Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 7

Wednesday reading and to-reads

I'm reading too many things to do them all justice, and then interrupting them with other things, but the things I've spent most time with are

--More of Life Is Not Useful, by Ailton Krenak. The first essay was good; I felt more at sea in the second and now the third--I can't quite follow the logic of where he goes all the time, and sometimes there are jargonish phrases that I don't get. Even so, there are moments I like very much.

This, for instance, is both serious but also amusingly expressed:...

kittens doing kitten things

Only these cats are doing kitten things in the heart of the Amazon. The video was sent to me by my friend and tutor--she said I could share it. The Siamese cat is the mother, Mia. The white kitten is her adoptee, named Squiper. The black one is Luna, and the tabby is Anastasia. Apologies for the blurriness; for some reason it got formatted large-style rather than phone-style.



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Two remarkable (longish) short stories

I don't read half as much as I'd like to, but now and then things spur me to read something and then wow! Amazed and delighted.

The first is a novelette in the December 2024 issue of Clarkesworld: "Lucie Loves Neutrons and the Good Samarium," by Thoraiya Dyer. It's an intimate story about a lesbian couple, Lucie and Izzy, both scientists (respectively from Tahiti and Australia, but living in France), and Miron Król, the Polish astronaut who fathers their baby. A nuclear war is going on in Europe...

"Looking at the mountain is an instant relief from all pain"

Some quotes from Ailton Krenak's Life is Not Useful, (trans. Jamille Pinheiro Dias). These are from the essay "You Can't Eat Money."

Here, on the other side of the river, there is a mountain that guards our village ... Looking at the mountain is an instant relief from all pain. Life moves through everything, through rock, the ozone layer, glaciers. Life goes from the oceans to solid ground; it crosses from north to south in all directions. Life is this crossing of the planet's living organism on ...

prayer to the bright object in the western sky

Walking home from the supermarket in the dark around 6 pm, I saw in the Western sky something brighter and larger than a star but not quite as large as a streetlamp light. Could it be Venus? I wondered. That big? Maybe?

Or would it start moving and reveal itself to be a plane?

Not an asteroid, probably--we'd have heard (or would we???)

So I kept my eyes fixed on it as I walked, saying, Please don't be a plane, please be Venus, please be magnificent morning star evening star Venus, please don't sta...

Maria Herrick Bray--emergency lighthouse tender, naturalist, activist

There was a great article by Jeremy C. Fox in the Boston Globe a few days ago about Maria Herrick Bray (1828–1921), whose identifiers therein are way more extensive than in my subject line: "abolitionist, suffragist, temperance leader, lay minister, innkeeper, writer, 'editress,' naturalist, lecturer, matron of a women’s shelter, and philanthropist." But the article leads with the heroic feat for which she's best remembered:

For three days and nights in 1864, from her wedding anniversary to Chri...

Mnemonic traditions and listening

In The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler made the fact that octopuses were able to write a central part of what indicates they're advanced (a character says, “Yes, they have writing… which is an enormous leap in cultural evolution”)--a hugely ethnocentric notion.

So it's very affirming to read Natalia Brizuela's introduction to another brief collection of essays by the Indigenous Brazilian activist Ailton Krenak. (The collection is called Life Is Not Useful.) She writes:

Yasnaya Aguilar, the Mixé li...

which oak leaf are you today

Thin and sharp, edges honed to keen points?

Broad and wide, a surface on which others may place their needs, but a bit battered and stained?

Round and open-lobed, expansively and graciously symmetrical?

Anemone-like, your parts drifting across each other, more to you than you can account for or control?

(Feel free to respond with a different oak leaf that represents you today)

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the sound of 40 miles per hour

Wakanomori found a battered aluminum tuning fork in the road, not any old tuning fork: a police speed gun radar tuning fork, with 40 m.p.h. stamped on it.

Stationary speed radars work by shooting radio waves out at cars and then noting the frequency at which they bounce back. So this is the sound that equates to the frequency produced by waves traveling back after hitting a vehicle going 40 miles per hour.


It's the tune of a speed.

Movement sings.



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always things to do -- for example

I've been supporting Beautiful Day RI as a monthly donor for years. They're a nonprofit that helps newly arrived refugees acclimate to the United States and get job skills (and an income) through the business of granola making and ancillary work. They also run language classes and classes for refugee teens. Their team is largely run by former refugees, people from Syria, Somalia, Iraq, DR Congo, Afghanistan and more. I did a post about the organization in 2020 --it has some nice photos.

The other ...