Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 102

Trick or Treat!

The Trick or Treat fanfic, original fiction, and art collection is open!

I have four stories in the collection - can you spot them?

I got three absolutely fantastic gifts.

Blood in the Ambient. A Punisher/Finisterre fusion, which is so much its own thing that I think you could read it without knowing either canon. In a terraformed world where all animals are telepathic, the riders of nighthorses protect their towns from other predators. A gorgeous, heartbreaking and heartwarming story about a small town huddled against the cold, a small family huddled together, and a stranger who tests the limits of their sense of community. Incredibly atmospheric, fantastic worldbuilding, and all-over wonderful.

I also got two wonderful stories for the IT movies. With very different premises and narrative voices, they both capture the love and trust of the Losers, and their hard-won hope despite horror and grief. They were both everything I love about the canon, beautifully written and characterized.

Familiar Hand. Post-canon, Mike and Bill move in together. The librarian and the writer merge collections, bringing up their diverging paths behind them and their new way forward. Sexy and bittersweet and thematically unified.

Foundations. The adult Losers have an orgy to cement their bond and make sure they'll never forget. Dead-on Richie voice, with all the grief and humor and sweetness that entails. Hot and funny and full of love.

I also enjoyed...

Art

Favorite Haunt. A ghost cat takes a ghost cat nap.

Graveyard Tree. The souls of those buried under the cherry tree wait in the branches as dawn rises. (Mixed media)

A formal portrait of Aral Vorkosigan

Original Fiction

The Lessons of the Tree A classic-feeling spooky story, like a murder ballad in prose.

Water Remembers Lovely flashfic about the ghost of a long-gone ocean.

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Birthday Butt Blade

iknowcommawrite sent me a delightful birthday box of books!



Amazingly, I have only read one of these before, Patricia Geary's Strange Toys, but when I think I was too young to understand it and I didn't still have it.

I flipped through and discovered that I have forgotten literally everything about it... except a sequence, near the end, in which the heroine, now grown up,

1) is an amateur weightlifter who breaks the world record in a gym

2) immediately whereupon she meets a man who says he wants to coach her and take her to dinner, who when she protests that she doesn't have time to go home and change, gives her $500 and tells her to buy herself something

3) so she goes to a mall and finds a shop decorated with cages of live lemurs and long-haired guinea pigs "dyed like carnations," which sells her a complete, gorgeous outfit, underwear included, which is worth way more than $500 for exactly that amount of money:

Carefully he cuts a piece of cheese from the hors d'oevre table and feeds it to the chartreuse rat in the golden cage. The rat stands on his hind legs and nibbles delicately. "How much do you have?"

Anyone read any of these? Any votes for ones you really want me to review?

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Twelve kittens leaping, eleven cats a-climbing, ten kitties cuddling, nine tails a-waving...

For my birthday, I treated myself to the 70-minute Kitten Extravaganza at the cat cafe and adoption site, Crumbs and Whiskers.

It was utterly delightful. There were 27 cats and kittens, all healthy, lively, and happy. They could leave any time they wanted (through the pink curtain). Zero smell. The floor rugs were extremely comfortable. Everyone there was in heaven, including me. (It was with great difficulty that I left without adopting Knox (a mini-Alex) and Firecracker (the black and white kitten I'm cuddling on the cat tree.)





Click to see more! ( Read more... )

Afterward, I got a slice of crack pie at Momofuku Milk Bar, a Chubby Pork Belly Bowl at Kogi Taqueria, and retired to my sofa where I read Stephen King's The Institute with both my own cats napping on me.

Truly a perfect day.

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Tomorrow is my birthday!

I don't have any specific plans for tomorrow other than hitting Coolhaus for an ice cream sandwich. Suggest something, if you like.

Here is my birthday gift to myself:



More pics below cut. ( Read more... )

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Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine, by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin

A 1969 children’s book about three kids and an absent-minded scientist having scientific adventures. In this case, they (plus the excitable terrier one of them is dog-sitting) fall into Professor Bulfinch’s smallifying machine.

I loved this series as a kid and the ones I’ve re-read have held up very well. They have accurate science presented in a fun way, they’re funny, they have a lot of sense of wonder, and while they’re obviously set in a particular time, they’re otherwise not particularly dated.

This book, for instance, has exactly one line about “girls are a nuisance except Irene who’s great,” but that is literally it as far as sexism is concerned; while Irene is the only girl, she is indeed great and is never looked down on, sneered at, stereotyped, or left out of the action. Which is a whole lot better on that front than a lot of current media.

The Smallifying Machine is unsurprisingly one of my favorites of the Danny Dunn books. It’s chock-full of sense of wonder, in this case exploring the world while you’re teeny-tiny. Far from many books that don’t really explore the premise, despite its very short length this book has the kids riding butterflies, eating nectar, whacking a pool of water with a tiny nail to get some droplets to drink (this is the book that taught me about surface tension, in a way that ensured that I’d remember it), being knocked off their feet by an earthwormquake, and much more. It’s entirely delightful.

Also, I think Irene should be introduced to Adrian Tchaikovsky. Here she is explaining the tarantula wasp (which, thankfully, they do NOT meet in their adventures):

“Ugh,” said Joe. “How grisly.”

“It isn’t!” Irene said, warmly. “Not any more than people wanting to eat fresh meat. It’s wonderful. You just think about it. The wasp will never see those babies of hers. [more horrifying description] Long after she’s dead, her children are all taken care of.”

“That’s the most touching story I ever heard,” said Joe. “I’m going to write a poem about it. I think I’ll call it M is for the Million Spiders You Gave Me.”

Now available on Kindle for $3.99: Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine[image error]

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Here we go again

I'm in Culver City, which is not in the evacuation zone or evacuation warning zone. Here's the fire department map. The LA Times has lifted its paywall for fire coverage, so you can follow it there.

I wonder if the Getty Museum is starting to consider relocating. It would be an absolutely insane expense and it's an incredibly beautiful structure, but it's full of irreplaceable works of art and it's looking inevitable that if it stays where it is, it will eventually burn down.

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When Darkness Loves Us, by Elizabeth Engstrom

Recommended in Paperbacks from Hell[image error], this is actually a collection of two novellas. I haven't yet read the second one, "Beauty Is..."

"When Darkness Loves Us" is a well-written, atmospheric, and extremely creepy work of psychological horror. Or maybe magical realism. Or dark fantasy. It's hard to put a label on it.

Sally Ann is sixteen and pregnant, just married, in love, relishing sex, and looking forward to life with her husband, living near her family and his. Until she ventures down a flight of stairs set into the earth, stairs which lead to a labyrinth of tunnels where it's said that once escaped slaves fled and died there when they couldn't find their way out. But she forgot that her husband was going to weld the door shut so their child could never get lost there. The door is closed forever, leaving Sally Ann trapped in the darkness.

But she doesn't die. Living in total darkness, she survives on moss and slugs and icy water, giving birth and raising her son alone. Until she finally finds a way to emerge into the light, and finds out what happened to her husband and family while she was gone...

This story is incredibly unsettling, using extremely vivid, realistic-seeming details to anchor a storyline that's much more like magical realism than ordinary horror; this makes it impossible to tell exactly what's really happening and what's in Sally Ann's mind, what's psychological horror and what's sociological horror. The legacy of slavery, the symbolism of sex and birth, light and darkness both real and metaphoric, the ghosts of dead people and the ghosts of the past: it all melds together in a story that invites to try to separate those threads from each other while making them impossible to pull apart.

If you've already read the story...( Read more... )

When Darkness Loves Us (Paperbacks from Hell)[image error]

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Dear Yuletide Writer

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Thank you for writing for me! If you have any questions, please check with the mods. I am generally a very easy recipient and will be delighted with whatever you write for me. I have no special requirements beyond what's specifically stated in my DNWs. I'm fine with all POVs (i.e., first, second, third), tenses, ratings, etc.

I like hurt-comfort, action/adventure, domestic life, worldbuilding, evocative descriptions, camaraderie, loyalty, trauma recovery, learning to love again or trust again or enjoy life again, and animals.

( General DNWs )

( Finisterre: The Nighthorses - C. J. Cherryh )

( Mojo Magical Horse Figurines  )

( Rocannon's World - Ursula K. Le Guin )

( The Sandman (Comics) )

( Wiseguy )

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The Yuletide Tag Set is up!

Behold the glory of the tag set!

This is the complete list of everything you can request for Yuletide. Since there's a broad definition of "fandom" and rarity is a prerequisite, it rewards browsing. The most entertaining categories are RPF and Other, IMO. Here are some of my favorites from those:

13th Century CE Sufi Mystics RPF: Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, Shams-i-Tabrizi (1185-1248)

14th and 15th Century Female Mystics RPF: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe

British Government Mousers RFF (Real Feline Fic): Gladstone (British Government Mousers RFF), Larry (British Government Mousers RFF), Palmerston (British Government Mousers RFF)

Charlotte Cushman and the White Marmorean Flock RPF: Charlotte Cushman, Edmonia Lewis, Emma Stebbins, Harriet Hosmer

Shakespeare RPF | Elizabethan & Jacobean Theater RPF: Anne Hathaway Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare

Great to see Kyd, Jonson, and Middleton in there along with the more usual suspects.

Mojo Magical Horse Figurines: Dark Pegasus, Dark Unicorn, Fantasy Unicorn | Original Unicorn, Lilac Pegasus, Pink Unicorn, Rainbow Pegasus, Rainbow Unicorn.

I was also excited to see The Bacchae, Drunk History's female Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton (the latter played by Aubrey Plaza), and Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Author of the Acacia Seeds."

In the TV section, who else remembers Wiseguy, Strange Luck, and V?

What are your favorites from the tag set?

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Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, by Mark Harris (Part 1)

Here is the remarkable, untold story of how five major Hollywood directors—John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra—changed World War II, and how, in turn, the war changed them. In a move unheard of at the time, the U.S. government farmed out its war propaganda effort to Hollywood, allowing these directors the freedom to film in combat zones as never before.

Sorry, couldn't improve on the blurb for a summary. This is a fascinating account which combines many of my interests - war trauma, movies and movie-making, art vs commerce vs propaganda, Hollywood history, and Jewish history - and it's comprehensive, meticulously researched, well-written, suspenseful, and great at making the characters and their milieu come to life.

The directors made the "Why We Fight" series, were wounded by shrapnel while shooting the battle of Midway live and in color, filmed the liberation of concentration camps, and both witnessed and created a brief but important era of documentary and fictional filmmaking unlike anything before or since.

Propaganda borders on a dirty word, so this account of propaganda efforts for a generally good cause (convincing Americans that Hitler was bad and ought to be fought) is genuinely thought-provoking and made me think of the entire concept in a new light. Is propaganda bad if it's true? Is it bad if it's for a good cause? What if the other side is making its own propaganda?

I'm listening to this as a 20-hour audiobook, which is why I'm doing a write-up before finishing it. The audio is excellent. There is also a three-part Netflix documentary, which I'm wavering on whether I should watch it now (so I have visual references) or after I finish (to preserve the suspense.)

The other reason I am writing about it now is that I have to share this with someone: I am in love with William (Willy) Wyler. IN LOVE. He is my new historical crush.

Of the five directors, Wyler was the only Jew. He was happily married to a woman from Texas and they wrote each other the sweetest letters. He was a perfectionist who did way more takes than was common at that time, but not tyrannical on the set; actors sometimes butted heads with him, but loved him for getting great performances out of them. He tried his best to get family members out of France and to America, but the US wouldn't let them in. When the government started accepting filmmakers into the military to make documentaries and training films, he volunteered, but all his filmmaking equipment got lost at sea and he couldn't cut through the red tape to get more.

At the point I'm at, an officer finally realized how awesome he was and wrote a stern memo praising him and scolding the military for not letting him do his thing; he's now attached to a squad of bombers, riding along in depressurized planes so cold his cameras keep freezing, and begging the pilot over the intercom to fly a little closer to the flak so he can get better shots.

He is the best and I love him. Admittedly he looks especially good in comparison with Huston (publicly cheating on his wife), Ford (dick-swinging credit-taker), and Capra (dick-swinging vaguely right-winger). I do like Huston as a character (he and Ford are my favorite filmmakers of the bunch) but man, he was a dick to his wife.

The other director I'm very fond of is George Stevens, who previously did very professional, very fluffy comedies. He too is stoically enduring a lot of difficulties to try to get to the front. I know generally where this is going (if you want a spoiler, just take a look at his filmography) and I am listening with my heart in my mouth. He is also so nice! He loves his wife and kids! He rescues a Jewish screenwriter from getting in court martial-level trouble! (The screenwriter was refused entrance to a club, thought it was anti-Semitism, and was about to start a brawl. Stevens rushed in to explain to him that it was an officers club and he was enlisted.)

skygiants brought this book to my attention, years ago. Great rec, thanks!

Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War[image error]

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