Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 92

between a rock and a hard place, or between...

Scylla and Charybdis

the devil and the deep blue sea

... any others?

In my personal experience, it's Between the Busy Road and the Poison Ivy



That dappled sidewalk may look inviting, but if you step from the curb YOU ARE IN THE PATH OF TRUCKS AND CARS and if you brush against the foliage on the right, you will have itchy ankles: it's poison ivy.

Two people can't walk abreast very easily there. One person could practice their balancing on the pale curb, or the other could practice elf-walking ligh...

Noblebright stories

The writer C.J. Brightly and her colleague Mike Reeves-McMillan got into a discussion sometime ago about a type of fantasy fiction that’s in contrast to grimdark. The term they adopted for the type of story they had in mind was noblebright.

Here’s how C.J. Brightly describes noblebright. (Complete description here.)

Noblebright fantasy has at least one important character with noble, idealistic motives who does the right thing out of principle. The character is flawed, but his or her actions ar...

A just-for-Goodreads blog post

I wasn't sure if I'd like Goodreads' new layout (to my mind it seemed busy in a way that reminded me unpleasantly of Facebook), but just now I ended up reading two interesting reviews by people whom I don't follow--they came up in my feed because people I *do* follow commented on them. I wouldn't have gone looking for reviews of those particular books, but enjoyed reading them--this friends-of-friends method of discovery worked nicely.

One more

wakanomori rightly suggested that we need the fading moonflower as well, evanescent as the dew that spangles it. Like the dew, fading as the sun rises.

Moon and moonflower

A moonflower is like a morning glory, but it opens in the evening and blooms through the night. It's very fragrant. In Japanese they're yūgao (夕顔), "evening faces." In Genji Monogatari, the woman called Yūgao gets one of the most exciting stories--attacked by a jealous spirit of one of Genji's other lovers. Genji actually draws a sword and everything! (This is remarkable because mainly men in Genji Monogatari don't get any more active than slipping into women's sleeping quarters or taking wal...

cicada song and una sonrisa hermosa

At night the katydids have taken up their song, and in the day there are cicadas. Let me tiptoe past an observation about the waning of the summer...

About those cicadas. Their sheeny noise, especially on a humid day like today, gives me an impression that they're burnishing the air the way potters can burnish bowls or weavers can burnish cloth. The air on humid days is like finest shining mist curtains, and the cicadas polish it with their song.

I missed my chance this summer to take a Spanish...

Thoughts on the "Grease" phenomenon

I've had a number of things simmering on the back burners of my mind, and one of them is the "Grease" phenomenon: stories in which a socially conforming character transforms into something (supposedly) excitingly transgressive to make a romance work out--as in the musical Grease. The girl changes completely; the boy, not at all. (The genders can be reversed, though, as in stories in which a manic pixie dream girl stories transforms someone who's supposedly, or actually, stodgy or straitlaced...

Pocumtuck Homelands Festival

When I left the possums with the woman at Medicine Mammals, she invited me to come to the Pocumtuck Homelands Festival, on the banks of the Connecticut River in Turners Falls--an old mill town where once I heard Anaïs Mitchell perform. Yesterday, wakanomori and I went, and it turned out to be a wonderful time, full of connections, synchronicity, and good news about the possums.



We happened to arrive at exactly the moment that the Akwesasne Women Singers, featuring Bear Fox, were singing songs...

will to live

On Monday, I was out for a morning run, not very far from home, when I came upon a possum that had been hit by a car. I was passing it, when I heard a wheezing, hissing, chirping sort of noise, and saw a little, blind, baby possum, with just a shadow of gray fuzz on its body, struggling by the side of the road. It had either been thrown there or had somehow managed to creep its way over. And then I saw that there was another, a little way off.

Those babies were in a desperate state, and tryin...

Irom Sharmila to give up her fast and enter politics

Irom Sharmila, the hunger striker and political prisoner from Manipur, in northeastern India (very far northeastern: it's in the portion of India that's on the other side of Bangladesh), has announced that she is going to give up her hunger strike in August and stand for election.

I think this is a very good decision. She has been on a hunger strike for sixteen years. As a means of accomplishing her goal (ending the law that lets the Indian military take the lives of Manipuris with impunity),...