some kind of gay boat festival

A soloist played this at church yesterday (interesting Palm Sunday choice, but it came together in the message), and I've been obsessed with it for 24 hours now.

Kind of soon after the last one, but trying to clear the deck for Trans Rights Readathon books, even if it's a bit haphazard this year.

(I was poking around on youtube, and saw maybe half a dozen booktubers using the hashtag, and several of them were authors suggesting their own books, which is fine! I even bought one, and someone was doing a round up of one-star trans books they'd read, which... didn't seem to be in the spirit of the thing? But maybe they're leading up to doing five star reviews later in the week? Still.)


After That by Lorna Crozier
Local poet writes about mourning the death of her partner of four decades, following a slow decline and long illness. I feel like writing about grief is a whole sub genre of poetry, and can fall into trite or overdone, which would be a terrible thing to say about someone processing an actual loss, but fortunately, I don't have to say it about this book!

Both the individual poems and the structure of the book as a whole worked perfectly. There's something of a progression from blank incomprehension to starting to pick up the pieces, but not in a terribly linear way. At the centre of the book, are lists of ways to get over loss, "Seven Ways to Keep on Going" then "Six Ways" and so down to down, and you realise that the fragments that showed up between poems through the book are items from those lists, scraps she's gathering together and trying to put into some kind of order. Several poems are biting comments on other people offering received wisdom on how to handle loss, not aimed at the givers themselves, but at the idea that there's any map besides the one you make yourself. She imagines a goat coming through the house and eating all the funeral flowers, she imagines hauntings, wishing for them more than dreading them. Crozier is from Saskatchewan, and a number of her poems reminded me of Anne Szumigalski's writing about loneliness and isolation. The last poem is a single list: "One Way to Keep on Going," and no clear resolution.

(I will add that it was a little odd to think about this in technical terms, as I know the poet in passing, and mostly feel really bad that her partner died! I hope she's doing okay.) I wish I had the book to quote it, but back to the library it went. I might end up buying it.


Fayne by Ann-Marie MacDonald
(But it's weird that it happened twice meme re: historical fiction with a non-binary main character and magical vibes. Though both this and The Cure for Drowning book a radically different run at those ideas.)

Our hero(ine) in this case grew up in the Scottish borderlands (or the English borderlands), in the late 19th century, raised by an absent-mindedly affectionate (or conflict avoidant to the point of infamy) father, whose barony mostly consists of a patch of moorland, a standing stone, an unremarkable old manor, and about five servant. He married an American heiress, who allegedly died giving birth to the protagonist, but might also be a protagonist herself. We read her letters intercut with her daughter's narrative, then flashback to her meeting with the the baron, and life in Edinburgh and on the more. Meanwhile, the child is trying to figure out her place in the world, when she wants to be a medical doctor, and her father has finally noticed that she should probably be wearing like dresses and stuff, and is also thinking of marrying again. But what happened to her mother? Is she actually a young lady, or something else? Why is her dead older brother haunting her? What is going on with the old man of all work and his buckets of muck from the bog?

It's a long book. I ran into my brothers in law reading it when it came out, and their feeling as of about a third of the way in was that it could've been a good deal shorter. I'm assuming they'd just hit the flashback about the mother, which seemed to just repeat the information we'd been getting from her letters. And to a certain extent I agree that maybe the letters might have been cut? But on the other hand, I really appreciated the jarring changes in style between our pedantic aristocratic main character, and her chatty Irish American mother. In any case, once past that first long flashback, the alternating timelines and the reasons therefore become increasingly clear, and increasingly tense as the book continued. The reader starts to realise that pretty much everyone is lying all the time. Will the protagonist figure out the truth in time? Who's actually alive or dead? Which of the multiple orphans have which established characters as parents?

There's a delightful mix of playing in the style of long Victorian gothic novels (several of which, especially Jane Eyre, get name checked), mixing with the grim reality of what the Victorian medical system would do to women, non-binary people, gay men, and on and on and on. There are the joys of science and the work engine of the Scottish Enlightenment discovering fossils and describing electricity and bridging the Firth of Forth, and there's the way that the baron can wield his power with no one questioning him. There's also something much much older on the moor. I liked the way MacDonald balanced all of this, and didn't shy away from the brutality or the beauty. I maybe felt like the borderlands = gender confusion metaphor was laid on a bit thick, but it somewhat went with the meta tone of some of the book. I'm really not scratching the surface of how many characters and relationships there are, and how much your perception of characters change over the course of the book.

It's an absolute voyage, and I'm so happy I bought a ticket.


Curious Sounds by francesca ekwuyasi & Roger Mooking
This book's a bit of an odd duck, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. The core of it is multi-genre artist Roger Mooking making a micro-album playing with the idea that we now have attention spans shorter than goldfish. Each song is between eight seconds and a minute and a half, and is paired with a story between twenty and a hundred words long, and a piece of art; they collectively talk about youth, life and death. That's the second half of the book.

The first half of the book is a conversation between Roger Mooking and author francesca ekwuyasi (who I pretty much only know from Butter, Honey, Pig, Bread, and indeed the two met when Mooking was defending that book on Canada Reads). The album/stories/art give direction to the conversation, but it ends up being mostly about different forms of creativity, family, history and art. ekwuyasi is a woman who loves a footnote, and also ties the project into other discussions about trauma and culture and art happening in the Black community.

I got more out of the first part, especially in regards to why people create, and the emotions around creativity. Maybe I'd appreciate the album more on listening to it again, but I've gotta say it was a lot all at once. It's very dense, and happens very fast (in nineteen minutes and twenty seconds), and though I generally liked Mooking's music and art (not as sold on the prose), it's just... a lot. Which is the point! It's just that I hit the thing with modern art where I get that it's making a point, but I don't always enjoy the ride? Or find the message itself buried by the medium? Art for artists, or something?

It's a beautiful book though, and I'm glad they got to make it together.

Ancillary Mercy by Anne Leckie, narrated by Adjoa Andoh
(First of all, can we talk about this cover design? I know there's complicated issues around art use on digital releases, etc, but I really liked the space ships, and the only explanation I can come up with for this one is that no one in Orbit/Hachette's design office has ever menstruated.)

But I was very pleased with the book itself! Aliens, space battles, people trying to murder emperors, the whole bag. I do actually understand why the middle book had to be there, now, which I figured I would by the end: It's hard for Breq to worry about losing things when there's just her and Seivarden on a suicide run, so spending a book building up a community for Breq to defend worked for me. ( Some spoilers )


A Grandmother Begins the Story by Michelle Porter
The intertwined narratives of five generations of Métis women, a variety of bison, two dogs, a car, and the prairie. I admire the confidence of this author! She's just like, "And it's going to have dirt as a point of view character! And you're going to have to go with it or get out of the car."

The chapters are only a few pages long, the book flittering between characters telling and retelling stories from a variety of perspectives: The grandmother talking to her granddaughter, her own grandmother now in the spirit world, her mother talking to her sister's ghost, while the youngest generation, separated by adoption into an non-Indigenous family, is now trying to catch up with centuries of backstory, and also figure out her own trashfire of a life. Meanwhile the bison aren't doing much better! Porter does a fantastic job of giving each character a distinct voice, and letting them all have a point of view that makes sense to them, if not to anyone else. I loved seeing how it all fit together in the end, and think it would reward rereading.

If I had one quibble with it, it's that the middle generation, the grandmother who wants to commit suicide, felt like a bit of a cypher. I suspect this is somewhat intentional, and she never really gets much of her own point of view shown, but I still wish I could've gotten a better feel for her.


The Cure for Drowning by Loghan Paylor
I think there exist two books: the book I wanted to read, and the book this actually is. I (to a certain extent) believe that both have their place, but I sure spent a lot of time reading this book wishing it was a different one. ( Somewhat long, and fairly negative (Maybe unfairly negative? Unclear?) )

I'm thinking of doing the seven covers in seven days meme, but I'm not sure what kind of books to include. Also, I'm bored. Thus: a poll.

(The meme is you post seven book covers, just the cover, context free)

I was just checking in on a livestream to see how the Iceland volcano is coming along (ideally I would like to watch lava flowing about, but not near any people or infrastructure), and Shawn Willsey, a geology professor who does a lot of explainers and odes to random roadcuts, was on the chat.

Someone was talking about following patterns of GPS data and minor earthquakes trying to work out how to predict eruptions, and Willsey replied: "Better to assume no pattern. Humans don't like that though."

Which could cover a lot of things, really.

CBC: The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial was a pop culture obsession. Saudi trolls may have had a hand in that.

I listened to the first three episodes of the Who Trolled Amber podcast, which I think is worth the time (there's paid early access for all of them, but they're coming out free with ads once a week). I've been so indifferent to the DCEU that I had heard that her role was cut back and she was cut out of posters/trailers, but had not heard that she was banned from so much as tweeting about the film, let alone going to press events. The first three episodes of the series haven't gotten up to the source of the bots mentioned in the article about, so I'll have to wait and see how that plays out. I predict it will piss me off.

And yeah, I'm having Amber Heard feelings in 2024. I don't know her. I've seen maybe two of her films (she was the cute bi girl in Magic Mike XXL!. I didn't really follow the trial past Princess Weekes' breakdown of it. But she's just such a perfect example of how you can't fucking win, you know? I know multiple people who ate up the "They're both terrible" line, if not quite "he did nothing wrong." Like you go through the world knowing that women and queer people are going to get the short end of the stick, just as background radiation, and then you see it on a giant billboard, in case you imagined you could forget for fifteen fucking seconds.

At best, the podcast means we're about to hit the part of the cycle where a bunch of people go, "Oh, shit. My bad. Society sure does treat women like shit! But at least we've learned and will do better!" before doing the exact same thing to the next acceptable punching bag. At worst, people will continue to troll her, and put him on a god-damn pedestal.

I'm very tired.