The Raven's Roost

I have been out of school for a very long time now, and I still enjoy setting up a "summer reading program." Sometimes I decide to read as much as I can of a particular author's work, or I pick a subject. But it's the same kind of buzz as getting to go to the book fair, with adult money.

I'm finally starting to feel like writing again, some of it in a paper notebook, some of it in a Google Document. I liked this piece of advice from, I believe it was Jordan Peele, who said that his first drafts are mainly dumping sand into a sandbox where he'll later build his castle. That's been an immense help. Given the crushing perfectionism I grew up around, if something requires fixing and revising, it's shit and you're a bad person. Writing in a paper notebook also helps with this because it's much harder to edit on the fly.

This summer I'm revisiting Arthurian tales, which were always a major interest of mine. I've got TH White's novels (replacing older copies I lost), and Mallory's Morte d'Arthur. I tried reading Lawhead's Pendragon cycle once and found them kind of tedious, but I may take another run at them. Stemming from Mallory, I've also got my grubby claws on The Medievalism of Lawrence of Arabia because I'm an academic at heart and love dense books I can mark up. And I love Ned.

Utterly unrelated to Arthur, I've also got Michel de Montaigne on deck. Well, he may be unrelated, or he may not be, we'll find out. In the "odds and ends" category, I'm reading 48 Laws of Power as someone who will never wield power over anyone else, but is very interested in knowing when someone's trying to use it on me.

Last year's summer books were a little disjointed and I never picked up on a theme, so it's nice to feel like I have direction this year.

1. Steak, tomato, and couscous - I was trying to find this recipe, so I'm sharing it because it's yummy. It's also from an old issue of Cooking Light and I used to make it as a work lunch for a while. If you don't have steak, chicken is great in it, too. I think the last time I made it was maybe 2005, which makes sense because we had some serious food shortages and weirdness after Katrina, so steak would have been impossible to get. Then I probably just forgot about it.

2. I look over my spam folder every so often to make sure legit stuff isn't ending up there, and to laugh at some of the scams. I got an obviously totally legit email from "Federal Government," ... you know, just the one. Mrs Melania Trump also emailed me about my cheques waiting at the United Embassy of the republic of Kenya (I have preserved the capitalization because why not). I shared that info with Fox, who promptly pulled up YouTube to start playing this.

3. A book is arriving today from that author I emailed earlier this week. I'll probably email her again when I finish it, but as I tend to do, I worry that I'm overstepping a boundary, being annoying, or creepy, or just ... bothering people.

4. I do not want to run today. I think I'll compromise and go for a longish walk.

Chamblin Bookmine

Never mind Disney, this is the happiest place on earth.

I indulged myself with a trip out to Chamblin today and picked up a few books. Mostly I wandered around the stacks, picking things up and just enjoying being around books. I found a few things I wanted but struck out on others. It's good to remember there are people who read. I know y'all reading this do, but sometimes it feels like ignorance is a virtue anymore.

If you were curious, I bought Return to the Whorl by Gene Wolfe, and When I Am Playing With My Cat How Do I Know She is Not Playing With Me by Saul Frampton. It's about Michel de Montaigne, whose work I'm getting more and more interested in. Most of my reading in philosophy has been around and about my Medieval studies degree, so I'm trying to branch out into more modern stuff. One can't simply be a Medievalist forever. Well, you can, technically.

My in-laws are coming! Tomorrow morning! Early! This is fine! Everything is fine! Actually I'm just going to vacuum and make sure the kitchen table is cleared off. I'm at the age where I don't care what anyone thinks of my house. It's not gross or dirty, just a bit cluttered. Life is too short to keep things looking like magazine photos. My mom did that the whole time I was growing up, for some damn reason.

One of my pumpkins has been GNAWED ON by an ANIMAL. Probably a squirrel. It didn't get far enough to really damage the gourd too badly, it looks like it mostly shaved off the green outer skin and the pumpkin is already healing. But it's probably time to put socks on them. This is an experiment - I've been told that animals dislike the texture of stretchy nylon stockings and won't bite into them, so you can slip a knee-high over the pumpkins to keep them safe. Hopefully even if the chewed pumpkin isn't suitable for eating I can still save seeds from it.

Not much has really been going on lately - it's happily quiet out here. I've been able to more consistently sit down and draw each day, and I'm knocking out a short comic. I enjoy stories where someone adopts a horrific monster-like creature and makes it a pet, and the monster starts behaving like a pet as well. And yeah, I'm also into monster girl/boyfriend stuff, too. (it's me - I'm the monster) But I;m just enjoying playing around with story ideas, weird imagery, and getting used to setting aside art time. Hopefully this will allow me to get back into working on Lora and finish the thing.

Speaking of art, I got a copy of Japanese Design Through Textile Patterns by Frances Blakemore. It's a collection of textile stencils that would be used to dye fabric, with descriptions and discussions of symbolism, etc. It's an enjoyable flip-through that will give me ideas for clothing patterns, backgrounds ... or just eye candy.

I also made my first attempt at melon pan. They were ... okay. The cookie layer didn't come together well and was super-crumbly. I switched recipes and was just reading through the pineapple bun recipe in Modern Asian Baking At Home which made much more sense to me. The inner bun is milk bread, so you start with a tangzhong and proceed much as you would for shokupan. She also doesn't call for scoring the tops of the buns, but I'll be doing that and sprinkling on coarse sugar. The ones I made aren't bad, they just aren't great, but I think I can nail it next time.

Since my birthday is coming up next month I might make a more elaborate cake, something like a butter cake with matcha frosting. Or a loaf of chocolate shokupan made in my kitty-shaped pan. Not sure yet.

The weather's been interesting lately. We've had several nasty storm cells go past us, including one that spit hail. We got pea-sized hail but a town southeast of us got the golf ball sized stuff. We've had more tornado watches than I can remember. One night, Fox turned off our weather alert radio so we could sleep, because we kept getting so many notices, and then this morning at 5, we got another, so that was my "sleep" done for the night.

I was starting to sleep a little better but I'm now back to my usual crappy sleep. Since it doesn't seem to matter what I do or don't do, I'm just going to get bad sleep. Yay.

I finished reading all three of Diane Setterfield's novels: The Thirteenth Tale, Once Upon a River, and Bellman & Black. I thought I saw something saying she's working on a new one, so that'll be worth keeping an eye out for. I haven't put them in a donation bin yet because I'm considering re-reading them at some point. The stories can be pretty dense once you get into them.

I then picked up a copy of The Dog of the South by Charles Portis to take on our trip, so I haven't started it just yet. But I did read True Grit, which was unsurprisingly much better than the movie. Though the movie is excellent, too. Portis has an odd sense of humor, which I appreciate because my sense of humor is also odd. He recently got the Library of America treatment, and Overlook Press puts out individual copies of his works that you can pick up on bookshop.org.

Other than that, my only other major read right now is wading through Sexual Personae which keep sending me to look up various things, from philosophers to sculptures. I'm still on her discussion of the Apollonian and Dionysian, which would be a pretty tired subject, except that she points out that Dionysian frenzies aren't simply about pleasure and partying, but should rightly involve dismembering animals and people in a lust and blood fueled intertwining sex and violence. She's citing Walter Otto's The Homeric Gods a good bit, which I read last year. I guess I'm going to have to find more English translations of his work, too.

I'm on probably about a month since I gave myself a buzz cut, and I'm still happy with it. I still might let some grow out when the weather cools off this fall. Happily no one else seems to care. As the Red Queen told Alice, it's people minding their own business that makes the world go 'round. LOL

I had an interesting dream and I actually remembered it. I usually don't have terribly good dream recall, and when I was actually keeping a dream journal, there wasn't much my subconscious was tossing up that I could use in art or anything, so I stopped. I'll occasionally get a single image or something I like, but it's mostly just brain garbage.

That being said, in this one I found an old home economics-type textbook from the early 1950s ... from an American school of magic. So think Harry Potter on The Donna Reed Show. It seemed like they were encouraging magical folks to blend in with the non-magical population, so there were a lot of little charms and such for things like blown fuses and broken appliances. There was also a section on appearance, so a lot of the spells were geared towards specific hairdos, hair coloring, removing stains from clothes. You know, normal stuff.

My creativity doesn't quite run in that direction, but if someone wants to actually write up some of this, feel free to use the idea. I'd even be happy to provide some mid-century modern illustrations.

I'm about halfway through reading The Dragonbone Chair, which I've had on my shelves for years and never actually got around to reading. So far I'm enjoying it, and I've found it's a trilogy, so that gives me something to look for. I'm still on this project of reading books I already own, and it's allowed me to further pare down my library as I start something, decide I don't like it and won't finish it, and it goes into the "donate" box for the Friends of the Library.

When people freaked out over Marie Kondo talking about only owning thirty books and said stuff like "this woman is a monster," I at first thought it was funny, because I thought the comments were hyperbolic for the sake of humor. Then I found out they were serious and was horrified both at the vitriol aimed at her for the supposed crime of only owning thirty books, and at how badly I miss social cues. Like that wasn't even a "whoooosh" because I was nowhere near close enough to even feel the breeze as it passed by.

I know typically reading more is good, but for the last five or six years I've been setting - and hitting - a fifty book per year reading goal. After ditching GoodReads I did not set a reading goal for 2021 and so far ... I kinda like it. I'm obviously not going to stop reading altogether, but the pressure is off for the next twelve months. I can just read what I want and enjoy it and if I don't feel like reading (too tired, too scatterbrained, etc) I don't need to force myself to knock out ten pages of some boring tome I picked up because it'll look good on my friends list.

I guess it's a little like having a refeed after you've been on a strict diet for a while. I needed a period to reset. Even if the only other things I read this year are manga it doesn't matter. Manga is still reading. And I don't need to defend my intellectual status or anything by spending more time deciphering marks on a piece of paper. After I got my degree, that summer I read one book. That book was Lonesome Dove which is not an inconsiderable novel. In fact it's a heckin' big chonker. But the point stands - I took a couple of months off and when I did read a book I read an adventurous Western story. And it's a hell of a good book, too, I'd highly recommend it, and I'm not even a particular fan of Western novels.

The Dragonbone Chair is a chonker, too, around 700 pages worth. But as I said, no timetable involved, no need to finish before January 31 or anything. And I'd probably be further along but some nights I'm up gaming a little later. I mean hey, I'm on the final boss in Hollow Knight, and yesterday I switched my charms up and found a pretty good combo that allowed me to get a lot further in that fight than I've been previously. I've got a couple of good games going right now but being on the last stage of a game is kind of exciting, ya know?

I didn't get a ton of reading done this month. I'm currently reading The Shining by Stephen King - as someone who has been a fan of King since middle school, I'm surprised at myself for not having read this one. I read a lot of his early and middle-years work, up through maybe Green Mile. And I'll probably go back and start catching up at some point. I'm also reading the Discourses & Selected Writings of Epictetus because I'm a huge nerd.

I finished The Magus by John Fowles (highly recommended but with some reservations,) and Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, which reminds me, I need to go find that grape ice cream recipe. So far as I'm able I'm trying to read what I already have. I've been able to weed out a few novels so far, starting them and then quitting when they failed to hold my attention, rather than forcing myself to finish them. I did need to buy a book, which came today.

With everything going on right now I felt like reading something superficial. I wanted the book equivalent of a box of meringue cookies. Edward Gorey was a big fan of EF Benson's Mapp & Lucia novels, which I gather are on TV now in Britain, but that sounded like a good diversion. Unfortunately, and the reason I'd not read them before, I only had the last three books in the series. At the time I was buying them they were apparently out of print in the States and I was having to gather them from used book shops. An excellent excuse to spend weekends scouring the French Quarter. Anyway, I broke my "no book buying" pledge and purchased a collected edition of the first three novels (bonus short story!) through Amazon Marketplace. So right after The Overlook Hotel burns down, I'm headed to 1920s England.

On the gaming front, there's a Steam Sale and I picked up We Happy Few, Gathering Sky, and Shovel Knight. SN is a collected edition with all the games, including the co-op Shovel of Hope. My controller is terrible and I'm looking to acquire a sturdier, nicer X-Box style one soon. I cracked the d-pad, and I'm also looking to get a faceted d-pad replacement. For whatever reason the joystick controller doesn't feel right and doesn't seem to work well for me. I also had a brainstorm and tried Cuphead with it, and hey, I got past the tutorial. Go me. *sarcastic thumbs up goes here*

I started We Happy Few (which really works much better with keyboard controls anyway) and I'm working through Arthur's story. On Hollow Knight, I have destroyed Herrah the Beast and opened the final Stag Station, so I got to go to the Stag Nest. I'm back in Queen's Gardens, probably going to try to take on the Traitor Mantis next. I got another nail upgrade, so I'm on Channeled Nail now, and there's only one more upgrade. And I lost all my money in Deepnest, so now I have no qualms about trying some of the trickier platforming segments.

Today's Fox's birthday (yay!) and we're not really doing much. I'll be making a pizza later, and we have some key lime cake. Tomorrow I'm probably going to do my last yard cutting of the year, but today I'm just cooling it. I pulled my calf muscle again, but it feels almost normal today so I might try a short run tomorrow. And I mean it really feels almost normal, not "almost normal except a little tight." I hopefully have given the thing enough time to heal up properly. It feels weird not running all this time.

And I upgraded my phone, but as usual, it's surprising what things don't automatically work. And I lost my house in Neko Atsume so I have to start that over. But I like the new phone, it's a lot lighter weight than the old one, so it won't be as much of a nuisance to run with. My Garmin actually will play music and run GPS at the same time but it will drain the battery fast. So for long runs, I'll carry my phone for music. If it's a shorter run, then I don't mind killing my battery quicker.

It's a gorgeous afternoon here so I'm thinking of getting my bike out of storage and pedaling around the yard some. Depending on how solid the sand feels on the road I might ride down to the turn. I'm just tired of being cooped up inside with the miserable hot weather, and I've played video games so much today my thumb is sore. But I got to take the Last Stag back to where he was hatched, so that was great.

I recently finished The Gray House, after reading a recommendation of it on Reddit. It's a long (700+ pages) read but to me absolutely worth it, and one I'll read again. I just need to let it sit for a while. I do recommend it myself, but it's got some quirks that others might find annoying. Multiple, unreliable narrators, non-linear time, and some vaguely gruesome scenes. No torture porn, but some disturbing imagery. The characters also have nicknames (a few of which change over the course of the story) and they are all descriptive in some way. Some are pretty straightforward - Blind, Tubby, Ralph One - and some are more esoteric or have a more detailed backstory - Tabaqui the Jackal, Sphinx, the Bandar-Logs. If I go too much deeper into it, I'm afraid I'd spoil the secrets, and part of the pleasure of this (for me) was the pieces of the story falling into place. When things started clicking and making sense. What's a Jumper? Where's Below? This was the sort of story that made it hard to shift gears back into reality. I'd look up and look around, momentarily confused about where I was.

After that I needed a palette cleanser, so I turned to another unlikely recommendation, Flush: A Biography by Virginia Woolf. It's the imaginative biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, Flush. It was short and amusing. I have never read a lot of Woolf's work, Orlando in college and assorted short pieces. I tried reading Mrs. Dalloway some years ago but I should probably try again now that I don't have ex-husband badgering me about my choices in books. But I'm told it isn't just me - that novel is sort of hard to read.

I also have a strong urge to spend money, specifically to buy the Palette Mini-Series from Victionary. They have reissued Black & White, Multicolor, and Gold & Silver in new editions, and they're a good bit cheaper than getting one's hands on the original editions. I love art and design books and sometimes enjoy spending time just sitting around flipping through ones in my collection. I have books of art and painting, graphic design, comic art, illustration, and interior design that all feed into my visual sensibilities.

I found this in an email from Anthony Ongaro of Break the Twitch, and it sums up what I was trying to say the other day about our current situation, but does so in a much better way than I did.



In mundane news a cold front ripped through last night, but it's brought us a few days of cool weather before Florida's summer starts pounding on us. So I have the windows open again, which the cats love, and can hear the wind and the birds again. I'm also dealing with - for whatever reason - a muscle twitch. I typically get a nerve that fires like this in one eyebrow - it's not even a symptom a stress or anything, it just does it. Today it's one of the longer muscles in my thigh but it's been twitchy since I got up, so that's annoying. I'm hopeful that once I get rehydrated from overnight and go for a run that it'll shut up.

I also saw a piece in The Atlantic this morning about how we're now starting to split along ideological lines over social distancing measures, and how people are turning whether they follow the guidelines or not into political performance theatre. I've said on a couple of occasions that I don't really want to drag politics into my personal journal here, but I will say that deliberately flaunting recommendations that are there to help you not contract a potentially deadly virus makes you a grade-A fucking idiot. And I don't really care which side of the political spectrum you're on, whether it's conservatives who think "it's not that bad," or party people who just want to have a good time, you're all morons.

Last but far from least, I discovered bookshop.org, an online book dealer that seems to be aiming to be the anti-Amazon. Portions of purchases made go to supporting small local brick-and-mortar book shops and the prices are not bad. I just bought a copy of The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. LeGuin which has already shipped. I don't know why I thought I needed another book for my TBR pile, but there you have it.