Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 51

As high as an elephant's eye

It's 86-89 F (30-31.6 C) in Crestline this week and I am literally dripping with sweat.

I rushed about gardening this morning as everything was wilting and nearly keeled over. I literally had to sit down in the shade and swill Gatorade. I already knew this from having lived my entire life in hot places, but it's salutary to be reminded of exactly how fast heat danger can sneak up on you. (I'm totally fine now, but I recognized the signs and remedied them immediately. If I'd decided to just finish watering, I might not be fine.)

On the plus side of this heat, I have CORN! I would share pics but they are currently covered in hardware cloth. That was probably the unwise in-sun exertion, but all these darling sprouts had popped up when I was fully expecting nothing to germinate at all, so I rushed to protect them. I have never grown corn before, so this should be fun.

Current state of garden:

Potatoes: Giant thriving jungle.

Tomatoes: Nibbled by bugs, but producing.

Bell peppers: Ditto.

Peas: Growing, but I'm in the usual battle of too much heat/dryness means wilting but too much shade/water means powdery mildew.

Cherries: All eaten by squirrels.

Morning glories: Two out of FORTY pre-sprouted seeds survived. One has a teeny bud! Well, now I know where to plant them.

Shallots: Thriving.

Rainbow chard: Died.

Blueberries: One very healthy bush with a handful of sloooowly ripening berries. I will put in more bushes later, as they grow beautifully but one bush doesn't produce much.

Raspberries: Marginal. Only one of three bushes is producing at all, and bugs are getting most of them. I think I need way more bushes to make a go of it.

Thimbleberries: Enormous thriving bank of them.

Blackberries: Even more enormous thriving bank of them, some just starting to redden.

Salal berries: One died, one marginal.

Salmonberry: Healthy, but no berries yet.

Saplings I planted last year (ginkgo, scarlet oak, birch stand, Bartlett pear, Satsuma plum): Every single one is doing great.

How does your garden grow?

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This is not fiction, it is fact!

While shopping an audiobook sale, I came across this amazing blurb. Make sure to read it all the way to the end.



Just a few hundred genes separate humans from chimpanzees. Imagine someone altering the chimp genome, splicing in human genes to increase the size of the cranium, reduce the amount of body hair, enable speech. What sort of creature would result?

Sims takes place in the very near future, when the science of genetics is fulfilling its vaunted potential. It’s a world where genetically transmitted diseases are being eliminated. A world where dangerous or boring manual labor is gradually being transferred to “sims”, genetically altered chimps who occupy a gray zone between simian and human. The chief innovator in this world is SimGen, which owns the patent on the sim genome and has begun leasing the creatures worldwide.

But SimGen is not quite what it seems. It has secrets, secrets beyond patents and proprietary processes - secrets it will go to any lengths to protect. Sims explores this brave new world as it is turned upside down and torn apart when lawyer Patrick Sullivan decides to try to unionize the sims.

Right now, as you read these words, some company somewhere in the world is toying with the chimp genome. That is not fiction, it is fact. Sims is a science thriller that will come true, one way or another.



ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.

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Any Twilight Zone fans?

scioscribe is reviewing all the episodes, in-depth and in order.

Follow along here.

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It's possible that I'm feeling a tad anxious

This morning I woke up and was immensely relieved that...

- I had not bought a new car and then lost it.

- I am not being stalked by Shirley Jackson.

- I did not forget to get dressed and not realize that I was wandering naked around Tokyo until several offended elderly men informed me.

- I do not need to guiltily inform my therapist that I have forgotten to get dressed and wandered naked in public multiple times. (This was a new one - in the dream, I recalled other "naked in public dreams" as being a history of wandering around naked in public.)

- I did not randomly decide not to accept the free offer of a gorgeous if slightly battered original painting of a gorgeous pink and black comic book spread.

- I did not spend hours and hours inexplicably attempting to fit a horse skull given to me by Shirley Jackson, a live strawberry plant with six strawberries, and a handful of dirt into the same pot without burying the strawberries, and also without it ever occurring to me that I could pick up the strawberry plant, put in the dirt and skull, and then put the strawberry on top instead of endlessly pouring in dirt and then uncovering the buried strawberries.

So that was a restful night.

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Happy Freedom To Terrorize Day!

For the record, should I be murdered with a gun as is the fate of so many in America, I would like my death to be politicized immediately. Further, I would like the most graphic possible photos of my mutilated corpse to be publicized, made into flyers, and used to leaflet-bomb the homes of appropriate politicians and supreme court justices.

On the principle that the results you get are the results you want, I think there's a reason other than profit for the people encouraging the unhindered proliferation of guns in the US, and the more lethal and crowd-killing, the better. It's to terrorize people out of public gatherings and prevent the freedom of assembly.

All non-violent political change stems from public assembly; protests and demonstrations may be effective or not, depending on circumstances, but you cannot enact nonviolent political change when people cannot gather. So getting people scared to go out in public in groups is a great way to prevent political change.

It also has side benefits: destroying public education by making people afraid to send their kids to school and making it hard for kids to learn when their brainpower is getting sucked up by fear, funneling more and more money away from anything that benefits actual humans and toward the police (who won't stop the shootings, so that part won't be a problem), and of course creating more of a market for guns from people who think they need one to defend themselves, and so the circle of murder generates profit generates murder continues.

ETA: Jayland Walker drives while black and runs from cops; they shoot him 60 times. Robert Crimo murders 6 people, wounds 40, and runs from cops; they arrest him unarmed. Can't imagine white's different about them.

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AU Exchange Letter

Dear AU Exchanger,

I am a very easy recipient so please don't stress over this. I adore AUs so I am easy to please.

I'm requesting fic for everything. But if anyone feels moved to give me an art treat, that would be delightful!

Feel free to use more than one prompt or combine prompts within fandom requests.

( General Likes. )
( General DNWs. )
( Biggles - W. E. Johns )
( Dark Tower - Stephen King )
( The Punisher (2017 TV) )
( The Stand - Stephen King )
( Torchwood )
( The Wilds )

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The Worst Raspberry

When I bought my house, the owners left me a handy, if incomplete, guide to its garden. They mentioned a hedge of wild raspberries growing between the road and the hedge of wild blackberries. I faithfully pruned them and trellised them, relieved that they were a thornless variety.

When sholio visited, she mentioned that they didn't look like raspberries. I said they were definitely raspberries, as attested to by both the previous owners and my neighbors who had seen them growing. I said they must be some different-looking wild variant. Plus, when I examined the spent canes, they very clearly had raspberry-looking places where berries once had been.

They've been slowly ripening. Today I ate a couple. I was very disappointed that they were the worst raspberries I've ever had.

Then I thought, "Wait a sec..." It turned out that sholio was right! They are not any kind of raspberry. They are...

( Read more... )

But I need to plant some more actual raspberries.

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Deck the melting sidewalks

The mall I'm at is playing Christmas songs.

IT'S NOT EVEN JULY YET.

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The Girl From Rawblood, by Catriona Ward

This is how I come to kill my father. It begins like this.

The Girl From Rawblood is a historical Gothic thriller following several intertwined families which seem to be cursed. It jumps back and forth in time and from character to character, but is never confusing and is always intensely engaging. I don't want to give too much of the plot away, because so much of the fun is discovering how the pieces fit together and seeing what happens next. I will say that it involves a mansion which is haunted by... something.

It's one of the best books I've read this year. After I read Ward's Sundial and then The Last House on Needless Street, cahn and I read this together, starting chapters at the same time and chatting on messenger.

This was extremely fun and at some point we will do it again with Little Eve, which is the last Catriona Ward book we haven't read yet. I loved her other two books, but I loved Rawblood the most.

It has a very timeless feel; a lot of it could have been written in any era of Gothics and ghost stories, though it's more graphically violent than would have been written in the 1800s, and involves explicit rather than implicit queerness.

It has approximately three shocking twists per chapter. It's a Gothic which packs in every possible Gothic trope you can imagine. But it's not just about twists. There are multiple narrators, all very well distinguished and most narrated in a very individual style. Ward did an amazing job not only of differentiating them, but of getting me emotionally invested in almost every single character. It's also an extremely emotional book.

Some of it is very difficult to read. There are cruel experiments on rabbits, including a passage which I skipped entirely once I saw where it was going. There's also an extremely upsetting section set in an insane asylum, which is even more awful than you might imagine.

But it isn't all horror. Terrible things happen to the characters, and many of them do terrible things, but almost always out of love; often misguided or twisted or obsessional love, but love nonetheless. In an afterword which is well worth reading, Ward says that she doesn't pity her characters because she feels that they lived full emotional lives and loved and were loved, which is the best that anyone can hope for.

Though much of the book is tragic, I didn't find it depressing, other than in certain specific sections. It's more of a wild, intense ride. I found the ending very moving and, depending on your interpretation and perspective, hopeful and satisfying.

Now let's talk about the twists. Seriously don't click on the cut if you intend to read this book.

( Read more... )

I am now completely obsessed with Catriona Ward. I look forward to reading Little Eve and her book that's forthcoming next year.

Content notes: EVERYTHING. Animal harm and cruel experimentation, cruel treatment of people in historical mental asylums, child abuse, violence, rape, miscarriages/stillbirths, probably more things I'm forgetting.

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Secrets of Monet's Garden: Bringing the Beauty of Monet's Style to your own Garden, by Derek Fell

This is the book that I wanted the insipid Everyday Monet to be. It's a detailed guide by a man who is an expert gardener and photographer, and used to work for Burpee Seeds. I'm not sure there has ever been a more perfect person to write a book.

Fell's book goes into great detail on exactly how Monet's garden was designed and why, and what an ordinary gardener can do to use some of the same principles on their own garden. He's both helpful and realistic in terms of what an ordinary person can actually do.

If you want to have a garden exactly like Monet's the short answer is that you probably can't, at least not in the way the garden is now planted and managed, as a complex space with intense color through three seasons and every inch of soil vibrant with healthy plants. Unless you are prepared to employ nine gardeners who work like dervishes under the eagle eye at the head gardener, it's unlikely you will be able to replicate the full grandeur of Giverny. Also, you would need to use a backhoe to completely dig up exhausted planting beds for renovation and replanting almost every year. It also require a range of greenhouses to grow nearly 200,000 annuals, biennials, and perennials.

Some of the design elements of Monet's garden that Fell explains are shimmer and sparkle, which Monet attained by planting white flowers amongst colored flowers, bicolored flowers, and flowers whose thin petals give a sense of translucence, such as poppies or cosmos.

There's sections on water gardens, structures such as bridges, benches, and leafy walkways, suggestions for how an ordinary gardener could replicate some effects similar to those in Giverny, and, again, a realistic sense of what makes sense for someone who is not Monet. For instance he very sensibly warns against wisteria, which is gorgeous if you have nine gardeners and will engulf your garden like a pretty purple eldritch horror if you don't.

This book is exactly what I wanted, and I look forward to putting some of its suggestions into practice.

Fell has written a lot of very tempting gardening books, but for now I am restraining myself.

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