Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 144

Now this is how you do autumn

Envy me.

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Lazy Day in a Cat Cafe

Now Facebook isn't letting me post photos. WTF. It let me upload two, then stubbornly refused to let me add more, even in a different post. Hopefully this isn't a trend.

While wandering Fukuoka, I spotted and visited a cat cafe! My favorite cat was a very silky one-eyed black cat, pictured next to the immense orange cat twice her size. My cat Alex would love being a cat cafe cat. Finally, all the attention he can possibly want.

While I was there, an English-speaking man struck up a conversation and recommended some places to visit. He mentioned that there is a shrine where if you make an advance reservation, they will let you view and even touch the bones of a mermaid. I had an immediate flashback to Rumiko Takahashi's Mermaid Saga, in which eating the flesh of a mermaid supposedly grants immortality, but more commonly kills you or turns you into a hideous monster. As Wikipedia puts it, Throughout the series, he wanders across Japan searching for a cure and meets others whose lives have also been ruined by mermaid flesh.

Also while wandering, I noticed an all-time great movie translation, which I will quote as I can't upload the poster, for the Avengers movie: Goddess of Death Spatula appeared before the Avengers. [...] Will the saws protect the world from the strongest enemies in history? The purpose of the revenge of the goddess of death - spat! What?

Finally, the ramen in Fukuoka is just as good as everyone says. I went to Ramen Stadium, which has eight or nine ramen stalls with ramen from different provinces, and had Hakata tonkotsu ramen, so rich that the broth felt almost creamy in my mouth. It was probably made from the bones of an entire wild boar.

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Trick or Treat Recs

I scored this fic exchange. I got three stories and two drawings, all fantastic. There's tons of great fic and art in the archive; go browse!

My Gifts

Constructive Criticism. Hamilton. Hamilton red-pens Burr's duel invite, because of course he does.

The Thirteenth Pint. Hamilton. Hamilton in the afterlife.

certain fathoms in the earth. The Dark Tower - Stephen King. For Gabrielle, another turn of the wheel.

Not to Scale. Voltron. Shiro gets an unusual jack o'lantern.

Burnt-out Ends. Saiyuki. Sanzo and Hakkai share a cigarette.

General Recs

Persephone. Carrie - Stephen King. Short, sharp, gorgeously written, Angela Carter-esque mythic take.

Egress. LA Confidential. Ed Exley in a haunted carnival of the mind. Very well-written in a classic noir style.

You've Got That Kind of Mouth. LA Confidential. Ed Exley and Jack Vincennes undercover in a gay bar; lives up to the title.

Dead Devotion. Original work based on the character nominations "Half-orc in search of an honorable death," "long-abandoned sentient ship," and "ghost cat." I mean. How can you resist that premise? This original fantasy is a hugely enjoyable exercise in D&D-ish orc culture worldbuilding, with very likable characters and a solid plot.

Deliverance. Game of Thrones. The ghost that was once Robb Stark does not like weddings. The reunion of Robb and Arya, poignant and satisfying; clever use of canon elements.

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Hot Water

Cannot deal with the hassle of DW images. Check them out on Facebook.

Today I went to Beppu, which is famous for its seven Hells, aka famous hot springs. I saw some of them (not all seven); they're a bit spread out. My favorite was Umi Jigoku (Sea Hell), which is naturally the color of a very chlorinated swimming pool. It bubbles and boils and steams so fiercely that I only then realized why it's called Hell. It was very primal. So were the muddier ones, which looked like a T-Rex would step out at any moment.

There are hundreds of onsen and a whole lot of hot springs in Beppu, and huge plumes of white steam jet up into the sky from the onsens, and curl up from vents in the streets. Depending on the vantage point (cobbled streets or forested hills), it either looks steampunk or Lord of the Rings.

After checking out some Hells, I went to an onsen and had a good long soak in a whole bunch of pools, of which my favorite was the outdoors pool with a mini-waterfall. No photos as I shared it with about fifty naked women, also some naked small girls and a few naked very small boys.

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Paragliders, gelato, wild boars.

I am ensconced in a lovely Airbnb private apartment in Fukuoka, Japan, courtesy of Mayuko and Minoru Ueno. They picked me up at the airport last night and drove me to the apartment, and offered to take me to a Japanese garden the next day. But when we met today to do so, it was such a beautiful day that they asked if I'd rather go to Itoshima Beach, which I'd mentioned planning to visit. I said yes please, and next thing I knew, I was here.







The water was even more clear and beautifully colored than the photo shows, and on the other side were densely forested hills. Minoru goes to the area often to surf, and said he knew a nice view if I'd like to see it. I said yes please, and we drove through a lovely little village with a lot of trees laden with glossy orange persimmons and a rather confusing layout of twisty roads.

He then took us up an extremely narrow, steep, and twisting road full of hairpin turns up Kiyama (Fire Mountain - named because people used to light signal fires on the top). I have no idea what we'd have done if anyone had been trying to drive down, because there was barely room for one vehicle and no shoulder whatsoever. That thought definitely added an extra thrill to the whole experience, but luckily no one did.



At the top, we watched a daredevil paraglider get tossed about in strong winds.



And driving down, we saw a wild boar!



Then we got homemade gelato at a stand operating out of a something like a converted bus, with a long line that barely moved. Minoru recommended the salt flavor, so I got that and caramel. It was spectacular - delicately flavored and creamy, as good as the gelato I had in Italy.

I also got lots of chances to practice my Japanese. I have now gotten to the point where I can understand a fair amount, though my speaking is still pretty terrible. I did get a chance to use some beyond-basic vocabulary (almost entirely involving food, plants, and animals), but sadly I am way better at remembering individual words than at stringing them together.

(By the way, everyone who thought no one was going to ask me about the Tiny-Handed Racist in Japan... I called it. They asked. I had such a wave of loathing that I forgot all my Japanese, and just said, "YECCCH!" Turns out that conveyed my meaning just fine.)

Before that, I ran a few errands (I needed to get my JR pass, and also buy toothpaste and a hairbrush) and of course got lost and wandered in circles around multiple train stations. In the process, I ate a bunch of things from convenience stores - hot canned coffee, egg salad sandwiches, shrimp salad rice balls, etc. I realize that the shameful failure of US convenience stores to sell food anyone would actually want to eat is low on the list of What's Wrong With America, but every time I visit Japan, it looms large in my mind. And it's not just combinis. Everywhere I go, there is delicious food everywhere. I will try to make up for the existence of my evil orange President by contributing to the Japanese economy by eating as much as possible.

Tomorrow I'm spending the day soaking in hot springs at Beppu. Coincidentally, Mayuko and Minoru are also going to Beppu tomorrow, so we may run into each other. There are seven hells (colorful hot springs, not for bathing.) They are spread out, but I'm going to try to hit at least a couple of them. Then I'm hitting the onsen. I am going to hide my tattoo under a large band-aid. Hopefully I remembered to pack it.

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Hamilton: Los Angeles

It was absolutely wonderful - worth every minute of the eight hours I spent in line for tickets.

I wish I could see it again, because the staging is really busy (derived from the Broadway staging, but not a total copy), and in all the scenes with the ensemble, I probably missed at least half of what was going on. It had a tremendous sense of energy, and was a model of how to do set changes (consisting solely of moving furniture around in full view of the audience) in a way that makes them part of the show rather than interruptions.

A few uses of props/furniture I thought were especially great were "Hurricane," where furniture spins around Hamilton in slow motion, borne on storm winds, and a bunch using papers or writing: "The Reynolds Pamphlets," where the pamphlets are thrown at Hamilton until he's standing in a blizzard of his own making, letters that get passed across the stage, actor to actor, giving a sense of how far they had to travel; the many parts where Hamilton is madly scribbling away, once on a desk held horizontally - some platform, any platform will do.

All the big ensemble numbers were wonderful - the cabinet battles, the battles of the Revolution, "My Shot," the tender heartbreak of "It's Quiet Uptown" and the glee of "Washington On Your Side."

I loved almost all the performances. I liked Laurens/Philip (Ruben J. Carabal) more than I had before, and Hercules Mulligan/Madison (Mathenee Treco) equaled the Broadway performance - he was hilarious and larger than life. King George (Rory O'Malley) was a crackup. All the Schuyler sisters were great, but the brittle, brilliant, mohawked Angelica (Emmy Raver-Lampman) was my favorite. Washington (Dan Belnavis) was very good, and perfect in his final song.

Hamilton (Michael Luwoye) was fantastic - great singing and rapping, tons of emotional range, a fighter and scrapper and underdog. He was shorter than most of the cast (including Eliza), which really worked for his interpretation. But my very favorite was Jefferson (Jordan Donica). Daveed Diggs is a lot to live up to, but this Jefferson made the role his own. He had a huge Afro that he made a character in its own right, and wonderful body language - sauntering, skipping, lounging, dancing backwards, gleefully swinging his legs on "Never gon' be President now." His scenes with Hamilton and Madison were perfection.

Disappointments: Donica's Lafayette was not very impressive and couldn't rap fast enough, though the actor killed as Jefferson. More significantly, I didn't like Burr. It was Joshua Henry, who's gotten rave reviews, but he had distracting mike or vocal issues, and his performance just wasn't that impressive/layered.

At the end, one of the actors (I'm not sure who he played - I think one of the ensemble) gave the single best fundraising speech I've ever heard, for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, which has apparently branched out into hurricane relief as well, including for Puerto Rico. I donated some money and also bought a "Pick Up A Pen, Start Writing" pen.

Overall, it had all of the emotion and electric life you want in a live performance. When I was a stage manager, there were some shows I'd eventually get bored with and some I never got tired of watching. I could see this every night, forever, and never get bored. I can't wait till it starts getting performed all over America - high school productions, all-female productions, reinterpretations, you name it.

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Texas LGBTQ pop-up library seeking books

The person putting this together hit me up for a copy of my book Stranger, and I liked the idea so much that I offered to pass it on to you. It's a pop-up library and drop-in center for queer-identifying people, especially young people. Still in early stages (you'll see on the website that the buttons aren't all active) but I had a fairly long convo with her over messenger and it seems legit.

Email Lacy Laird at renegadelibraries@gmail.com if you have either copies of your own books with LGBTQ characters, or new/perfect condition books or graphic novels by others that you'd like to donate.

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My FemslashEx story

I had tons of fun with FemslashEx, and highly recommend browsing the archive.

My recipient was iknowcommawrite aka Scioscribe, who wrote me two lovely Treats last Yuletide! FemslashEx allows prompts for original fiction, and this is the prompt I wrote for:

Female Revolutionary/Princess

Class issues, identity porn, loyalty kink, and compromised principles: hell yeah. I think ideally I would like this one in a fantasy world, but I’m open to other possibilities. I’d love to see about any variation on this I could think of. Is the revolutionary undercover in the palace, getting ready to overthrow the monarchy while falling for the princess? Is the princess on the run from the revolution, disguising herself, and falling in amongst the rebels? Do either of them begin to rethink their principles or their policies? Is the revolutionary agitating in the open, and the princess is intrigued by her radical ideas? Other things I’m totally here for: wearing a crown while being thoroughly debauched by a revolutionary, hurt/comfort, kneeling, undressing from gowns and corsets, and virgin princess/experienced revolutionary.

Isn't that great? I found it very inspiring.

I wrote Burn, an epistolatory exercise in Ultimate Identity Porn. The revolutionary hides her face to conceal her identity. The princess silences her voice to preserve her purity. They know each other. And they don't...

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My long-delayed trip

Two years ago, I meant to go to Japan in November. And then I had the most horrible two years of my entire life, and the trip was shelved.

I'm going to Japan in November! I'll be there for two weeks, divided between Tokyo, Kyoto, and Fukuoka. The last is a city further south than I've been before, with some very pretty day trips.

I'm going to use AirBnb, which I also haven't used before, but it looks pretty great. I have two lovely apartments all to myself for cheaper than a hotel room would be, and one room in a house with a lady who cooks breakfast, has a friendly toy poodle named Piccolo, and says understatedly, "I am a former hotelier who worked in the five star hotel. I think I can assist you well during your stay."

Any of you done anything fun in Japan?

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Duma Key, by Stephen King

Of all the new-to-me books by Stephen King that I’ve read in the last year, this and the middle Dark Tower books are the ones I’ve re-read the most. I’ve re-read Duma Key three times in the last two years, and I can tell it’s a book I’ll keep coming back to. Here’s the first page:

How to draw a picture


Start with a blank surface. It doesn't have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember.

How do we remember to remember? That's a question I've asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon. You have to establish the horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic. Or so I’ve come to believe.

Imagine a little girl, hardly more than a baby. She fell from a carriage almost ninety years ago, struck her head on a stone, and forgot everything. Not just her name; everything! And then one day she recalled just enough to pick up a pencil and make that first hesitant mark across the white. A horizon-line, sure. But also a slot for blackness to pour through.

Still, imagine that small hand lifting the pencil ... hesitating ... and then marking the white. Imagine the courage of that first effort to re-establish the world by picturing it. I will always love that little girl, in spite of all she has cost me. I must. I have no choice. Pictures are magic, as you know.

On the one hand, this is my favorite prose passage in the book. On the other hand, the entire book has that same atmosphere and themes: the magic of art, the bleakness of loss, the terror of opening a door into darkness, human empathy and connections, and, always, how making a mark on paper is both simple and difficult, the dividing line between nothing and everything.

Unusually for Stephen King, Duma Key is set in on the Florida coast – an incredibly vivid and atmospheric Florida, which becomes enough of a character in its own right to make the book a very satisfying sea-soaked, sunset-lit Gothic.

I am pleased to say that this is one of the least gross King books I’ve read, bar a rotting ghost or two. It’s also one of the scariest, in a very classic “terrify by keeping the scary stuff mostly off-page” manner. The Big Bad is never quite seen directly, and is one of King’s creepiest and most mythically archetypal figures.

It’s also one of King’s most heartbreaking books. Almost all the characters are really likable, and if not likable, than still very human. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon opens with, The world had teeth and it could bite you with them any time it wanted. Duma Key is about the beauty and magic and redemption of the world, but also about the teeth.

It begins with a wealthy self-made man, Edgar Freemantle, getting into an absolutely horrific accident while visiting one of his job sites. He loses an arm and gets some brain damage; he’s barely out of the hospital before his marriage has ended, his life as he knew it has ended, and he’s on the brink of suicide.

After some talks with his psychiatrist, he ends up taking up art, which he’d enjoyed as a boy but never pursued, and moving to a cabin in the Florida Keys. There he meets a chatty guy, Wireman, who’s the caretaker for Elizabeth, an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s – both of whom have pasts which slowly, heartbreakingly unfold over the course of the book. Edgar finds that painting is his new passion and genuine talent… but his paintings are odd. Eerie. And they can change things…

The first half of the book follows Edgar as he recovers from his accidents, explores his new talent and gains critical and commercial success, and loses some old friends and gains some new ones. The emotional and physical recovery from the accident and its fallout (which doesn't mean he'll ever be the same as he was before) was incredibly well-done and vivid. I don't know if it was technically correct, but it felt very believable.

In classic Gothic fashion, there’s creepy stuff going on simultaneously, but it’s comparatively subtle. I found this part of the book hugely enjoyable even though tons of scenes are just Edgar painting or eating sandwiches and shooting the breeze with Wireman. On the one hand, it probably could have been shorter. On the other hand, I could have happily gone on reading just that part forever.

And then the creepy stuff gets less subtle. A lot less subtle.

This has an unusual story arc. I’m putting that and other huge spoilers behind a cut, but I’ll also mention that even for King, the book has some very tragic aspects— ones which he’s explored before, but there’s one I’ll rot13.com (feed into the site to reveal) because it’s a specific thing that people may want to avoid. Gur cebgntbavfg’f qnhtugre vf xvyyrq. Fur’f na nqhyg ohg n lbhat bar (n pbyyrtr fghqrag) naq irel yvxnoyr, naq vg’f gur ovttrfg bs frireny thg-chapurf va gur fgbel.

If that’s not a dealbreaker, I suggest not reading the rest of the spoilers because even though if I’d sat down and tried to figure out where the story was going, I probably could have, the experience of reading it feels unpredictable; you can guess the outlines but a lot of the details are unexpected.

( Read more... )

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