Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 140

Pete Seeger

I'll miss you, Pete. Yours is one of the first singing voices I ever heard, and you were an all-around hero. Waving at you. I'll remember you. I'll be singing your songs.

Terms of Service

Tumblr just updated its terms of service--you have to accept them before you can access the site.

Every now and then I've tried reading terms of service--just for the cussedness of it, just for the I'm-on-the-hook-legally-for-signing-this-thing-edness of it. And I'm reading, oh yes, so reading, look at me read! . . . And then before I know it, in fact all I'm doing is thinking about reading as I scroll rapidly down, wondering just how long terms of service can possibly be.

"I think the only pe...

brooding on conquest--then something more encouraging

Here is the other thing about Canajoharie: It is the site of battle and conquest.



If you read its Wikipedia page, you'll see that it's near the site of a Mohawk town of the same name. That's a weird nicety: preserving the place names of towns you've conquered and whose inhabitants you've driven off or worse.

This whole country is built on conquest, a fact that isn't acknowledged very often.

. . . Okay, here is something more cheering.

From Nunavut, Canada: a company that is working on putting vi...

A dinosaur utopia

The Arkell Museum in Canajoharie, New York (a town celebrated by They Might Be Giants in a song--can your town say as much? Mine cannot--but more about Canajoharie later) has been assiduously advertising its exhibit of art from James Gurney's Dinotopia since October. Yesterday the ninja girl, the healing angel, and I went to see it.

Do you know Dinotopia? James Gurney imagined an island populated by sentient dinosaurs and humans, living together. Gurney's worldbuilding is fabulous, and his ar...

Artistic vision, choices, fate--the story of a band called "Death"

Sherwood Smith has some thoughts on a documentary called "A Band Called Death," the story of a punk rock band some brothers formed in the late 1970s, and named "Death" after the brothers' father died. The story of their choices and the outcomes is heartbreaking and will hit home for anyone who's ever had a vision they didn't want to sacrifice. Entry is at Book View Cafe:

"The Persistence of Vision"

hoarfrost flowers

too delicate to pick

drown your arms

That song, "Clamanda," those lines,

And shall the world with dread alarms
Compel you now to ground your arms

I'm hearing it as drown your arms

The scene--

Archers drown your fiery bolts
Foot soldiers, your flaming swords
Into the wide sea send them
Into the ocean plunge them
Now kneel here on the shingle
And drown your incandescent rage
In the brine of your deep grief

But I just made that up. The actual hymn is more real, more intense:

fires fill the sky from whence you came
And brimstone in a driving rai...

three things, and a bonus

snow squall
On the way to my father's there was a snow squall. The trees melted away and the lanes of the highway disappeared.



pizza
I am so sorry, but it must be said. Here we have a leaning tower of pizza . . . boxes.



ice
This puddle has the smoothest ice, the best ice. if you run and slide, you can go almost clear across--no friction.



The ice has creatures. . .


And treasures . . .



a bonus

In her Q&A about Ancillary Justice over at io9, ann_leckie shared some of the music that's in the book, includi...

a different sort of bingo

You know how people make up bingo boards for various dislikable or problematic things, putting in all the typical elements you can get with those things? One of the first ones I remember seeing was a handmade one about hipsters (the kind of bingo board a hipster would make--ohhhh!)

But the bingo-board format is a great way for arraying visually elements in a novel, if you want to tell people about it and maybe intrigue them--which I do. And so . . .

Behold! Pen Pal Bingo!


Would you like a helpi...

oh, /that/ Sherlock

My dad was talking about this great BBC mystery series he'd been watching recently, a redoing of Sherlock Holmes, and I said, yeah, wow, there are lots and lots of those around these days, and he said, well this one is really quite good, would I like to see an episode, and I said, sure, why not--and, dear Internet, it was Sherlock he was talking about! It's so funny if you've heard something talked about and talked about and talked about in one particular way, to then hear it talked about in...