Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 15

Benjamin Zephaniah

Sometimes I feel fond of a person based solely on one acquaintance. That's how it is for me with Benjamin Zephaniah: I knew him solely for his "Tam Lyn Retold," which he created with Eliza Carthy as part of The Imagined Village, a project "intended to produce modern folk music that represented modern multiculturalism in the United Kingdom" (Wikipedia). "Tam Lyn Retold" recasts Tam Lin as a war refugee threatened with deportation whose lover holds onto him despite his turning into "a victim, a l...

The inanimate object

Sometimes on Wednesday nights, I join an online writing session--you know the type of thing: everyone introduces themselves, then settles down for X amount of time for writing, then comes back together to chat about it. Usually, along with the introductions, there's some kind of icebreaker question...

(  CW! You are about to enter the realm of petty, competitive thoughts and resentments!  )

So there you go folks! Unvarnished Asakiyume!

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capitalism and Thanksgiving

I find it amazing and daunting to see how the capitalist machine took a holiday that has very little that's commercializable to it (you buy food; you may buy tickets to visit family--that's it) and turned it into a multiday festival of consumerism of all flavors.
Black Friday--buy buy buy from major retailers of all stripes!
Small Business Saturday--don't forget the little guys, especially those near you! Buy buy buy!
Cyber Monday--*wringing hands* But what about the online vendors? Please cast ...

un très bon micro

I've started listening to Denis Bertet's 2021 Tikuna classes. OMG great French review because he says everything in French and then translates into Spanish, so if there's something I don't remember, I can catch it the second time around.

First class he shared a video of a man sitting in his house, introducing himself, and asked the students for things they noticed about the language on first hearing (although the class included both people who were familiar with the language and/or culture and ab...

languages-lifeways-connections

It was a peak linguistic delight to listen to a presentation, given in Portuguese by a charismatic Colombian researcher named Mayra Ricardo Zuluaga, on a film she and a Tikuna scholar (meaning, in this case, a scholar who is Tikuna) named Sandra Fernández Sebastián had made about huito (in Tikuna, é), the fruit that's so important in Tikuna culture. It makes a deep, blue-black dye, and painting this on you confers protection and blessings. It's used on babies for this purpose, and in coming-of-a...

The Sleeping Soldier

I've been daunted by the idea of trying to do justice to Aster Glenn Gray's The Sleeping Soldier here on Dreamwidth. Somehow I did manage, finally, to say a few things on Goodreads, but when I think about writing a DW post, I think about saying more, or making it more personal, or something. And then I wilt. And that's a shame, because I love this book. All of AGG's books are fun, thoughtful tales, but this one really nails a central theme of hers, which is what friendship means or has meant for...

some reading notes, some dashing birds

rachelmanija 's great review of Goddess of Yesterday (by Caroline Cooney) made me want to read it too--I did, and I enjoyed it very much. It really truly felt like the story was being told to me by a young girl from Trojan War times. I liked Anaxanadra very much, liked how observant she was, how she learned quickly and worked for her own survival, and that she took a liking to--and then felt loyalty and concern for--the various people she met.

What had absolutely pushed me from "Hmmm, cool book; ...

clades!!

In Ann Leckie's Translation State, Presger Translator society thinks of itself in terms of clades--like lineages among plain old non-Presger Translator humans, but clade also has an everyday, this-world meaning, which is a taxonomical group that shares a common ancestor.

Humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons are in the hominoid clade. They share with Old- and New-World monkeys the clade of anthropoids. Anthropoids and prosimians (a group that includes lemurs and tarsiers) compris...

un caballo misterioso

There's something inherently mysterious about living on the edge of thousands of miles of rain forest. Mysterious things just happen; that's just the way it is.

My tutor sent me this video (and gave me permission to share it) of an eerie encounter she had with a horse the other evening. For the record, I saw no horses whatsoever while I was down there, and though I'm sure that there are people who do have horses, I find it hard to imagine them in the neighborhoods I was in. This horse was apparen...

"I'm teaching myself Hebrew"

The teacher I used to work with in Holyoke asked me back to give a talk on writing to her high school-aged students, who are working on personal narratives. These are all kids for whom regular high school hasn't worked out, but they are still fighting for an education and a future, and the teachers at this program are 100 percent dedicated to helping them with that.

This happened in front of the building housing the program. This is these kids' daily life.

We talked about what makes writing hard, ...