Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 9

seige perilous

There's a chair beside the path in the woods. Some leaves have collected on it.

Would you sit on it?



I sent the photo to my Tikuna tutor. She said maybe it's the seat of Madre Monte, a guardian of the forest and the animals in it, a terror to hunters, clearcutters, and fishers. She appears in the deep forest when there are storms, is responsible for water-borne ailments, and her screams are louder than thunder (says Spanish-language Wikipedia).

But maybe in her quieter moments, she appreciates a g...

boba--sort of

When I make casabe, I grate cassava and then squeeze out the fluid. The fluid is always milky white--cassava starch, aka, tapioca. The last time I did this, I let that starch dry... and there it was, actual tapioca, like I buy in the store! That I made out myself! Not very much (maybe a tablespoon's worth), but still!

I decided to use my homemade tapioca (generously supplemented with store-bought tapioca) to make boba, the bubbles in bubble tea. First step was to find some guidance on how to do ...

a strangeness

I saw the aurora. I saw it only with my eyes, not through a camera. It was not cherry pink or brilliant turquoise. It was a mysterious strangeness, a hint of something that made me think I was imagining. And then, as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I realized it was really there, weird veils of color, faint and deep, like iridescence on black bird's feathers. I laughed for joy to have all those vibrating, excited electrons overhead, our atmosphere talking to me in a new way about the sun.

Th...

Icarus and the birds, pawpaw

I wrote a microfiction about Icarus the other day:

Sent out to gather feathers for his father's project, Icarus only picked up ones that birds had shed--he never harmed a single bird. And he learned the birds the feathers came from: osprey, gull, raven, jay, starling.

Later, when he flew too close to the sun and the wax melted, when the feathers were coming out one by one, when he was falling, the birds remembered his careful ways and came to rescue him, in flocks and bands and murmurations.

I als...

More on The Mountain in the Sea

The characters are so alone in this book. There's no community and no model for/of community--at all! Just people groping toward (or away from) one another on an individual basis. Evrim, the sole android ever created, Ha, the solo octopus researcher at the research site, Rustem the solo hacker, Altantsetseg the solo security agent, Arnkatla Minervudóttir-Chan (LOL, Minerva's daughter), the solo designer of the android. Eiko, the enslaved guy on the fishing ship, strives not to be solo: he active...

The gate was shut but the invitation was in plain view

Yesterday mallorys_camera and I went for a walk in a location more or less equidistant between the two of us (more or less... it was closer to me, though). After a couple of false starts that included infiltrating the high school bathrooms during a soccer tournament (we blended right in: "How's Dustin enjoying soccer, Sandy?" she asked me. "Oh, he's loving it, Lisa. He'll be playing for Real Madrid one day, you just wait"), we found ourselves at the entrance to the Housatonic Flats Reserve.

The g...

In the context of my previous entry, this news story was hilarious

Or, octopuses can be assholes, too. (And you thought only human bosses were jerks)

"Octopuses and fish share leadership--and enforcement--in group hunting."

The octopuses punch the low-performing or freeloading fish. They punch them!

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Wednesday Reading: The Mountain in the Sea and Point Fives

I'm nearly done with The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler, which I picked up hoping and expecting a cool nonhuman intelligence first-contact situation (with octopuses), and which has that, sort of, but is mainly about the nature of consciousness and the mind, human loneliness, and How Bad We Humans Are For This World Of Ours. To my amusement and chagrin, the plotline that pulled me in is the corporate scheming one--more so than the octopus researcher + lonely android, and definitely more than ...

Not One of Us, Issue 80

I'm in this issue of Not One of Us with a piece of very short flash fiction, "Freeing .33333..."

It's ironic, maybe, to write flash about a number that goes on forever, but like the narrator, I've always been fascinated by this endlessly repeating number, and a short form is as good as a long form, I suppose, to talk about something infinite.

There are several other offerings in this issue that I loved--noteworthy among them sovay 's poem "Fair Exchange," about what the dead want. (You know it ins...

Why don't you...

Happy mid-Autumn festival, one day late! Please enjoy this Google doodle that was only shown to people in East Asia. In the United States Google was busy urging us to register to vote.

It was a lovely harvest moon--with a bite taken out of it in these parts, due to a partial lunar eclipse. Like a ghostly version of the moon cakes made in its honor.

Some time ago I learned how to ask questions using "Why" in Tikuna. I gave some sample questions (Why is the cat happy? Why are you tired?) and my tut...