Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 264

Radiohead Lyric or Emily Dickinson Phrase?

A delightful post from BookRiot: Quiz: Radiohead Lyric or Emily Dickinson Phrase?

As it happens, Emily Dickinson is probably my favorite poet ever, so this was especially intriguing. Though I would not characterize Dickinson’s poetry as giving voice to “quiet despair” as does Christine Ro in this post, the challenge is still an immediate draw. Can one actually confuse Radiohead lyrics with Dickinson poetry? I am not that familiar with Radiohead, but let’s take a look at this quiz. There are only 15 lines presented; I’ll show them here — click through to see the answers.

the mongrel cat came home holding half a head

inebriate of air

the distant strains of triumph burst agonized and clear

broken hearts make it rain

i felt a funeral in my brain

tie me to the rotten deck

how dreary to be somebody

howling down the chimney

disappointed people clinging onto bottles

he bit an angle worm in halves

why so green and lonely

he talks in maths

the truth must dazzle gradually

get the flan in the face the flan in the face

nobody wants to be a slave

Are any of these at all difficult? A good many are lines from very well known Dickinson poems; putting them in surely makes this challenge less, er, challenging.

Things that Emily Dickinson never used in any poem (you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m not wrong): mongrel cats, rotten decks, bottles, flan, and slaves. I might not have thought she wrote the line about the worm, though, except I remember the poem clearly, so there’s that. Still. Flan? As if.

I bet I could find a group with lyrics that would be easier to mistake for Dickinson poems. How about Peter Gabriel?

wind was blowing, time stood still

if again the seas are silent

ten coaches roll into the dust

I used this website to look up Gabriel lyrics, btw; I recognize some of his songs, but I couldn’t have pulled lines out of my brain.

I maintain that any of those seem a lot more like Dickinson lines than anything ever written about flan by anybody.

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Pause for something beautiful

This is a hypnotically beautiful video.

Watch it all the way to the end and you will see how the seeming chaos resolves into a different kind of pattern.

I can hardly see how you’d even approach setting this up. If every ball weighs just the right amount, would that do it?

Designing something like this would make a fascinating problem for physics students, I bet.

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Good News Tuesday

I’ve seen lots of promising cancer research go nowhere, but eventually someone (multiple someones) is going to come up with some very nice broadly applicable treatment methodology and the big C will get demoted, in lots of cases, to just another medical inconvenience. Maybe this will be one of the keys:

Johns Hopkins researchers say they’ve unlocked key to cancer metastasis and how to slow it

Jayatilaka and a team at Johns Hopkins discovered the biochemical mechanism that tells cancer cells to break off from the primary tumor and spread throughout the body, a process called metastasis. Some 90 percent of cancer deaths are caused when cancer metastasizes. The team also found that two existing, FDA-approved drugs can slow metastasis significantly.

I will just add here that many of us who own dogs with cancer would be happy to test new therapies. Though Dora shows no signs as yet of returning tumors, she does still have a fairly good chance of dying this year. If she does, it will definitely be because of the metastasis of the original carcinoma.

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Jos —

Saying goodbye to a young adult dog is hard, even if you’re sending him off with a wonderful new family. This was arranged months ago, but it was still hard.

I think every dog deserves to be the center of attention in a wonderful family. Once it was clear that Conner was going to grow up substantially more glamorous, it was practically ordained that Jos would be looking for a pet home. Three intact male dogs is a lot. Jos is cute and cheerful and energetic and affectionate, but he is never going to be as handsome as either his father or his . . . let me see . . . half-nephew.

Rather than sharing my attention with a zillion other dogs, Jos now has one playful dog sister and two human children to keep him busy and happy, not to mention mom and dad and various other relatives and friends.

But he does leave a cute, cheerful, energetic, affectionate hole in my life.

Jos as a baby, with a protective Kenya making sure he is safe.

Jos as a teenager, with his father, Ishmael.

Jos, getting into trouble in his unique way.

Jos, all bathed and brushed, ready to be admired by his new family.

Jos, with his new kids, heading off on the adventure of his new life.

Jos, surprisingly relaxed after checking out his new backyard.

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A labor of love

Check this out: All 213 Beatles Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best: We had to count them all.

The author of the post, Bill Wyman, says: “It turns out that ranking the songs recorded by the Beatles in the 1960s is easy; you put the worst one at the top, and the best one at the bottom.” Heh. Well, I didn’t realize that this was the 50th anniversary of the release of “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” but that does explain why I’ve been seeing a few more Beatles references than usual. Also why Sirius XM just added a Beatles station to their list.

Anyway, I am far, far from an expert on the Beatles. But I am amused by this attempt to rank more than 200 songs from worst to best. In case you are interested, but not enough to click through, I will tell you that Wyman ranks “Good Day Sunshine” as the worst and “A Day in the Life” as the best.

If you are interested enough to click through, Wyman has included comments about each entry, plus links and some embedded videos. The biggest surprise to me is how many song titles I immediately recognize, that instantly call up up the song for me. I don’t have a very good memory for songs or song titles and had no idea so many Beatles songs had imprinted themselves on my brain.

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Sometimes you just need to let it go

Check out this article at BookRiot:

MY PARTNER DOESN’T USE BOOKMARKS AND IT STRESSES ME OUT

My partner and I have been together, more or less, for fourteen years. In that time, I have learned all sorts of odd things about him… However, only one of his weird idiosyncrasies stresses me the eff out: the man doesn’t use bookmarks. Ever.

Now, the author of this post . . . Ashley Bowen-Murphy, I see here . . . makes a good point:

According to him, if he can’t remember where he was in the book, he shouldn’t be reading there. So he will flip backwards through the book until he remembers a key plot point or, in the case of non-fiction, important fact. On one hand, this feels like a pure way to read– it ensures that he really and truly pays attention to all the plot points and arguments made in a given book. On the other hand, ZOMG that is ridiculous!

Okay, yes, it does seem kinda ridiculous to me too. For heaven’s sake, if for some reason you are opposed to using bookmarks, just look at the page and recite “Page 172” before you put it down. Poof, problem solved.

But! Who cares, fundamentally, whether someone else wastes time flipping around through a book searching for where they last left off? It’s their time to waste if they find that kind of thing fun. On a scale where leaving the cap off the toothpaste is, say, a seven, this strikes me as about a minus seventeen.

Kind of an entertaining post, though, and I will assume that Bowen-Murphy really would not put this on her top-ten list of stressful things.

Also, the comments are interesting. There are even one or two commenters who dog-ear pages. Now THAT would be a habit worth complaining about!

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Recent Reading: Murderbot Diaries: All Systems Red

So, yesterday I took my car for an oil change, and that’s the sort of situation where a novella seems like a perfect idea. Especially a novella by one of my favorite authors. Thus:

I didn’t make much headway during the oil change because it turned out the guy who did it had his standard poodle with him for the day and she was distracting. Standards are one of my very favorite bigger breeds. Also, the guy got the oil change done in jig time. That means I actually stayed up kinda late to finish this story. I basically never stay up late for any reason other than hovering over newborn puppies, but last night I made an exception.

I don’t much care for the title — “Murderbot” Does not have that certain something I look for in a title. I guess it sounds too grim? The titular character does call itself that, but ironically. There’s a good deal of violence and blood and betrayal in the novella, but the cool voice of the protagonist deemphasizes the violence, so it’s definitely adventure rather than horror. Here’s part of the description from Goodreads:

On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid’ — a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone…

The protagonist is a construct with both organic parts and tech parts. Definitely a person, it is legally equipment. Generally it’s rented to clients it doesn’t think highly of, by a company it thinks even less of, which as you might imagine has cased it to develop a certain bitter cynicism. Despite this, it can’t help noticing that its current clients are actually pretty nice people. When someone starts trying to kill them all, it gets personally involved … and so the story unrolls, with a fast pace that keeps you involved straight through to the satisfying conclusion.

Coincidentally, the sequel, “Artificial Condition,” became available for pre-order last night. Next January seems a good ways away, but hey, now I can be sure I won’t forget about it. Also, I already know I will enjoy re-reading the first novella before reading the second.

If you like:

I’ve been thinking of Breq from Leckie’s Ancillary series recently, and I must say that Murderbot reminds me of Breq in some important ways. Definitely not human, definitely a person — and actually similar as well in how out of touch it is with its own feelings. This is another take on a nonhuman protagonist who is a good person without ever thinking of itself that way. I think people who appreciated the Ancillary series ought to like this novella quite a bit.

If you lean toward “noblebright” SFF, the niceness of the secondary characters will surely appeal to you. Martha Wells pretty much had to make those characters nice in order to get Murderbot involved in their fate; they also work really well as a counter to the generally grim society we glimpse in the background (the company and most of its clients seem very far from admirable).

I should add, I don’t mean to imply saccharine niceness. These secondary characters are better developed than that, with touches of complexity despite the short (160 pp) format of the story.

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An amusing post from Atlas Obscura —

C.S. Lewis’s Greatest Fiction Was Convincing American Kids That They Would Like Turkish Delight

I too had the most extreme desire to try Turkish Delight after reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I too probably would have been surprised to taste anything close to real Turkish Delight:

Here’s what it really is: a starch and sugar gel often containing fruit or nuts and flavored with rosewater, citrus, resin, or mint. The texture is gummy and sticky, some of the flavors are unfamiliar to American palates, and the whole thing is very, very sweet.

Now, I should add, I have since had a chance to try rose-flavored Turkish Delight, possibly this brand or something similar, and I liked it a lot even though super-sweet things are not necessarily my favorite. On the other hand, I’m a big fan of rose-flavored confections. Possibly as an inexperienced child I might have been less keen on flavors like that than I am now.

Now, here is what Jess Zimmerman was inspired to do: I set out to discover what Americans imagined when they read about Turkish Delight. What kind of candy did we think would inspire a boy to betray his brothers and sisters? … Their answers spanned a whole range of sweet treats—and some surprises.

Click through to read all the rhapsodic visions of what Turkish Delight ought to be.

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Here’s what Ann Leckey has been working on:

Via File 770, I noticed this: Provenance gets realer

Lecke says: Provenance is set in the Ancillaryverse but does not concern the same characters and is not set in Radch Space

Good thing it’s in the same universe because the cover is obviously meant to indicate that. Really boring cover, but then I wouldn’t have bought the Ancillary novels just to admire their covers either.

Goodreads says: A power-driven young woman has just one chance to secure the status she craves and regain priceless lost artifacts prized by her people. She must free their thief from a prison planet from which no one has ever returned. Ingray and her charge will return to her home world to find their planet in political turmoil, at the heart of an escalating interstellar conflict. Together, they must make a new plan to salvage Ingray’s future, her family, and her world, before they are lost to her for good.

Well, I’m just as glad this book isn’t set in Radch space, since we all know how young people curry favor with their superiors in order to rise in status themselves in the Radch Empire, don’t we? I would prefer to see Ingray use something other than sexual favors to get what she wants.

I don’t much care for this cover copy. “She must free their thief…” — whose thief? Took me a minute to realize the pronoun “their” went back to “artifacts.” Not clear why you’d need the thief particularly, or why the thief would have the faintest interest in Ingray’s future.

Well, I’m sure it will all make far more sense in context.

I don’t expect this to be as good as the Ancillary series because I don’t expect any of the characters to be remotely as interesting as Breq. That would be a tough act for any protagonist to follow and presuming Ingray is actually human, I don’t see how she can measure up. But I expect I will like the book a lot anyway.

Provenance is due out this fall, I see. I’m looking forward to it.

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Take a moment to appreciate something beautiful —

I suggest you take a few minutes to watch this video of French skaters Vanessa James and Morgan Ciprés performing a choreographed routine to Disturbed’s rendition of Simon & Garfunkel’s classic hit “The Sound of Silence.”

And thanks to Stephanie Burgis for posting the link on Twitter. A lovely way to start the day.

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