Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 160

Two Books, part 2: The Other Half of the Sky

I was very excited to get The Other Half of the Sky (Athena Andreadis, ed.), as I like science fiction (though I rarely read it these days) and I like stories with strong female characters. This anthology promises both, and if the first story I read is anything to judge by, it will deliver.

I started with Aliette de Bodard’s “The Waiting Stars,” because I’ve been dying and dying to read something by Aliette. (And why have you not read anything yet, Asakiyume? There are plenty of opportunities....

a bog in early morning

golden golden early morning. So beautiful.





On this same early morning walk I saw two deer bound away and a heron fly by, and a bluebird. Also, I think on my travels I may have seen a yellow-crowned night heron--a strange dark thing, standing heronlike in the water, with a white patch on its head.


not my photo

Also, wirewalking has three ferrets, and one of them climbed up on me. I took a blurry photo:

two women

The first is
I've only ever seen her at a distance, but she makes an impression.

In the post office today, as I was waiting in line, someone came up behind...

a golden land

Two books, part 1: A Cup of Smoke

So I have two books that I'd like to share about. One is A Cup of Smoke, which I've mentioned before--a collection of short stories and poetry by Rachel Manija Brown. The other is The Other Half of the Sky, a collection of short stories featuring competent women in outer space, edited by Athena Andreadis. I'm dipping into both volumes, and I thought I'd share my findings as a way of encouraging you to give them a try, too.

From A Cup of Smoke, I decided to read the title story first. From The...

The air itself golden

The air itself was golden yesterday evening--living gold. "The fields arrayed in living gold"--no, the air itself. Shimmery--all your molecules are excited to move through it, your lungs are happy to inhale it.



And this May Day is a golden day--a nature's-first-green-is-gold Day






On my walk, on a piece of lawn owned by . . . the town? the supermarket? crazy, contorted dandelions. They were gasping and dying: you could tell by their wilting and twisting, thought it took me a moment to realize t...

Other scenes from Saturday

At the Harvard Science Center, Hermes signs the Boston Strong boards.



True Art?



Symphonic skies on the way home.

Only one T story

I wonder what other stories I thought I would tell you; I can only remember one, right now.

Boston's Mass Transit is known as the T. T for transit? I think. The lines are color coded. In one direction, the Blue Line's destination is Wonderland. Isn't that great? The train to Wonderland. That's the line you take to get to the airport.

There's a park at the airport stop, and from it you can watch the trains go by . . .



(You can also watch them from the station platform, of course...)



But I promise...

In Cambridge for the morning, and look who now has a Camb...

In Cambridge for the morning, and look who now has a Cambridge Public Library card, and is typing LJ entries on a Cambridge Public Library computer. Next mission: find out the location of this thing and that thing in town (things I used to know the whereabouts of, but establishments move around and put on new clothes if you're away for a decade or more), so I can entertain the ninja girl when she's finished with her job interview (not here; I took the T here after dropping her off).

I have a T...

Wittgenstein's birthday and other trivia

The Writer's Almanac informed me this morning that today is Wittgenstein's birthday. Of course I thought of sovay , occasional sufferer of the morose whisperings of a tiny, shoulder-sitting version of the philosopher.

Did you know, though, sovay , that not one, not two, but three of his siblings (he was one of nine children) committed suicide? So there was something in the Wittgenstein family well that was not doing anyone any favors.

Today must have been a good day for philosophers, because it i...