Rixosous

Lunacon 2011 Schedule

My very belated Lunacon schedule.  Only got the final version at the con and am posting it via the lobby wi-fi.  And it's mutating even as I type...

Friday Night Ball a.k.a. Steampunk Ball
Friday 8:00-11:00pm
Susan de Guardiola
From Regency to Victorian and everything in between, come join us and dance the night away!  Dance mistress Susan de Guardiola will provide instruction.  Costumes are encouraged and appreciated, but not required.  [This is "Friday Night Ball" on my panel list and "Steampunk Ball" in the program.  I am going to do whatever I feel like.  So there!]

Book Reviewing
Saturday 6:00-7:00pm
Daniel Grotta, Susan de Guardiola, Meredith Schwartz
How to review books, what makes a good review and what makes a GREAT review.  [I personally think the Oxford comma is sacred...]

The Eye of Argon
Saturday night/Sunday 12:00midnight-2:00am
Michael Ventrella, Hildy Silverman, Keith DeCandido, Susan de Guardiola, Ef Deal
The worst science fiction story ever told gets a reading by our brave panel as they compete to go the longest without tripping over a misspelled word or laughing uncontrollably.  Audience members are also encouraged to take a chance.  Can you keep a straight face, especially when the panel beings acting out the story?  [Really, you must come to this panel!  After Arisia, Mike and Hildy and I are a practiced comedic team!]

Researching Historical Costumes
Sunday 2:00-3:00pm
Susan de Guardiola, Diane Kovalcin
[We don't need no stinking description!  That's good, since they didn't give us one!]

This should be an interesting con.  The program was done rather late, and we seem to be improvising as we go.  I've just been recruited to judge the masquerade as well.  I'm also probably going to crash The Alternate Regency Sunday at noon because the sole panelist is a friend of mine, and am about to be dragged off a 5:00pm Friday panel on Y.A. literature for adults.  "About" means right this second...

Alternate Westminster

The New York Times has created a slideshow of 102 best in breed champions from the Westminster Dog Show, which takes place in New York City every winter.  Aside from being an astonishing lesson in the possible genetic variety within a species, this also offers the chance for amateurs to take a look at the dogs and offer their own opinions.  This isn't quite up there with the Super Bowl or the NCAA brackets, but some of the dogs have great possibilities.  I'm not going to link to the picture of each winner, but you can see the whole slideshow here.  (Left: a dog.  No, really, it's a dog.  Seriously.)

Here are my selections.

Suisan

I picked up Phyllis Carol Agins' Suisan (Baen Books, 1992) in my favorite used book store last summer in Stratford because I mistook the title for my own first name.  Six months later, I grabbed it to read pretty much at random, and was startled to find that just when I'd been playing around with twisting "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," here was someone who'd already done it.  I didn't much care for the results, however.

It's competently written, and it started out interestingly enough, working from the dwarfs' point of view, with them being distinctly faerie-like (webbed feet!) and each having his own special expertise in their mingled mining and magic.  This part is fascinating.

Then it got, well, icky. 

Spoilers ahead!

Earnest on Broadway!

Brian Bedford's production of The Importance of Being Earnest is playing on Broadway!  This is an excellent production which I saw at Stratford eighteen months ago and shared my thoughts on then.  Bedford directs as well playing Lady Bracknell.  The latter is not as unusual as it sounds -- the role has been played by male actors enough to make it something of a tradition.  And this is not a drag portrayal; he's simply playing the part with his usual perfect comic timing.

Of the rest of the supporting cast, it looks like only Sara Topham (Gwendolyn Fairfax) made the transfer.  But the Desmond Heeley sets and costumes (complete with Lady Bracknell's astonishing collection of hats) appear to have come along.

I highly, highly recommend this production.  Bedford is a superb director of this sort of farcical drawing room comedy, and his Lady Bracknell is one for the ages. 

If you can't possibly make the show, here's a video sample courtesy of The New York Times.

Arisia 2011 Schedule

My ultra-crazy Arisia schedule for this weekend:

Children of Grace

I only just tripped over Bruce Hampton's frontier history tome Children of Grace: The Nez Perce War of 1877 (1994) at my grandparents' house over the Christmas holidays.  After flipping through a few pages, I decided it was irresistible and appropriated it for a few evenings' reading.  It turned out to be rather depressing, which didn't really surprise me -- white men vs. Native Americans on the American frontier is generally not a recipe for joy and good fellowship.

Counterfeit Magic

Yes, back to Kelley Armstrong yet again.  I pre-ordered this book a number of months ago when it was announced and had more or less forgotten about it by the time it finally turned up in the mail.

Counterfeit Magic (Subterranean Press, 2010) is a novella-length paranormal mystery story published as a Subterranean Press standalone like last year’s Angelic.  The narrator is the witch Paige Winterbourne, wife to the sorcerous Cabal heir Lucas Cortez, who is living out his own version of The Godfather by trying to change the evil, Mafia-like Cabal from the inside without being corrupted by it.  The resulting tension and the hostility of the Cabal toward Paige are stressing their marriage. 

That’s the ongoing series background.

Spoiled rotten

An hour of dance research:

"Finding out what music they used for this dance is going to be a drag."

(15 minutes later)

"Finding recordings of these particular songs is going to be difficult."

(15 minutes later)

"Finding the exact recording made in 1927 is never going to happen."

(15 minutes later)

"Finding more than one late 1920s recording so we have a variety of music to dance to is unlikely."

(15 minutes later)

I love the internet.

Outlaws and Murderers

Way back when I first started really reading the Dame Frevisse medieval murder mysteries by Margaret Frazer, I managed to collect fifteen out of the seventeen with relative ease, the more recent ones still in print and most of the older ones available online for typical used-paperback prices of $1-$5 each.  But there were two spectacular exceptions: The Outlaw's Tale (#3) and The Murderer's Tale (#6).  Both are out of print, but for some unknown reason (small print runs?) are priced in the $30-$60 range on eBay and Amazon.  That's about 1000% more than I am interested in paying for a 250-page used paperback book.  So for a couple of years I kept checking to see if a cheap copy ever came up anywhere online.  No luck so far.  As I became more involved in the series and the spinoff Joliffe novels, it became more and more irritating to be missing those pieces of the continuity.  And last month it finally occurred to me that while waiting to turn up a copy that isn't overpriced, I could at least satisfy my curiosity by reading them.  My local library doesn't have either, but after a few weeks' delay, Interlibrary Loan came through for me.

Supervolcano

Well, I've just finished scaring myself to death watching Supervolcano, a BBC docudrama from 2005 that extrapolates what would happen if the massive volcanic caldera which is Yellowstone National Park erupted with a V.E.I. 8 magnitude.  I've always been vaguely fascinated by volcanos, and I stumbled across Supervolcano during some random Googling around during a slow moment at Darkovercon.  It's on YouTube in twelve parts, starting here:

Basically, it's a piece of near-future disaster science fiction in which the science is, unfortunately, not at all fictional.

Darkovercon 2010 Schedule

As usual, I'm off to Darkovercon (formally known as Darkover Grand Council Meeting XXXIII) for the Friday through Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend.  I'm doing two dance events and my usual charity fundraising work, which is not so hectic a schedule that I won't have time to just hang out.

The specifics:

Philcon, improvised

Philcon is rapidly approaching, and I'm still dithering about the shape of my weekend. 

Part of it is fairly fixed:

I will arrive early Friday after picking up a mysterious package and one or two passengers in New Jersey.  I am feeling lame, so I will probably wear jeans and a slightly risqué t-shirt rather than bringing a costume.

I will spend all Friday afternoon and much of the evening running Program Ops, presumably once again in the Slightly Mauve room.  Since the schedules went out on Monday, I will probably spend lots of time troubleshooting program issues along with the usual check-in routine.

At some point I will escape and go hit parties and maybe some filking.  I am not on any program this year, so once I escape my time is my own.  If Principal Speaker Peter S. Beagle is on any evening programming I will escape long enough to go to that.  I often ignore programming and guests, but Beagle is a special case.

I will crash in a corner of Program Ops on the airbed I have thoughtfully supplied myself with.  Saturday morning will be more of the same.

Early Saturday afternoon, I will head to Gettysburg, where I will run an 1860s-era ball all dressed up in my hoop skirt.  I will be put up in style at the Gettysburg hotel and will be well paid for the whole experience.

Sunday morning, there will be brunch in Gettysburg.  I will not need to dress up but might have to look respectable, so I will bring a dress or something.

At that point I will have decisions to make:

1. return to Philcon and see The Last Unicorn (film) with Peter S. Beagle commenting?

1a. end up in Brooklyn at Catherynne Valente's no-doubt overcrowded book release party?

1b. end up in Manhattan at the no-doubt overcrowded Steampunk event?

1c. avoid NYC like a sensible person and go home and get a good night's sleep

2. drive in the opposite direction to see a friend of mine in the last performance of a musical in which he stars, resulting in getting home at, optimistically, midnight after six more hours of driving?*

3. become screamingly anti-social and go straight home from Gettysburg

What do you think?

 

* Note: this is insane.  That does not always stop me.

Halloween weekend's dancing

Halloween is pretty much a busman's holiday for me, since I dress up funny all the time.  But I hopped up to Boston this past weekend for a bit of costumed dancing Saturday night and Sunday afternoon at, respectively, the Commonwealth Vintage Dancers' Black Cat Speakeasy and Mostly Waltz Boston's Halloween afternoon dance.

Saturday night at the Speakeasy I decided to get into the spirit of historical fancy dress and thus wore the green tango dress and gloves that I made/dyed to surprise S.J. Tucker with a tango at her performance of "Alligator in the House" at Lunacon a few years ago. It was comfortable and easy to dance in and very much in the fancy dress mode: a dress and gloves of the appropriate color and a stuffed animal accessory.  That's me at left, with my alligator.

Intrigues

I didn't buy this one.  I just couldn't help reading it when it arrived as a freebie.  But at least I didn't spend any money on it.  That's a start, right?

Waking the Witch

I'm starting to think I need a separate category just for Kelley Armstrong books, since I seem to post about them ridiculously often.  The latest entry in her [Women of the] Otherworld series is Waking the Witch, following the now-adult Savannah Levine, whose mother was a half-demon witch and father a sorcerer.  Summarizing the complex backstory on this would take forever; the most relevant novels in the series are Stolen (#2), Dime Store Magic (#3), and Haunted (#5).  But, surprisingly, I think this book does a fairly good job of making it unnecessary to have read the previous books.  You won't figure out the villain without clues from previous books, but I didn't figure it out even with those clues and wasn't overly bothered by this failure.

The big plus with Waking the Witch is that it's got a simple concept: hotshot young witch coming of age and wanting to prove herself to her over-protective guardians by solving a murder mystery on her own.  Needless to say, the situation is more complicated than it appears, and she turns out to need a little more help than she thinks, and she learns the expected sort of adult lessons.  Given a good writer, it's a fairly foolproof concept.  Having a single focus character and writing in the first person is also a huge help; Savannah simply tells her own story, filling in background details as needed via meditations on her rocky early life, which helps a lot with the complex-backstory problem.

The mystery is a typically convoluted puzzle, there's a workable love interest, the ending is not a pat "happily ever after" one, and Savannah is convincingly voiced, though not nearly as funny as she has been in previous novels now that she's the lead character instead of serving as plot device and teenage comic relief.  Waking the Witch is not up with the top books in the series, but it's one of the solid middle group.  Given the twenty-one-year-old heroine, it's also a good bridge into the series for a younger reader.

One warning: this is the first book in a mini-trilogy within the series and as such it ends on a setup for the next book that could be described as a cliffhanger.  I wasn't as annoyed by this as I usually am because the novel itself is a complete story with a proper wrap-up.  The final couple of sentences feel more like a "coming next week" sort of preview than a true cliffhanger ending.  I'm curious about what happens next but not frustrated at having to wait.

Read for yourself:

Tongues of Serpents

It's been a long two years since 2008's Victory of Eagles, but it's been worth the wait.  Naomi Novik has pulled off yet another triumph with the sixth Temeraire book, Tongues of Serpents.  I actually read this back in August with some vague thought that preparing for my trip to Australia and New Zealand by reading alternate history set in Australian cities and places I wasn't going to was a good idea.  Its relevance to my trip turned out to be pretty close to zero, but the reading pleasure was worth it regardless.  I didn't have time in the flurry of quitting my day job and packing to actually write about it then, so I'll remedy that now.

It Gets Better

Dan Savage does not exactly need me to boost his signal, but here's a wonderful new project that I have to mention.  In Savage's words:

I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

But gay adults aren't allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don't bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don't have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.

Billy Lucas was a fifteen-year-old in Indiana who hanged himself after being bullied for being gay.

So Savage has started a YouTube channel, the It Gets Better Project, and is encouraging adults to make and submit videos that say: it gets better.  Here's his video with his husband Terry:

"You gotta give 'em hope."  --Harvey Milk

It gets better.

Spread the word.

Brush up your Shakespeare

Jim Russell, Republican Congressional candidate in New York State (NY-18) feels that a modernized version of Othello is "deliberately designed to exploit the critical period of sexual imprinting in their target audiences of white pre-adolescent girls and adolescent young women" as part of a media plot to "deliberately popularize miscegenation in films directed toward adolescents and pre-adolescents."  ("The Western Contribution to World History," Occidental Quarterly*, 2001/2002.)

Um...what? 

I haven't seen the movie in question, but apparently it is sufficiently true to the source material that the Othello character kills the Desdemona character by the end.   So let me get this straight: a movie in which a girl's black boyfriend murders her out of irrational jealousy is supposed to make white girls in general eager to date black guys?  Because being murdered is, what, oh-so-romantic?

Othello is a wonderful play that I haven't seen enough productions of, but somehow I never thought of it as a tract promoting interracial relationships.  I'm not certain it's condemning them, either; some of the characters certainly are against Othello and Desdemona's marriage on explicitly racial grounds ("an old black ram is tupping your white ewe") but Othello and Desdemona are the victims of evil and are never portrayed as anything other than tragically credulous and somewhat dim.  Given when it was written, that's actually pretty good.  But a nefarious plot to promote "miscegenation" via modernized settings of Shakespeare (since, you know, no one ever remakes Shakespeare in modern settings)? 

I. Don't. Think. So.

(Courtesy of The Albany Project -- see their post for more excerpts featuring racism and anti-Semitism.)

 

Edited 9/22/10 to add:

Salon has more on this.  School integraton might make kids gay!

*The Occidental Quarterly concerns itself with white oppression by "the Negroes, Hispanics, Asians, Indians, feminists, labor unions, corporate plunderers, Jews, Muslims, illegal aliens, socialists, pornographers, “free-traders,” environmentalist fanatics, animal-loving lunatics, the education cabal, the “disabled,” the professional “poor,” atheists, “humanist” clerics, crooked law enforcers, government bureaucrats, venal politicians, activist judges, and the myriad other enemies, traitors and bleeding-heart weaklings that today run what used to be “our” country."

Final Cut

I picked up Lin Anderson's Final Cut (Hodder (UK), 2009) on my trip to Canada last month.  It's the sixth book in a series focusing on Dr. Rhona MacLeod, a forensic scientist in Glasgow.  I found it only mildly enjoyable and suspect that this is one of those cases where having read all the previous books in the series would really have helped.  It wasn't a bad book, but it's on the cooler and the less emotionally punchy side as serial killer novels go, much like Mari Jungstedt's novels.  But Jungstedt's novels are about as cool as I can go in the serial killer genre, and there I came in at the beginning of the series and have engaged sufficiently with the characters to compensate for the reserved style.  I don't have that advantage with Rhona MacLeod and her fellow investigators, and the book is all-too-clearly part of a continuing series, with a lot of ongoing subplots from previous books in the background.  There was no problem with understanding what was going on with those loose threads; Anderson is thorough about providing the relevant details.  It was just hard for me to care.  Regular switches in focus character didn't help -- MacLeod was part of an ensemble cast, and not an overly large part.  I realize that forensic scientists are not generally on the front lines of cases, but if that's the lead character's job then I expect a whole lot more forensics.

Home

Trip diary and many, many pictures to be retro-posted.

First, an Adventure

Before I start my life as a starving artist, I'm going to use my substantial accumulated back vacation pay to have one little Adventure.  A travel Adventure.  I'm going to Australia and New Zealand for three weeks, with the trip centered around this year's World Science Fiction Convention and a visit to my old friend Emily, whom I haven't seen since she moved to New Zealand twelve years ago.  I'll also be hitting the NZ natcon, Au Contraire, which is very conveniently located in Wellington, where Emily lives.

My style of Adventure is to:

Flying Free

Well, I did it.

My, what a gigantic...backlist you have

The readers' version of size counts?  The dream of young fanboy wannabe writers?  I might quibble with the choice of author, but the sentiment is fabulous and oh-so-NSFW. 

"I'd rather stay home and read." Indeed.

Evita (Stratford Shakespeare Festival, 8/4/10)

I planned the second phase of my Stratford visit as a three-part nostalgia tour of shows I saw as a child or teenager.  The first of these was Evita.  (Left: Chilina Kennedy in the title role with Juan Chioran in the background; click images to enlarge.)

My first Evita was the original Broadway production, with Mandy Patinkin singing the role of Che, when I was around twelve or thirteen.  I loved the show, bought the LP -- yes, an actual record, and I probably still have it -- and listened to it until I'd memorized the entire first act.  (I learned that whole opening Latin prayer-song phonetically without having the faintest idea what it meant.)  I developed a crush on Patinkin-as-Che, the memory of which was enough to lure me to a somewhat dubious production of The Tempest a couple of years ago just for the chance to hear that voice in person again.

This sort of intense teenage imprinting on a particular production makes seeing a different one very problematic.  That first production was so definitive and my memory of the musical numbers so thorough that I suspected I was going to really resist enjoying anything short of an exact recreation of it.

So why bother?  Well, I really do love the soundtrack (or at least the first half of it; more about that below.)  And one of my favorite Stratford actors, Juan Chioran (whose performance in Dracula: A Chamber Musical I've been rhapsodizing about for over a decade), was singing Perón.  And I've been reading up a bit lately on Argentina's Dirty War, which made me rather thoughtful about how odd it must have been for a politically aware audience member during the show's original run, which coincided almost perfectly with the Dirty War.

Black swan and other astonishments.

Prop 8 overturned in federal court.

Absolutely amazing Winter's Tale.

Job interview tomorrow morning.

And there is a black swan munching away right next to me.

Stratford, Ho!

I'm doing my annual wander to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario this week and will be once again trying to blog each show as I go.  I don't know quite what I'm seeing, because I've only bought one ticket out of the nine shows of interest.  The rest will be rush tickets, which I've had great luck with the past couple of years.

Other than that, I'll be sitting by the river, reading and relaxing, hitting my favorite used bookstore and Callan's Books for mysteries, and generally having a lovely, quiet, non-stressful time.

But today is a long day's journey across New York state, hopefully with less excitement than two years ago at the crossing.

WWW: Wake

Well, I thought I was only going to have to read four novels this week, since I'd already read and loved Palimpsest, but there must have been a tie in the nominations for Best Novel.  There are six nominees, so I have five to go.  Oops.

First up is Robert Sawyer's WWW: Wake (Ace 2009, serialized in Analog 2008-2009; Ace editor Ginjer Buchanan(?), Analog editor Stanley Schmidt), mainly because I have a physical copy of it that a friend gave me handy.  WWW: Wake is the first in the WWW trilogy, and both book and trilogy take the prize for most-irritating-to-actually-say titles.  Wuh-wuh-wuh-Wake seems to be the most efficient version.  It will be followed by wuh-wuh-wuh-Watch and wuh-wuh-wuh-Wonder, at which point anyone still reading will have a permanent mental stutter.

Can I read all the Hugo Award nominees in one week?

Okay, not quite all of them.  How about: all the words-only fiction Hugo nominees that I haven't already read in one week?

Sneak Previews via KGB (July 21, 2010)

It's not a particular secret that I am exceedingly fond of Catherynne Valente's novels -- the Orphan's Tales duology (Tiptree and Mythopoeic Award winners), Palimpsest (a current Hugo nominee), and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making being four of the finest fantasy books I've read in the last decade.  So I decided to take a fast trip into the city last night to hear her read as part of the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series along with M.K. Hobson, whose first novel, The Native Star is coming out next month.

More Further Adventures Of...

I hadn't been keeping track of Barbara Hambly's experiment in short fiction self-e-publishing, "The Further Adventures Of..." since I purchased the first round of stories back in November, but when I mentioned to a friend how pleased I was to have a new Benjamin January novel, she noted that two more Further Adventures had just been posted, one in the Darwath/Time of the Dark series and one in the Sun Wolf/Starhawk series.  Since those are among my favorites of Hambly's creations, I promptly went off to get the new stories.

Once again the purchasing was easy and smooth.  There's a shopping cart now, and even though I ordered the stories in the middle of the night, they arrived about half an hour after I made my Paypal payment.  I don't know whether they have it automated or whether whoever is in charge of sending them out is a night owl, but I was impressed at the after-hours fulfillment speed.

One Mountain Thousand Summits: The Untold Story of Tragedy and True Heroism on K2

My appetite for extreme mountaineering books appears to have some limits, and Freddie Wilkinson's One Mountain Thousand Summits: The Untold Story of Tragedy and True Heroism on K2 (New American Library, 2010) exceeds them. 

Billed as an insider's account of a 2008 tragedy on K2 (the world's second-highest mountain) which ended with eleven climbers dead, One Mountain somehow manages to drain the events of drama.  And Wilkinson is nothing resembling an insider.  He wasn't part of any of the excursions; in fact, he's never climbed K2 himself.  He wasn't involved in the tragedy in any way as it unfolded.  So he's chasing a story after the fact.  And with no firsthand experience on which to draw, he pads the book out with a great deal of barely-related information that far exceeds the cover blurb's suggestion that it will tell some previously unknown story of Sherpa heroism.  While the information is good, the lack of organization or focus is amateurish and annoying.  This should have been a much shorter, tighter book.

Dead and Buried

I missed the last couple of Barbara Hambly's marvelous Benjamin January mystery novels and had been vaguely aware that the series had been dropped by its publisher.  It has been picked up again by Severn Books, which has brought out the ninth in the series, Dead and Buried (2010; no editor listed) in hardcover and trade paperback in the U.K. and U.S.

The series is set against the marvelously rich backdrop of 1830s New Orleans, with the remains of the old French/Spanish Creole culture and its lively parallel society of "free colored" residents, often closely related to the white families, resisting the increasing social and financial encroachment of Americans who see, literally, nothing but black and white, slave and master, and are slowly eroding the safety and social place of men like Benjamin January, a Paris-trained surgeon and free man of color who makes his living as a musician and music teacher.  As a professional pianist, January has an observer's access to everywhere from the highest levels of white society to the quadroon balls where white men seek mixed-blood placées (mistresses) to the fanciest of brothels.  But it's at a funeral that the latest mystery begins, as the burial of a member of a Free Colored Militia and Burial Society is interrupted when the coffin falls open and a white man's corpse tumbles out.  That man turns out to have been a wealthy Irish visitor, Patrick Derryhick, who is traveling in the company of the young Viscount Foxford, along with Foxford's Uncle Diogenes and his man of business, Caius Droudge.  Foxford stands to inherit all of Derryhick's wealth, so when the dead man's bloody pocket watch is found under his bed, he is promptly arrested for murder.

No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks

I'm amused that I'm following exactly the same thematic path this summer in stress-relief reading that I did last fall: urban fantasy to vampire fiction to extreme survival stories.  No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks by Seattle mountaineer Ed Viesturs with David Roberts (Broadway Books, 2006) is a little different from my usual survival tale, since I could be confident of the happy ending, but it provides much of the same general excitement with great moment-by-moment descriptions of perilous climbs.

Another Part of the Forest (Peccadillo Theater Company, July 9, 2010)

 I saw Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939) at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario back in 1996, but I had never seen its 1946 prequel, Another Part of the Forest, before squeaking into the closing weekend of last night's superb production (left) by the Peccadillo Theater Company at New York City's Theatre at St. Clements.  I was fascinated by the play itself as much as the production.

While Foxes depicts the nasty infighting of the Hubbard siblings in their forties and fifties, Forest takes them back twenty years, to their young adulthood in 1880, to show us an earlier stage in the family conflicts of the wealthy Southern merchant family.  Big brother Ben is an amoral schemer, whose proclaimed disinterest in women in both plays makes me wonder if he was meant to be read as gay.  Oscar is a fool and a brute who rides with the Ku Klux Klan.  And sister Regina is moving well beyond father-daughter flirtatiousness into something that borders on incest in her practiced manipulation of her father.  (The production actually takes it a bit further than the play as written, which calls for a daughterly kiss, but does not describe it as being placed on the lips while Regina straddles her father's lap.)  

In Foxes, I was always a little torn in my response to Regina.  I despised her for her dishonesty and her indirect murder of her husband, but I couldn't help feeling a little sorry for her, too, trapped in a loveless marriage with no money of her own and continually told, in effect, to shut up and be pretty and charming because that was the only way a woman could get anywhere.  That would probably make me pretty nasty and manipulative, too.  In Forest, she just sickened me with her mercenary schemes and her selfish indifference to John's desires, though I still winced a little at how callously Ben planned to marry her off for money at the end.

Tales of the Otherworld

Yes, I'm back to Kelley Armstrong again, even though it's only been six months since the last time.  What can I say?  She keeps churning them out, and I keep reading.  This one doesn't really count as churned out, however.  Tales of the Otherworld (Bantam Books, 2010; no editor listed) is another collection of shorter series fiction which was, for the most part, first published online several years ago as freebie material for her fans.  (Stories not yet anthologized remain available online.)  It's less thematically unified than last year's Men of the Otherworld, which focused fairly tightly on the men of Armstrong's werewolf Pack.  Anyone who isn't following the entire series will probably be a little lost, since the collection hops all over the place:

Echo: Volume 4: Collider

I made a comics store run right before the long weekend and picked up the latest Echo compilation, Echo Volume 4: Collider (Abstract Studio Comics, 2010), which collects issues #16-20.  I enjoyed the first three Echo compilations (here), but as the story picks up speed my interest is rapidly increasing.

Note: spoilers below for Volumes 1-3, but I think I've avoided any for Volume 4.

Three is better than two

Anyone who's still reading Rixo may have noticed that I have become the poster child for failing to blog in anything like a regular and timely fashion, though I'm planning to spend some of the weekend slowly chipping away at my double-digit list of unfinished posts.

This has been due both to lack of time and to a general malaise over the last eighteen months which has left me struggling with this odd reluctance to finish and post much of anything.  It's something between procrastination and perfectionism.  Hence the long list of drafts.  It's a little better over on Kickery (my dance history blog), though I have some similar troubles there.

So I've come up with a brilliant (for some value of brilliant) new project: a third blog!

Moonshine

As was not unexpected, I completely ran out of time to post -- or even to read -- during the rest of my time at Stanford, but I had a long flight home, and flight time means reading time.  And once again, there's WiFi on the plane...

I was given an advance reading copy of Alaya Johnson's Moonshine (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin 2010; editor: Karyn Marcus) by an industry friend, though I dithered around long enough before reading it that the book has now come out for real.  I've read quite a bit of vampire fiction (though I can't keep up with the sheer quantity coming out nowadays), and Moonshine is not a bad addition to the genre, though it's not as overwhelmingly original as I'd hoped and has occasional jarring lapses in period atmosphere.  I've avoided plot spoilers below.

The White Road

The only good thing about delays in air travel is that they give me ample time to catch up on my reading.  I had recently picked up Lynn Flewelling's latest, The White Road (Bantam Spectra, 2010; editor: Anne Groell) which is the sequel to Shadows Return (discussed here), which is the sequel to her earlier Nightrunner trilogy.  Assorted travel excitement on Friday gave me ample time to finish it on the road.

The White Road wraps up the story begun in Shadows Return, and there is no indication of a third (sixth) book.  I'm just as happy about that.  Once again, I found it interesting enough to keep reading but simply wasn't bowled over by it.  None of the Nightrunner books have been anywhere near as compelling to me as the Tamir Triad which first got me interested in Flewelling's work.

Note: There are significant spoilers for Shadows Return below.  Right below.  In the very first sentence of the next paragraph.  Stop reading right now if you care.

Twenty-five down

Ever since I posted Hoop Dreams back in February, I've been steadily hooping, dieting, and losing weight, documented mostly in the comments there and occasionally on Facebook.  Time for a Rixo progress report!

This morning, for the first time, I tipped the scales at twenty-five pounds less than I weighed in mid-February when I started keeping track.  That probably represents a slightly larger weight loss, since I didn't dare weigh myself for the first couple of weeks of the diet-and-hoop plan.  But it's a nice, substantial number to reach and represents the halfway point of my goal of fifty pounds total weight loss.  It's only one pound over the lowest weight I've been in the last five years (at least), though I'm cheating somewhat with that comparison since that was before surgery removed five pounds in one fell swoop.

I was actually a little startled at this morning's weigh-in results.  I'd been hovering around a twenty- to twenty-three-pound weight loss for about five weeks now.  I thought I'd plateaued and was planning to just stay in that range for a few months while my metabolism adjusted.  I'm delighted that the weight loss has resumed, though I'm still not making a big effort at it right now since I don't want my body to decide I'm actually starving to death and start conserving calories.

This weight loss has been achieved entirely by controlling my total calorie intake per day and by regular sessions with my hula hoops.  There's no secret, no wacky diet, no restrictions on what foods I can eat, and no gym time or exercise other than hooping and my usual dancing.  But it's working beautifully.

A few notes on the process so far:

Off to Stanford

After six years, I am once again getting to make a pilgrimage-like trip to Stanford for a wonderful nine days of dancing: Stanford Dance Weekend followed by Stanford Historical Dance Week and then possibly Stanford Waltz Weekend (either dancing if there's space or just observing).  I'm going primarily as a student, though I'll be giving a pair of seminars that I've been stressing about for a month, one on Regency era dance developments and dancing master feuds and one extremely geeky one on choreographic connections across five centuries of set dances.  But mostly I'll just be learning.  I'm signed up as a lead (well, I signed up as a follow, but volunteered to be switched to improve balance) but will switch roles back and forth as necessary to balance any individual class.

I expect results similar to my last such trip in 2004: a substantial improvement in overall dance skills plus a whole lot of new repertoire.  This is a rare chance for me to do everything from Renaissance to Regency to Swing to Cross-Step Waltz in one trip and to learn from expert instructors from all over the world.  And compared to 2004, I'm a much better dancer and leader already and can probably absorb new information more efficiently.  Now I just have the agony of making choices like: Charleston and collegiate swing or Barriera and Gracca Amorosa?  Waltz dips or cross-step troika?  Blues or Steampunk?  Fusion waltz or fusion foxtrot?  Stretch myself with new material every single period or take some classes where I'm already familiar with it to give myself a break?  Do as much Regency as possible to dance it with other skilled dancers or skip it because I already know most of it?  These are lovely problems to have!

I fly out Friday morning.  I can't wait.

I will have limited time available from the dance week, mostly dinner on various evenings.  If any Rixo readers are in the Bay Area and would like to get together, let me know.  I rather expect there to be Wifi access everywhere, given the location, so I'll be checking email and blogs periodically.  I won't have a car, however, so you'll have to come to Stanford to fetch me.

I Am Not a Serial Killer

For a dramatic change of pace from the rest of this month's reading, I picked up I Am Not A Serial Killer (Tor Books, 2010; editor: Moshe Feder), a debut novel by Dan Wells which I had been keeping an eye out for ever since I spotted a promotional button on his editor's shirt over lunch last fall.  And...jackpot!  This is a marvelous little book which I probably never would have found if not for that fortuitous lunch date.

Illyria

There seems to be a sort of miniature subgenre of theater-related YA fantasy fiction, with the latest entry to turn up in my to-read stack being Elizabeth Hand's exquisite novella, Illyria (Viking/Penguin UK 2007/US 2010; no editor listed), which I received as a birthday gift from Serge.  It was a good read and beautifully written, but I have to admit: I didn't like it as much as his last present, which may just prove that I have incurably low tastes.  I'm also not entirely sure it should be classified as YA; other than having a teenage protagonist (at first; she grows up in the course of the story) it's a perfectly fine tale for adults.

The Enchantment Emporium

After Tanya Huff was the guest this year at both Lunacon and Balticon, I felt like it was time for me to give one of her books outside the linked Vicki Nelson/Henry Fitzroy/Tony Foster series a shot.  I'd tried this once before and bounced hard off one of her early fantasy novels, so I was somewhat afraid that this was a similar situation to my feelings about Lynn Flewelling, where I really, really like one series and just can't find the magic anywhere else.

I was relieved to find that The Enchantment Emporium (DAW Books, 2009; no editor listed) was actually pretty good.  It's an urban fantasy romance (my newly-invented term for paranormal-ish romances that would work just fine as urban fantasy even if the romance was removed) with a lot of humor and an original spin on the magic.

A Local Habitation

A.J. got in way ahead of me on this one, but I finally got around to reading Seanan McGuire's A Local Habitation (DAW Books, 2010; editor: Sheila Gilbert) in my idle moments during Balticon.  This is the sequel to last fall's Rosemary and Rue (discussed here), which is one of the few "urban fantasy" novels around lately that I felt really fulfilled the classic meaning of the term rather than being a paranormal romance novel with delusions of grandeur. 

Stardancing

I heard the news today that Jeanne Robinson had died over the weekend, unsurprising since I knew of her fight with cancer, but saddening in the loss of a lovely artist of both words and dance.  I never knew her personally, but she and Spider's novel Stardance inspired one of those lovely songs that has stuck in my mind since I first heard it a quarter-century or so ago and still speaks to me deeply.  When I got my very first webpage, back in 1992, its primitive content consisted entirely of a quote from this song. 

I don't know who wrote it; I'm guessing one of the filk groups that performed at Shore Leave back in the mid-1980s.  I can still hear their voices in my head from an old live cassette tape I made then.  I transcribed the lyrics as accurately as I could long ago and repost them below with no intent to infringe copyright.  They express my thoughts more eloquently than I can myself.

So, and with sympathy to Spider and in thanks to Jeanne and to all those whose diverse arts leave the world a better place and stir creativity in others...

I shall leave the earth behind and dance where I am free
To dream of greater things
I shall say good-bye to air and choreography
And dance as thought I've wings.

The Ultimate Answer

I am the Ultimate Answer today and for the next 364 days.

Fortunately, I don't have to worry about the Ultimate Question.

That's it.

That's all there is.

I don't have to like it.

Balticon 44 Schedule

I'm off to Balticon this weekend, feeling very sad due a whole lot of bad life things falling on me lately and yet another birthday.  This has negatively affected my planning, so I won't be quite as shiny and well-costumed as I'd hoped, but at least I'll be skinnier (twenty-three pounds lost since mid-February). 

I haven't actually received a formal schedule, but I think I'm just doing three special events in the main ballroom:

Air travel karma

I'm starting to wonder if travel to Kalamazoo is just jinxed, after the last two years involved spending hours at O'Hare in 2008 and then being ridiculously delayed and my luggage lost until a couple of hours before I left Michigan last year.

This year I made a point of avoiding O'Hare in my transfers and actually flew out of Philly rather than any of my usual New York-and-Connecticut airports.  This was because while my outbound flight allowed generous time for screw-ups, my return plans were very tight -- I had to finish my presentation in Kalamazoo at noon and be on the dance floor at 8:00 that evening teaching at the Steampunk World's Fair.  That was down in New Jersey, so flying back and forth from Philly meant I'd be much closer to where I needed to be.  The timing would work if everything went perfectly.  And yes, that was enough of a gamble that I arranged a backup teacher in case I didn't make it.

So how did it work?  Well, let's just say the trip out was not quite as planned.

Not evil? Just sexist.

Oh, Google.  Banning dating sites aimed at older women/younger men from its content network, but not ones aimed at older men/younger women?

Google continues to allow similar advertising for the many sites that match older men and younger women, like DateAMillionaire.com, which assures its clients they can meet “sugar babies.”

So cougars and cubs are out, but sugar daddies and sugar babies are in.

Cougars are "nonfamily safe" but sugar daddies and sugar babies -- a polite set of euphemisms for johns and prostitutes -- are A-okay?  Really?

Is there any way to spin this as anything other than blatant sexism?