Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 27

Neptune Frost now streaming!

Neptune Frost is now available (for pay) through these streaming services (link includes Amazon and Apple, plus several others).

In addition, the soundtrack, Unanimous Goldmine, is also available.

This song, Mbere y'Intambara (Before the War), is my favorite. It's sung by Cécile Kayirebwa, a well-known, well-loved Rwandan singer, making her screen debut in this film.

And this piece, Terambere Ry'igihugu , shows the amazing, propulsive drumming--Himbaza Club, the drum collective that performs it, por...

Happy Tanabata

Since we don't have any bamboo handy, when the kids were little we'd attach our wishes to the branches of our birch tree or rhododendron bushes.

Here's a sweet illustration of what Tanabata celebrations used to look like in Edo-Period Japan. The artist is Sayuri Sasai; she posts on Instagram and Twitter. Here is her Tanabata post from Twitter:



( Link to tweet )

Her pictures of daily life during the Edo period are super charming (and informative!)--I think many of my Dreamwidth friends would like t...

New story: New Day Dawning

I have a new story out: "New Day Dawning."

A novel cyanobacterium is threatening ocean fish stocks, and Winna and Tomás are at an international conference convened to address the problem. Also at the conference is Káurë New Day, a participant from the Solimões Sodality whose presence warrants an FAQ and causes some strife.

Káurë New Day is named after Cacicus cela, called káurë in the Magüta language, and photographed here by Flickr user Francisco Piedrahita.



It's a pretty bird!

"Magüta" is an auto...

Neptune Frost

I just saw the Afrofuturist film Neptune Frost (2021; dir. Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman), and whoa. It's pure resistance poetry from beginning to end; it fights the gender binary; it braids pessimism and resilient hopefulness, and it's *beautiful*. The music, the colors--and the languages! Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Swahili, French, and English. Amazing.



Here's how one review summarizes it:

When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection ...

seven seconds of June

Have a seven-second ride down a road that leads from Amherst to B'town, MA:



Here is the tiny jungle I've been delighting myself with before my trip to the Actual Jungle. You can click through to see it larger.



And here are milkweeds, for pollinators' delectation:



And a sunset ... which is not true in its colors. My phone panics when faced with vividness: it renders the vivid red as yellow. WHY, phone? Why? In other news, I'm going to take an actual camera with me to the Amazon.



I still can't believe...

self-awareness and the desire to be known

I've been musing on self-awareness and on humans' desire to have machines be self-aware ever since the story about the guy at Google came out. My thoughts have run in all kinds of directions. For instance: about relationships up and down the awareness scale. Most of us likely have had relationships with beings more self-aware than we are (parents are generally more self-aware than toddlers, and all of us have been toddlers and had parents or others filling that role), and most of us likely have ...

malt

This entry repeats some of the stuff I said about brewing chicha in this entry , but consider this the revised, improved, and expanded version ;-)

In the rhyme "this is the house that jack built," there are these lines:

This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built. (etc.)

The picture always is of a sack. For example...


(Source: New York Public Library Digital Collections)

I never actually knew what malt was.

Fast-forward t...

Intervista ho hakerek na'in/ Interview with the author

These questions are a mix of Tetun and English. Where they're in Tetun (probably riddled with errors), I've supplied English, but I haven't attempted to translate my English-language questions into Tetun. Similarly, where Nando answered in Tetun, I've translated the answers into English, but where he answered in English, I haven't ventured a translation. Ha'u husu deskulpa tanba la bele tradús hotu ba Tetun 😓

Nando da Costa Pires
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Nando da Costa Pires is the author of "Mr. Mau Leki Meets an Eel," ...

Mr. Mau Leki Meets An Eel, by Fernando da Costa Pires

This is a story that Nando (Fernando da Costa Pires), whom I met in 2013 when I visited Ainaro, Timor-Leste, wrote. Stories of special relationships between people and the natural and supernatural world are not uncommon in Timor, but this story is unique: it's part of Nando's own family history. I've translated it into English, and we present you with both versions, so that readers of both Tetun and English can enjoy it. Tomorrow I will post an interview with Nando.

Fernando da Costa Pires

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Versau...

Big news re: the story from Timor-Leste

You may remember that I encouraged anyone I knew from my visit to Timor-Leste in 2013 to send in a story to Strange Horizons for their Southeast Asian writers issue. They were specifically looking for submissions from Timor-Leste.

My call on Facebook didn't get much traction--probably because I'm not very active on the site, so it deprioritizes my posts in people's feeds--but one acquaintance reached out to me, a guy called Nando. I remembered his smile super-well. He's just one year older than ...