Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 62

Covid RAAAAAAGE

Where I Live, No One Cares About COVID

Article copied in comment due to paywall.

My letter to the editor:

You published an article glorifying "I don't care about covid." One in a hundred American citizens over 65 has died of covid. 800,000 Americans have died of covid. People can't get essential medical care for life-threatening issues like cancer because hospitals are filled with people who didn't care about covid. That article is essentially in favor of bioterrorism - deliberately spreading a deadly disease - and you gave it a platform.

You are complicit in spreading that message. I got a subscription because of Ed Yong, but I cannot continue to support you publishing propaganda that is killing hundreds of Americans every day. I have canceled my subscription and I hope you cancel future articles advocating spreading deadly diseases.

ETA: The letter focuses on Americans because the article was about America, and that kind of trash publication only cares about Americans. I know it's a worldwide issue!

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Welcome to the Walk-In Freezer Part II

I poured water into a pan for the chooks, then put a hot pad wrapped in a towel beside it for the night. It was still liquid this morning, albeit absolutely filthy. (This is why my regular waterers have nipples.) Oh well, better dirty water than no water.

I had to unfreeze the nipples again this morning with hot water (heating pad didn't defrost them), but the water inside was still liquid.

I think the chooks will survive. They don't drink after dark anyway, so it's really just an early morning issue (before I get up).

I forgot to take out the trash cans last week, so I had an extremely heavy trash can with two weeks worth of trash. It has wheels so normally I take it down the driveway, but the driveway is basically an ice slide, so I had to lug it down a long, steep flight of snow-covered stairs. Congratulate me, it only spilled once.

My new curtains were worth the absolutely crazy hassle of installing them. They look great, they drape beautifully, they feel nice, they block my obnoxious neighbors' obnoxious motion-activated floodlights, and when you pull them, they keep in the heat.

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Welcome to the Walk-In Freezer

Things that didn't work this morning until I poured hot water over them:

The chicken run latches.

The chicken waterer nipples (they peck them to get water).

The lock to my shed.

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Snow!

It just started snowing!

Have a video of a squirrel in snow.

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Desmodus, by Melanie Tem

Desmodus is the genus of vampire bats, including the extinct giant vampire bat Desmodus draculae. The novel Desmodus is about a group of humanoids descended from vampire bats who live secretly on the fringes of society in modern times, and retain much of the habits and social structures of bats.

They can fly, they eat fruit and drink blood (mostly from animals, usually without harming them), they sense heat and echolocate, and they have tails. They live in a colony well outside of town, where they have a house designed for themselves with features like roosting areas and doors twenty feet up. Their young hang from the walls and ceiling in a communal nursery. Only a few of them can pass for human, even in baggy clothes and wearing hoods. They are matriarchal, with only the women hibernating, and in the winter they have to make a complicated migration to a secondary colony with the men driving huge refrigerated trucks with women hanging upside down in them.

The lives of the bat people are fascinating, weird, and often gross. There's a scene where the narrator, Joel, a depressed middle-aged bat guy, goes out to gather apples from the orchard for their annual journey. He's very annoyed that he's the only one actually working, while the other men are in the trees gobbling apples and pooping down on him.

This odd novel is either anthropological science fiction with strong elements of horror, or horror with strong elements of anthropological science fiction. There is a plot but most of the book is about what it's like to be a humanoid bat and have your whole life circumscribed by being a male humanoid bat in a world run by female humanoid bats. The gender issues are really interesting and I'm surprised this book wasn't nominated for a Tiptree Award.

There's a horrifying dark secret, a lot of bat family drama, and a strange, surreal conclusion. But mostly it's about being a bat person in a bat culture, and how much you like it probably depends on how interested you are in that premise. (Leaning into premise rating: A).

Content notes: bat child and infant death, a bat person who's racist and homophobic, gendered ableism among bat people (many of the male bat people have disabilities), murder of a disabled bat person, rape, incest.

Melanie Tem's books are all available on Kindle!

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Maggot Moon, by Sally Gardner. Illustrated by Julian Crouch.

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On the other side of the wall
there is a dark secret.
And the devil.
And the moon man.

I bought this book at a used bookshop, intrigued by the weird title and cover, the enigmatic blurb, and these really neat flip-book style interior illustrations of a rat scurrying from page to page. I thought it was a spooky children's book a la Coraline.

HahahahahahahaOMFG was I wrong. I may have never been more wrong.

I expected The Graveyard Book, and I got The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

This book won the Printz Award and the Carnegie Medal, and I can see why. The prose style is distinctive and the story has a pageturner quality; I read it in one sitting. It's also extremely well-designed. The illustrations aren't just good, they're very cleverly placed and the whole visual/reading package is extremely well-done.

Okay now I'm done being positive.

The other reason it won the Printz is that it's about Very Important Topics. It's about either an alternate history in which the Nazis won WWII and took over England, or an alternate history in which Russia took over England, or a historical fantasy in which some unnamed country which strongly resembles both Nazi Germany and postwar Russia took over England. Whichever it is, it's aiming for allegory rather than naturalism.

The main character, Standish Treadwell, is dyslexic. (So is the author). He can barely read and his narrative voice is very quirky/poetic. He attends school in Zone Seven, which is where you go if you're not in quite deep enough shit to be sent to a concentration camp YET. However, people disappear on the regular. His parents have disappeared before the book begins, and it starts after his best friend Hector has also disappeared.

It's 1956 and the Motherland is preparing to send a rocket to the moon. There's a giant wall and a mysterious giant building which always has electricity, which everyone is forbidden to go near. If you think you know where this is going, yep! You're totally right.

There is a lot of extremely graphic violence. A teacher beats a boy to death in front of the entire class, in explicit detail, then gets shot in front of Standish. It turns out that Standish's mother had her tongue cut out, again in pretty graphic terms. And while we learn all these increasingly horrible details of what's going on, and the story hurtles toward what is clearly going to be a deeply depressing conclusion, we have the art.

Every couple pages, there's an illustration of a fly or a rat. They appear in different places, moving across the page and doing things in sequence, so it's almost a flip-book but not quite as there's too many pages in between the illustrations to work that way. At first it's really cute, with the fly flying across the pages and the rat going in and out of a tunnel. Those are the ones I saw when I opened the book in the bookstore, as I only open books to early sections so I don't spoil myself. Later in the book...

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I'm a bit puzzled as to who the audience for this book actually is. The Printz Award is for YA. The Carnegie Medal lists it as for ages 11+. It's way too graphically violent for younger kids and the illustrations are pure nightmare fuel, but other than that it reads more like a children's book than YA, both in terms of prose and due to self-consciously cute stuff like Hector and Standish's imaginary planet Juniper and their imaginary ice cream-colored car. I had to keep reminding myself that they were fifteen because they came across more like ten or eleven-year-olds.

Possibly the true audience is adults on book award committees.

This is a book that does what it intends to do, kept me engrossed, and has literary merit, but I didn't like it. Also, fuck those horrific drawings. I wish I'd never seen them.

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Please recommend a time-wasting website

I'm looking for something that has cheerful and interesting content about food, crafts, nature, science, history, gardening, culture, or random interesting stuff. It SHOULD NOT have popup or video ads. A comment section that's actually fun is a big plus. Reddit forums are totally fine.

Not into advice columns or politics.

Imagine FFA minus the interminable wank and all the topics I'm not interested in. Or Bored Panda from the years when it had actual enjoyable content about stuff like "This Russian artist makes cakes that look exactly like Faberge eggs" or "My hobby is creating fairy gardens for the field mice that live in my garden." Or Metafilter but without every other comment being "We're all doomed and I long for the merciful death of all humanity" or "You may think that's a cute article about creating fairy gardens for the field mice that live in your garden, but fairy gardens are actually highly problematic."

Rec away!

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What is Realism?

I'm excerpting some comments from the discussion on my post about Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family series. Some context that's known to those of us in the subthread but isn't explicitly stated, is that Sydney Taylor's series about a Jewish family in turn of the century New York City is very autobiographical, to the point that the characters are not only based on her real family, but with one exception (the baby brother) keep their real names.

Lirazel wrote: "The writer of the autobiography talks about how much the children's market had changed between the 50s, when the first three books in the series were written) and the 70s, when Taylor wrote Downtown and Ella. Taylor's style and subject matter worked brilliant in the 50s, but by the 70s, publishers and children's librarians were looking for more issues-based fiction. Taylor's books had always kind of...smoothed over the uglier parts of growing up poor in early 20th century New York (in a way that reminds me of Laura Ingalls Wilder's tendency to do the same), and that just didn't really fly anymore by the 70s.

So from what I remember, the publisher wanted her to write something a little grittier, but she didn't want to alienate all the readers who had loved the original books that were gentler. That's why Guido was introduced--he could be suffering from poverty in a more realistic way, but it wouldn't "taint" the characters that were already beloved. I think it was phrased more gently than that, but that's the impression I got of why Downtown is so different than the previous three books."

Rachel wrote: "It's funny how we think of realism. The first three books are classics because emotionally, they're incredibly realistic. I remember experiencing those same emotions as a kid, even though the details of the circumstances were so different. Taylor had to have been very faithful to what it felt like to be a kid, because so many of us find the books so relatable.

Downtown has more gritty poverty, but to me it feels less real/true than the books that were less realistic about social issues, but more realistic psychologically."

This reminded me of the endless debate over what's "realistic" in fantasy novels loosely based on medieval Europe. The rape and subjection of women is often considered a keynote of realism. But widespread premature death due to disease is not considered a necessary thing to include for the sake of realism, even though that was at least as much of a fact of life. (Imagine Game of Thrones if Cersei, Jaime, Joffrey, Arya, and Ned had all died of cholera or plague in book one.)

Or, going back to the original example, which is more "realistic," the events and emotions that stood out in Taylor's memory when recalling her childhood, or the dire poverty that was all around her, but wasn't how she personally experienced her childhood?

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Quarreling, They Met The Dragon, by Sharon Baker

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This cover is accurate in pretty much every way except that Senruh, the pictured sex worker, would never look that awkward. At least I assume he wouldn't because almost everyone he meets hits on him.

On the weird terraformed planet Naphar, early colonists genetically spliced themselves with native mammals, producing two new races who are interfertile: the Rabu, who are very tall (I think this means human height), and the Kakano, who are half that height and can see the Veil (some kind of red atmospheric feature) and so see at night. In some places the Kakano rule the Rabu, but in the city where the book is set, it's the reverse. Senruh is mixed-race.

The sun's intense radiation is damaging to humans, and even the genetically engineered people can't eat animal meat on Naphar as it's impregnated with toxic heavy metals. They must eat human meat to survive as I guess there's no other protein sources. Also, there are sacred flying lizards.

The only cannibalism trope I like is this specific one: it's necessary for survival on a hostile alien planet. Also, flying lizards.

The book itself is strange and uneven. An author's note says she interviewed hustlers to get Senruh right, and he does come across convincingly as one. Everything around him, however, is totally batshit and extremely iddy though not necessarily iddy to me.

He spends the first part of the book as a kept boy to a rich woman who addresses him with such amazing epithets that honestly I'm reviewing this book just to share some of them:

"My unlettered he-lizard."

"My small frightened turtle."

"My moonstruck gift of the night."

"My sensitive little bazaar-scuttler."

"My over-vigorous jewel."

"My filth-smeared gem."

"My small craven lizard."

"My dingy scrap of heavenstone."

"My potent, squalid little morsel."

That's only about a third of them. If that.

This book has a LOT of sex, mostly some flavor of dubcon or noncon, and even more dubcon and noncon perving on Senruh. At one point he gets publicly gang-raped in the marketplace by four other slaves on their mistress's order, so, yeah, that kind of book.

Senruh ends up on the lam with a Kakano slave with whom he has a cute bickering buddies with sexual tension relationship.

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The ending had a neat surprise and a sweet closing image. The world was interesting but-- and I can't believe I'm writing this-- I wanted more cannibalism and less sex.

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Clarissa is off the nest!

FINALLY. I rewarded her with an armload of dead leaves and tasty young weeds to scratch through and find the delicacies.

I've been dumping dead leaves, pine needles (PINE NEEBLES!), etc into the run. The chooks shred them, and the floor level gradually rises as they mix with the dirt and chicken manure. At some point this should all become extremely fertile earth I can transfer to the garden; in the interim, hopefully the run will flood less next time it rains.

I've been dumping chicken manure in various places where I don't already have anything growing but plan to plant in spring; it should be rotted enough by then that it won't have enough nitrogen to burn the plants. I have a bale of hay that I need to start dumping in similar places ASAP, so it can sit there and meld with the earth a bit over winter, and then I can plant there in spring.

It's supposed to rain tomorrow and snow on Friday.

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