Beyond Selidor

After the busyness of last weekend (and of the past working week), it was good to spend this weekend doing our more restful, typical activities. I find the fixed schedule — Saturday morning at the bakery at opening time, for pastries and coffee, off to the gym for two hours of classes, meeting Matthias at the market at midday to get the week's vegetables, food truck lunch in the sunshine in the courtyard of our favourite cafe/bar, Sunday morning laps when the pool opens, cooking all the stewed fruit and crepes for breakfast, then books, and Dreamwidth, and yoga — to be incredibly soothing and restorative. It's not super exciting, but the predictability is relaxing.

This week most of my reading has been rereads. Two of these (Good Man Friday and Crimson Angel) were from Barbara Hambly's 1830s New Orleans Benjamin January mystery series, which took the titular protagonist to Washington DC and Cuba and Haiti respectively; as always, the draw for me is the recreated historical world, and the sense of building family and community in the margins of monstrous, dystopian injustice, the beauty fiercer because it's pushing back against incredible danger and cruelty. I also reread A Gladiator Dies Only Once, the second short story collection in Steven Saylor's ancient Roman historical mystery series. These were all a lot of fun — the title story in the collection in particular — and gave Saylor a chance to explore little fragments of Roman history and culture (garum production! pet ownership! etc) for which he never found space in the full-length novels. Now only one book in the series remains, and it's one I've never read, since it was published after I stopped keeping track of Saylor's output. I'm hoping I can get a secondhand copy.

In new-to-me historical mystery series, I also read The Angsana Tree Mystery, the latest in Ovidia Yu's 1940s Singapore series. This one is set in 1949, and involves, as alway,s a case which hinges on family secrets and money. While I appreciated a lot of the familiar elements (the food descriptions, the narrator Su Lin's messy extended family, the multicultural cast of locals who are always much cleverer than the British colonial administration), I felt that it got bogged down in an unnecessary amount of soap operatic interpersonal drama in a way that felt untrue to the characters, making it weaker than previous books in the series.

Then I reread Mind's Eye, a short story collection by Australian children's author Jackie French. The stories are concerned with French's main preoccupations — the Australian landscape, particularly the bush, and rural areas, recent Australian history, and the ways these things interact with, and find echoes in, then-contemporary (1990s) Australia. They still hold up very well, although there's a kind of uncritical lauding of rural (white) Australians as living a more authentic kind of Australianness which really wouldn't fly today. I am a city dweller to my bones, and have been all my life, and I remember reading these stories as a child, and feeling that the world they depicted was as exotic to me, and equally outside my own experiences, as something on the other side of the globe, even though it existed merely a hundred or so kilometres away.

I spent an hour or so after lunch today curled up on the couch reading Bitter Waters, a novella in Vivian Shaw's Greta Helsing series, in which all the fictional vampires of nineteenth-century novels are real, living scattered around the UK, cared for by the title character (a descendent of Stoker's Van Helsing, who works as a GP specialising in supernatural beings) and getting swept up in various unlife-threatening dramas. The novella is a great deal of fun — the sort of thing I describe as authors writing fanfic of their own characters, which seems to happen a lot in SFF novellas these days — and is probably best described as vampire domestic fluff. My only gripe is something that I've found a minor irritant about the series since the beginning, which is that it's set in Britain, but really obviously written by an American, in wildly jarring ways. This time, it was a couple of really glaring instances of US English in the mouths of British characters ('takeout' and 'math class'), which, for an author who makes much of the fact that she spent a portion of her childhood living in the UK, really shouldn't be there.

All in all, it's been a weekend of cosy domesticity, and that's been reflected in my reading choices.

The weekend has been fairly routine and uneventful, but it was preceded by a busy day in London on Friday, so the chance to rest a bit before the new working week begins was welcome.

I was in London for an appointment to sort out a big stressful bureaucratic thing that's been a weight on my mind for several years now — so it was a huge relief to have the thing finally done. After that, I spent some time walking along the river around Battersea Power Station, before heading inland to meet catpuccino for lunch. We've known each other since the first day of secondary school (which is ... coming up for thirty years now, eek), and she ended up immigrating to the UK as well — she met a British guy, got married, and now lives in London. She's very plugged in to the food scene there, and suggested we go to mercatometropolitano — a former industrial site now filled with static food trucks serving everything from Mauritian to Venezuelan food, plus coffee and various alcholic beverages. It worked well since we didn't have to agree on a single type of food, and all the stalls had £5 lunch specials, which is extremely cheap for London. catpuccino had Mauritian food and German food, and I had some really delicious Uzbek dumplings, and we sat outside chatting for hours. It was great to see her — apart from our long friendship and various shared interests, she's one of the few people who shares, understands, and is able to articulate my complicated tangle of emotions about Australia, and I always appreciate being able to talk about such things without being misunderstood, and knowing that the feelings are mutual.

After that, I headed across town to Bloomsbury to meet Matthias, so he could show me around his new (or new-to-me, since he's been in the new job since July last year) workplace — the library of a little research institute in a terrace house facing a square with a park. I met a couple of his library colleagues, and got to snoop around the building in relative anonymity, since the researchers and admin staff seemed to have left or be working from home.

We then travelled over to Hackney, for an extremely belated dinner celebrating my birthday (in December), and the stressful bureaucratic thing being done. The restaurant was casafofolondon, and it was delightful — excellent food and wine, in convivial surroundings, which is all I want a restaurant to be.

In terms of books and media, it's been slim pickings with me for a while — by the end of the week, I will have only finished one book — but what I've read and watched has been excellent.

I paused my Roma sub Rosa and Benjamin January rereads to ... read the newest (twentieth) Benjamin January book, The Nubian's Curse. As always, it's got Barbara Hambly's characteristic blend of evocative, historic specificity (1840s New Orleans, plus some flashbacks to Ben's time in Paris fifteen years earlier), a mystery that hinges on the injustices and cruelties of that time and place, and — most importantly, what I read the books for — a celebration of Ben's messy, complicated family (expansive enough to encompass family both by blood and by choice, with an ever-growing cast of characters incorporated into it). As I always say when discussing this series, the books' setting is dystopian for its protagonist and most of the people he loves — their ethnicity and the racism of the society in which they live puts them in constant danger — and Hambly never shies away from that darkness and ever present sense of threat and fear, and yet somehow I find them extremely comforting to read. It's the warmth of Ben and his family, and their love and fierce protectiveness towards each other, and determination to live lives that matter and are full of love and meaning in spite of all the world does to grind them down, I suppose.

I don't always log the films I watch, but the one Matthias and I saw last night was so singular that I feel it should be recorded. The film in question was Neptune Frost, a riotous, surreal, dreamlike Burundian science fiction film. The dialogue is in multiple languages (but most often in song), and it's best summed up as the kind of anti-extractive capitalism, anti-colonial, afrofuturistic gender fuckery you'd get if Janelle Monáe decided to make a feature-length film-album about the monstrous evil that is the coltan industry that makes the computer on which I am typing this entry possible (and the devices on which you are reading it, and, and, and). The score is spectacular. Highly, highly recommended.

It poured with rain all morning (such that I felt I'd already had my morning swim solely by walking 20 minutes to the pool), and now the living room is drenched with sunlight. I'm going to take advantage of that, and head upstairs to do some yoga before it gets dark and melancholy again. I hope the weekend's been treating everyone well.

In your own space, talk about your favorite trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme.



Why limit myself to just one? Here is a non-exhaustive list of stuff I like — sometimes just in fanfic, sometimes just in professional writing, sometimes in both. I think the boundaries between tropes, clichés, kinks and so on can sometimes be a bit blurred, so I'm not going to define any of these narrative/character/relationship preferences as one thing or the other.

Enemies/antagonists to friends/allies/lovers is something I will eat up with a spoon. I like it in both its variants — where the characters differ in their approaches, methods or aims but are essentially both fundamentally correct, and where one character is clearly in the right and the other one is at best wrong and at worst straight up evil. I guess in essence I like characters being thrown into situations that force them to reevaluate their core understanding of themselves, and these kinds of relationships often do this.

Hurt/comfort is one of my favourite things to read, although I don't like it so much in visual media. Like many people in my Dreamwidth circle, I tend to have firm preferences for which character is hurt, and which one is doing the comforting. I sometimes like this trope in combination with the enemies-to-lovers one, in which one character comforts the other for hurt that they themselves inflicted, but it depends on the fandom.

I don't really know how to describe this one succinctly, but basically stories about women enduring awful stuff at the hands of men in patriarchal societies, and finding a sense of community and common purpose within these terrible situations. Survival is the important thing here — I don't need the women to escape or overthrow their oppressors within the narrative, but they need to be able to find ways to survive and find meaning and connection with each other in the margins. Examples of what I'm talking about include Mad Max: Fury Road, Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, and stuff like that.

Human/non-human pairings where the human character stays mortal, the non-human character remains a vampire/demon/otherworldly fairy/etc etc, but they both transform each other in other ways. The irreconcilable differences are the thing, here — I don't want them reconciled by the vampire's human girlfriend becoming a vampire herself, or the god who falls in love with a human giving up immortality for love.

Stories in which the ordinary work of everyday life is made magical and heroic, especially tasks typically perceived (whether correctly or incorrectly) as having been 'women's work' in a historical setting. I particularly like this if the story hinges on mentor relationships between girls and women, relationships between sisters (or girls who are raised in a situation that is essentially like being sisters), mothers and daughters, and so on.

Stories about characters who were made to feel frightened once, reacted (to put it mildly) extremely poorly to this, and decided the only reasonable course of action is to warp the world around them such that they will never, never be made to feel fear again — even if they burn down the world and all their relationships with it. An example of this type of story is the Peaky Blinders tv series.

Stories that are fundamentally dystopian (or ushering in something that will result in utter destruction of everything the characters valued — they just can't see it yet or can't do anything to stop it), in which the characters do their best to carve out meaning and joy, build community and remain essentially true to their own ethics, even if their efforts are marginal at best and are like twigs attempting to shore up a torrential flood. Examples of this type of story are — in different ways — The Lions of Al-Rassan (Guy Gavriel Kay), Hambly's Benjamin January mysteries, and the Babylon BerlinTV series.

Do you have any specific narrative/character preferences?