen, I was taking a world history class and we were talking about immigration, because that’s what you do in a world history class in the United States of America. And the teacher asked us the question: why do people immigrate to America?
One of the other students—who was, in my teenage self’s words, “a white preppy blonde chick” and in my current self’s words, “literally just some guy”—raised her hand with perfect confidence and said “For a better life!” She spoke with such clear, myopic certainty that I was suddenly furious, because there are a lot of reasons that people go places and stay places and “a better life” is so reductive as to be meaningless, and also, some of us move because our dads get jobs, okay? You’ve lived here your entire life, and I’ve lived in four different cities in two different countries, so why are you raising your hand with such confidence?
The punchline, of course, is that I was born in New Jersey, and also had never technically immigrated anywhere. Also, it’s not like I raised my hand to talk about my experiences of being an expat in my country of ethnic origin.
Back then, I never liked talking about how I felt about being from places, because my international childhood was hard to explain. It was an experience that was fairly benign, mostly enriching, and only strange in retrospect. The only lingering weirdness was that I felt like a foreigner everywhere I went. I was an American kid in Korea, I was a Korean kid in America, and explaining how that felt would require me to make you live an entire life walking in my shoes. When you’re seventeen, that’s hard.
A few years (read: seven years) later I was back in Korea for a vacation, and I was surprised at how quickly the country had changed while I had been gone. I started thinking about how all the differences would have seemed totally organic had I lived there my entire life. This got me ruminating about the version of me that never moved back to the states, which led me to the idea of instancing—leaving a double behind when you cross a border. One person who goes, another who stays.
And I thought that was a really interesting metaphor made flesh, an idea through which I could viscerally shove the experience of being a foreigner into the reader’s brain. And I was thinking about my classmate from high school, and how I wanted to make people like her understand how it felt, to be perpetually from somewhere else.
So, I started writing a story (“Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self”) about how it felt to be from somewhere else, and how it felt to be a foreigner, and how you might feel if you were the one who got to leave, and conversely, how it might feel to be the one who had to stay.
Then, a strange thing happened. The more I expanded the aforementioned short story, the more I realized that the feeling of alienation was universal—everyone feels like a stranger sometimes, everyone wonders about what could have happened had they made different choices, everyone has a road not traveled.
The more I wrote, the more I saw the story I was writing as not really about my own individual experience, but as a way for the reader to sift through their own experiences through the lens of the story I was giving them. The narrative became a sort of window for the reader, or a magnifying glass.
And I felt that even more intensely when I talked with people about Sublimation across the various drafts. The more conversations I had, the stronger my feeling was that at the end of the day, we’re more similar than not. If you look far back enough, we’re all from somewhere else. And we’re all traveling into the future together.
And the future, like the past, is a foreign country, from which we can never return.
So that’s what Sublimation is about. And maybe it’s a good thing that I didn’t raise my hand in world history class; if I had, I might not have written this novel.
My recent reading has either been complete fluff, or about soil management. Books with "No Till Farming", "Soil Biology" and "Bio Char" in the titles. Reading about the advances in our understanding of soil biology has been fascinating and useful. All this reading, plus watching what is going on in my own garden, is continuing to alter the way I garden. That plus the very warm spring we have had here means that I have tomatoes that have flung themselves up their trellises. Many are well over 4 feet tall with big thick stems, and have their first crop of tomatoes growing rapidly. Some have struggled to set fruit, possibly because we are still getting swings of temperature that are 40 or more degrees F. between day and night. Today it was 95F during the day, but the forecast low is 55. Chores for tomorrow are to finish unloading the fourth pickup load of wood compost, and start digging a ditch for a new faucet. While I'm putting in a faucet I want to install a underground box for valves. It is long past time to set up timers on my beds. I've got all the stuff to do it! My solar stuff was supposed to be here Friday, didn't come, was supposed to be here today, but no word. The tracking on it just says "In Transit", which isn't very helpful.
Quick note that post-by-email and comment-by-email is (sometimes?) failing silently without actually posting right now! I'm pretty sure this is related to last night's shenanigans and will be fixed once Mark can finish the full fix for it, which he's working on, but if you've posted or replied by email in the last 24 hours, fish it out of your sent folder to check if it posted!
EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.
It's hard to write about an advanced reader copy of one of the most coveted science fiction releases of the quarter. I tried, multiple times, to collect some thoughts about Platform Decay, the latest release in The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. I failed, every time, because my love for this series is immense, but also hard to quantify. Finding the words to describe sincere emotions? Ugh. Therefore, Platform Decay is already out, and you can read it now via your library or favorite indie bookstore!
Platform Decay is the eighth entry in The Murderbot Diaries, following our hero as it stages a high stakes rescue on Corporate Ringworld. It's working apart from its usual allies, it must infiltrate and escape the station with several squishy humans, and oh right, a former enemy asks for its help, complicating the extraction. Nothing can go wrong!
(Things immediately go wrong.)
To make matters worse, it's also dealing with an emotional health module. What's more stressful than a hostage situation in corporate territory? Mobile therapy. Murderbot must protect its humans (no pressure), avoid corporate forces that would love to slurp its kidnapped humans into corporate slavery (assholes), and navigate across a hostile station where one mistake could cost it everything (business as usual!). ( Read more... )
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Monday, June 01, to midnight on Tuesday, June 02. (8pm Eastern Time).
Awww, doesn’t it look like they’re cuddling? They are not, about a tenth of a second later they were rolling about in a full-blown tussle, as they are wont to do. Don’t worry, it’s all in good fun; Smudge actually enjoys his wrestling time with Saja, and vice versa. But it does make for some fun moments:
To begin the month of June, Smudge offers up the rare but valuable TussleMlem, with an assist from Saja
Took my wonky knee to the GP this afternoon - the GP, as they are these days, appeared to be about 12 years old from my advanced perspective, but v competent, did a thorough interrogation and examination, and came to the conclusion that it looks very like a damaged meniscus -
- and guess what?
We treat that with PHYSIO! like what I am doing for other assorted bits of anatomy. They are sending letter to appropriate quarters and no doubt it will take 6 months at least to get an appointment.
An investigation into acts of self-pleasure among parrots and other birds has reached a climax, with the results providing welcome relief for vets and researchers, not to mention the birds themselves. Bird keepers are often advised to discourage and even punish birds for masturbating, but the study found the activity was more common in the wild than in captivity, with researchers concluding it is part of a bird’s natural behaviour.
I am trying to recall what novel it was in which somebody mentions that the family have a canary (or maybe a budgie?) they have christened Onan because it scatters its seed upon the ground....
'Don't forget to feed pleasure the parrot!!!' (so that nature will not turn sour in its veins.)
1) I finished the series Hacks. I was very ambivalent about the show's first season, and was not enthusiastic about the second either. But I definitely get that in order to end where we did in the last season the two characters had to start poles apart. So I felt like the final season was a huge payoff to viewers who had stuck through the show all the way through. Would definitely recommend.
I was reading a good article (about TV shows on the tech industry) that included this: "the show is uniquely skilled at depicting the complicated mix of emotions that animate creative partnerships, and makes a strong argument for the idea that your true soulmate is the person that you most love making stuff with." It was talking about a show I loved, Halt and Catch Fire, but it applies equally well to Hacks. The fact that both shows featured female partnerships is a real bonus.
2) I had wondered a while back why Disney was partnering with Max to do a bundle (whereas Hulu + Disney + ESPN was all in-house, so an obvious option). Apparently, it's because bundling is very successful in keeping people subscribed. "Two years ago, only 10 percent of every new subscription for a major streaming service was for a bundled offering…Now, bundles account for a third of all new subscriptions, and 28 percent of all subscriptions, double the share in 2024." ( Read more... )
3) I was commenting over on Pillowfort about Tumblr's latest move to make commenting more prominent on the site. As I said there "As a totally anecdotal point, I rarely follow Tumblr links anymore because so often I'm blocked from seeing the linked content. But when I do get through I'm often surprised how little response I see the posts getting." So I'm wondering if this move is because, between the repeated exodus of people and the blocking of content to visitors, that the site traffic is actually in sharp decline. One way to make it more obvious people are active and to encourage them to speak up, is to surface comments more prominently.
My mother has been looking up & memorising the number of British expats living in various different countries around the world. This is ammunition for an long-running battle about immigration with one of the neighbours. Woman at num 3 says ".. small boats crossing the channel..." My mother says " .. over 700 thousand British economic migrants in America should they all be sent home? Estimated up to a million British migrants in Spain and they don't make any effort to integrate or learn the language .. " I don't think the woman at num 3 will change her mind, but my Mum is enjoying herself. She also has strong opinions about the use of the word Expat which she will share whether or not you give her the chance.
Unfortunately she lost points on the surprisingly-progressive-old-person leaderboard when talking about British Jews & British Muslims and assimilation.
This is the fanworks round-up post for May! Please link in the comments toany Guardian (or related fandoms) fanworks you created or enjoyed last month.
all kinds of fanworks are welcome – fic, art, vids, picspams, etc. - including those made for exchanges and events
new chapters of WIPs count
meta or discussion posts, too
whether or not you've already linked these in a post of their own, we still want them here!
If you're linking to fanworks you didn't create yourself, please clearly mark these "REC", so there's no confusion about authorship/creatorship.
(And please still do link your fanworks, meta, etc. separately, in their own post, at any time!)
So ... what Guardian and related fandoms works did you create or enjoy in May?
Robby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)
The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.
We're aware of site traffic issues and are working to fix them for the people who are having problems! (The tactics the damn bot traffic uses are endlessly shifting, and they're really good at looking like real traffic, sigh.)
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Sunday, May 31, to midnight on June 1 (8pm Eastern Time).
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, with an assist from Saja
