westerling | Reading

Because Hanscom hasn't held an air show in years, I have no idea what the hell passed over my parents' yard behind the unrelieved overcast except that it sounded like a heavy bomber, but not a modern one: an air-shaking piston-engined roar like who ordered the Flying Fortress, which were not to my knowledge even tested at the base. It suggested lost psychogeography.

Japanese Breakfast's "Picture Window" (2025) came around again on WERS as I was driving this afternoon. The line about ghosts and home keeps resonating beyond the pedal steel guitar.

I see we will be celebrating the Fourth of July out of spite this year. So go other holidays. Af tselokhes, John.

Current Music: The Dropkick Murphys, "Who'll Stand with Us?"

nineweaving

Laputa-like, my dear and daunting Readercon has come round again to Burlington. They've given me a delectable set of appearances, and I hope to see some of you there!

Understanding Originals Through their Responses
Thursday, July 17, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT, Salon G/H

Melissa Bobe (m), Greer Gilman, Michael Dirda, Rebecca Fraimow

An expected result of discovering books in conversation with each other is that reading the older book illuminates hidden aspects of the newer one. But what of the reverse case, when reading the response tells you something new about the original? Panelists will discuss the deeply satisfying experience of appreciating originals through the responses to them, including examples they've seen, what they learned from them, and how this shaped their experience of both books.

Reading: Greer Gilman,
Friday, July 18, 2025, 12:00 PM EDT, Envision / Enliven

Greer Gilman reads from Lightwards, her third Cloudish novel.

Crafts as Magic, Magic as Craft
Friday, July 18, 2025, 4:00 PM EDT, Create / Collaborate

Scott H. Andrews (m), Chris Rose, Greer Gilman, Natalie Luhrs, Stephanie Wytovich

To those of us who have never learned such skills ourselves, all manner of crafts from cooking to pottery and from fiber arts to woodwork can seem like magic. In what ways is it illuminating to talk about crafts and magic in terms of each other? What stories have made good use of crafts as magic or magic as craft?

Meet the Pros(e)
Friday, July 18, 2025, 10:15 PM EDT, Salon F

At the Friday night Meet the Pros(e) party, program participants are assigned to tables with a roughly equal number of conferencegoers and other participants, and then table placements are scrambled at regular intervals so that everyone gets to meet a new set of people in a small-group setting. Think of it as a low-key sort of speed dating where you need never be the sole focus of anyone's attention, and the goal is just to get to know some cool Readerconnish people. Please note that this event will include a bar and is mask-optional, unlike most other programming.

The Allure of Orpheus and Eurydice
Saturday, July 19, 2025, 11:00 AM EDT, Salon F

Tom Doyle (m), Constance Fay, Greer Gilman, Gwynne Garfinkle, Kate Nepveu

The tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice — the lover who visits Hades to rescue his love, only to falter at the end — has inspired artists for millennia. We'll look at why the story has resonated for so long, favorite adaptations and whether Orpheus could ever NOT look back.

Cartography and the Imagination
Saturday, July 19, 2025, 3:00 PM EDT, Salon F

Fonda Lee (m), Anne E.G. Nydam, Greer Gilman, Jedediah Berry, Robert V.S. Redick

There are few conventions more ubiquitous in fantasy novels than the map at the beginning of the book. Often, as Diana Wynne Jones memorably put it in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, "you must not expect to be let off from visiting every damn place shown on it." A map can be used to give a sense of place, to make a promise to the reader about which locations will become relevant, even to conceal or misdirect. This panel will discuss how maps can both illuminate an imagined world or conceal its dark edges.

Nine

sovay

I was so transfixed by the Bittersweets' "Hurtin' Kind" (1967) that I sat in the car in front of my house listening until it was done. The 1965 original is solid, stoner-flavored garage rock with its keyboard stomp and harmonica wail, but the all-female cover has that guitar line like a Shepard tone, the ghostly descant in the vocals, the singer's voice falling off at the end of every verse: it sounds like an out-of-body experience of heartbreak. The outro comes on like a prelude to Patti Smith.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard two songs about mental unwellness within the same couple of hours, actually I'd be swimming in nickels, but I appreciated the contrast of the slow-rolling dread-flashover of Doechii's "Anxiety" (2025) with Marmozets' "Major System Error" (2017) just crashing in at gale force panic attack. Hat-tip to

rushthatspeaks for the former. I must say that I am missing my extinct music blogs much less now that I spend so much time in the car with college radio on.

"Who'll Stand with Us?" (2025) is the most Billy Bragg-like song I have heard from the Dropkick Murphys and a little horrifically timely.

Non-musically, I think I might explode. The curse tablets are not cutting it.

Current Music: Marmozets, "Major System Error"

sovay

Rabbit, rabbit! I had to go for my annual physical this afternoon, but I stopped by Porter Square Books afterward to collect a book for my mother and look what was part of their summer sea-display:

I had wanted to write about so many queer films for June, but the month disappeared. Fortunately before we ran out of the formal observance of Pride,

rushthatspeaks and I made it to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982) at the Coolidge. It was adapted from the 1947 novel by Jean Genet, but I have never seen anything onscreen that more resembled the novels of Chip Delany. Meant in sincere compliment, it is one of the sweatiest films I have ever seen. It looks like it smells like a porno theater. Its antihero is straight out of Tom of Finland with his sailor's tight, tight white trousers and muscular cleavage revealed by the barest excuse for an A-shirt, his boyish, chiseled, louche face under his insolently cocked bachi in the sullen, enticing haze that never varies from the sodium-smoke of just after sunset or just before dawn, a perpetual cruising hour. The sea-wall of its fantasized Brest is studded with stone phalli, anatomically complete with slit and balls. All graffiti in town is dicks. The chanteuse of the dive bar sings Wilde like Dietrich, but some of the construction workers with their buff hard hats are playing video games while the naval lieutenant who pines for Querelle records his poetically criminal obsessions into a portable tape recorder. The bare-chested, leather-vested cop at the bar actually is a cop outside of it, where he looks just as fetishistic in his fedora and black leather trenchcoat. Every interaction between men looks like a negotiation or a seduction whether it is one or not, although on some level it always is, regardless of the no-homo excuses manufactured to allow their bodies to meet. Constantly, metaphysically, literally, this movie fucks. Its hothouse, bathhouse sexuality must have come in just under the cutting wire of AIDS. I have no idea what it would offer a viewer with no sexual or aesthetic interest in men except its philosophy, although as my husband notes the philosophy is actually quite good, deconstructing its hard masc signifiers as much as it gets off on them, dissolving in and out of the words and ultimately the life of Genet; the theatricality of its interlocked sets and swelteringly flamboyant lighting would look entirely natural on the stage. It quotes Plutarch and stages a hand job that without a glimpse of cock would have caused mass apoplexies in the Breen office. (Send it back in time, please.) It was my introduction to Fassbinder and if I had seen it as an adolescent, I imagine it would have had much the same effect as Tanith Lee. It was introduced by the series programmer wearing leather in its honor and a T-shirt for Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963). It made a superb date movie.

Current Music: Les Cowboys Fringants, "Marine marchande"

asakiyume

This question popped into my head when I looked out my window and saw a catbird balancing on a stick, using its wings to help it balance.

Would you trade your arms and hands for wings?

sovay

As I hollered after the inapposite license plate of the SUV that had blown through the crosswalk without even thinking about stopping while we were in it, "Psalm 23? With that driving?" I am informed by

spatch that the driver who actually had stopped for us like a normal person let out one of those whoaaa sounds as at a game of the dozens, which was extremely good recompense for almost being run over by an SUV whose Lord may have been a shepherd, but obviously not a crossing guard.

(The rest of this weekend has been different temperatures of garbage; I take my victories where I can. We were in West Medford to eat tamales on the bleachers of Playstead Park.)

Current Music: The Heavy Heavy, "Feel"

sovay

After many travails and an extra plague year in transit, the latest of the Paleozoic Pals has made landfall from the Carboniferous.

My father adores his Diplocaulus salamandroides. My niece has been sent a picture of hers with its accompanying book, to be held in trust until her next visit. My mother has been presented with its enamel pin form, which is done in bands of lighter and darker purple instead of newt-like red and black. I had forgotten entirely about the stretch bonus of Bandringa rayi, whose spoonbill suggests the Amazon river dolphin of the Pennsylvanian period. I really am invested in the continued existence of the Paleontological Research Institution, which is one of the reasons I have gladly thrown in to its Kickstarters for almost ten years. The present being so very full of horror and stupidity, it is important that it can also produce such snuggable plush of the past.

Current Music: Soul Asylum, "Somebody to Shove"

marthawells

For Murderbot Day, a great interview with DeWanda Wise, about playing NavigationBot in The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon:

https://www.nexuspointnews.com/post/interview-dewanda-wise

I had worked with Paul on Fatherhood. He literally texted me and was like, "do you want to play a murderous robot?"

sovay

Actually the temperature crashed by a solid thirty degrees Fahrenheit and with any luck will stay this moderately cool and dampish until everyone has rehydrated. Or we could just skip the next heat dome entirely.

I had worked up an entire rant about the scaremongering of this article and especially its anti-intellectual characterization of Zohran Mamdani as automatically out of touch because his father teaches at Columbia and his mother has directed films in Hollywood as if he were a Cabot who talks only to God when both of these professions especially in these days of DEI demonization mean something very different without whiteness and then I discovered that the author's big shtick is that she "came out" as politically conservative while an undergraduate at Harvard, at which point her already tenuous right to slate anyone for attending Bowdoin fared poorly on the pot-to-kettle scale. Anyway,

spatch liked Monsoon Wedding (2001).

The Europeans (1979) turns out to have been the first foray of Merchant Ivory into costume drama and its modest budget gives it a slight, wonderful ghost-look of New England, nineteenth-century carriages on twentieth-century streets, the tarmac dirt-roaded over, telephone poles discreetly out of shot, the dry stone walls tumbledown in the picturesque rather than practically maintained day. I got such déjà vu from the Federal style of its historic houses—and the occasionally more modern construction of their neighbors—that I was reassured to see it actually had shot in Waltham, Concord, and Salem which I recognized from the red-bricked back side of the Customs House. Its autumn is the sugar-red drift of maple leaves, the pale punctuation of birches. Its actors have an indie air with their precisely characterful period clothes doing half the worldbuilding. Robin Ellis sports a moss-bronze corduroy coat and a waistcoat in pheasant paisleys I should like to bid for and a creditably mid-Atlantic accent, cast ironically on the colonial side of the plot of two sets of American cousins and their entanglement with a third, European set. I have not read its particular source novel by Henry James, but it has the light, sharp, not overly mannered observations, a sweet-sour bite in the chocolate box. In light of the setting, variations on "Simple Gifts" and "Shall We Gather at the River?" may have been unavoidable contributions to the score.

Because I had showed

spatch a clip of a trumpet played into Jell-O, my attempt to explain Chladni figures netted us a 1989 Christmas lecture by Charles Taylor, after which we went through Delia Derbyshire's "Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO" (1967), Belbury Poly's "Caermaen" (2004), and finally thanks to what must have been a very confused sidebar landed on Les Luthiers' "Rhapsody in Balls" (2009). Today has been generally breaking-down-tired, but during the part of the evening where I was still working on implementing a bagel for dinner, WERS had the decency to play the Dead Milkmen's "Punk Rock Girl" (1988).

Current Music: The Chats, "Smoko"

sovay

Returned from the optometrist's, I have nocturnal eyes and mirrorshades. When

spatch informed me that Zohran Mamdani is Mira Nair's kid, I remarked that it was a little like discovering that Madhur Jaffrey the author of cookbooks and children's books is the actor who introduced Ismail Merchant to James Ivory. I feel I really should have seen this video coming.

Current Music: Mr. Cardamom, "Nani (feat. Madhur Jaffrey)"

sovay

102 °F, said the forecast this afternoon. 106 °F, said the car when I got into it. I have no difficulty believing it felt like 109 °F. The sun clanged. The electric grid of the Boston metro area was not designed to run this many air conditioners at once.

I followed Ally Wilkes from her short fiction into her debut novel All the White Spaces (2022) and I mean it as a recommendation when I say that I came for the queer polar horror and stayed for the bildungsroman. Externally, it follows the disintegration of an ill-fated Antarctic expedition over the austral year of 1920 as it comes under the traditional strains of weather, misfortune, the supernatural, mistrust. Internally, it follows the discovery of its seventeen-year-old trans stowaway that masculinity comes in more flavors than the imperial ideal he has construed from war cemeteries and boy's own magazines, that he can even invent the kind of man he wants to be instead of fitting himself fossil-cast into a lost shape. No one in the novel describes their identity off the cutting edge of the twenty-first century; the narrative resists an obvious romantic pairing in favor of one of the less conventional nonsexual alliances I enjoy so much. I am predictably a partisan of the expedition's chief scientific officer, whose conscientious objection during the still-raw war casts him as a coward on a good day, a fifth columnist on a bad, and makes no effort to make himself liked either way. It has great ice and dark and queerness and since I deal with heat waves arctically, I am pleased to report that it holds up to re-read.

Kevin Adams' A Crossword War (2018) is a folk album about Bletchley Park, a thing I appreciate existing.

Current Music: Alabaster DePlume, "Who Is a Fool"

jazzfish

I ... I guess that's that.

My group members stepped up at the last minute and helped out with the paper, so I turned that in on Thursday. I also explicitly abdicated all responsibility for putting together the five-minutes-each video recordings for the group presentation. I recorded that last night, realised this morning that it was actually under five minutes but also how to fix it, re-recorded it, and sent it off. And just now I hit Submit Quiz on the final.

I'm ... done? Grades will be out at some point to confirm that I did in fact pass, both "sufficient unto graduation" and "sufficient unto my own arbitrary standard". (Pretty sure I did, but grades for this class have been Not Terribly Forthcoming, so there's the possibility of an unpleasant surprise. Not at all likely, but possible.)

Onward. After credential: chop wood, carry water. Time to get (more) serious about ye jobhunt.

You cannot know what happens next.

marthawells

Great interview with Murderbot executive producer Andrew Miano:

https://www.nexuspointnews.com/post/interview-murderbot-ep-andrew-miano

First and foremost, my partner Paul Weitz read the book for pleasure, not with any eye towards adaptation, and came in with it and said, "this would make an amazing TV show." We all read it and really sparked to it and thought it was unique and special and funny, which is not something that you always get in a lot of sci-fi. [It is] also very meaningful and emotional. It was the whole package so it was very exciting and we went about it. We met Martha... One of the biggest things to focus on is how do you honor the book? How do you translate that to the screen? It's not easy, but I'm very fortunate to have Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz — two smart, talented partners — creating and running the show with their guidance and Martha's support and involvement to sort of capture and stay true to the books.

asakiyume

Waking up this morning was like waking up in the Amazon, and I AM HERE FOR THIS. Out my back window, a northeastern jungle, so many shades of green, dappled sun, morning mist. An aural bouquet of birdsong and small critter sounds. Right now there's a scent of wood smoke.

I love the way the medium of humid air makes you intimate with every other thing. The way everything is right on your skin and in your lungs. The glass of water sweats, you sweat. Time dissolves, sound travels nonlinearly, odors are more vivid. I love the lassitude, the exhaustion.

sovay

For the hundred and thirteenth birthday of Alan Turing,

spatch and I drove to Gloucester to watch the sunset on the water, so, queer joy?

I have worn this T-shirt since his centenary in 2012: it is a word cloud derived from "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950). The tide filled in around the barnacle-colored, seal-colored boulders we had climbed out onto, swirling the olivine shag of the rockweed in the late mirror of the sea. I had not been to Gloucester since before the last glaciation, in a warm autumn that was still cooler than this heat dome settled over Massachusetts like a fitted block of Death Valley. We saw the red-and-white blinks of buoys, the oil-slick necks of cormorants. We checked in on the ghost sign for Moxie at the top of Tablet Rock in Stage Fort Park. From our vantage point of one of the granite horns of Half Moon Beach, we saw three crewed boats practicing for what we realized later would be the races for St. Peter's Fiesta, the blessing of the fleet which had hung the streets with tricolor bunting and Italian flags and set up the Ferris wheel and concessions of a carnival as well as an open-air altar brilliantly painted with a seascape of Ten Pound Light, its foreground wheeling with gulls with their own successful fisher's catch in their beaks. The fisherman in his sunken-green bronze oilskins still holds the wheel against more than four centuries of the remembered drowned. Our designated clam shack had closed an hour before we expected it, so we drove down Route 1 in a sailor's delight of clouds like an electric fire and came to a bewildered halt in a retina-searing splatter of blue lights, because it turned out that half of Revere Beach was closed to traffic thanks to a hit-and-run on a state trooper. We managed nonetheless to salvage roast beef and fried clams from Kelly's at the cost of several miles' walk in the gelatinous night, which compensated at least with the white noise of waves at high tide. The cable-stays of the Christina and John Markey Memorial Pedestrian Bridge were lit up in rainbow neon. I admire Aimee Ogden's "Because I Held His Name Like a Key" (2025) for not being any of the things expected of a Turing fairy story. I look forward to whatever comes of these unshredded papers. We drove home covered in sea-salt and sweat-salt and an unavoidable admixture of strangers' weed smoke and I had a really nice time.

If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up.
—Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950)

Current Music: Kevin Adams, "Safety in Numbers"

sovay

For whatever it is worth to history, I wish to register that I do not like finding out that we are suddenly at war with Iran. I do not need any more specters of annihilation, nuclear or otherwise. I get enough stress from my regular life.

(These Crusader fantasists. My entire lifetime. Their Armageddon wet dreams. Why will the sand not eat them alone.)

Current Music: Midnight Oil, "Beds Are Burning"

asakiyume

Today was wonderful!

It started out with meeting a young woman in a wheelchair, birdwatching by a small pond with cattails.

"I think I saw an American bittern," she said.

Later I brought some catalpa blossoms to a friend, and they gave me an iced, homemade-banana-syrup-and-oat-milk latte to take with me on my errands. It was a hot day and the drink was perfect!

My errands included buying a sickle to cut this long grass.

Not now: now I want to let it alone, as the fireflies and butterflies and bees enjoy it (and also I enjoy it). But later, in the fall, when the time comes to cut it. A lawn mower does a horrible, chewy job, and the shears I have are blunt.** So I want to try a sickle. I saw people cutting grass with sickles in Timor-Leste. Here is my sickle. I've named her Kusakari (grass cutter).

Now, as it happens, I also have a lump hammer, which the healing angel named Petra, and which is great for smashing open hickory nuts or acorns. Here she is, posing with some of last year's hickory nuts.

Well ... if we introduce.... Petra to Kusakari.... OMG!

Then on the way home from my errands, I was driving along a stretch of road that's marked "Turtle Crossing." Usually this is a depressing stretch of road because in spite of the sign, what I mainly see are crushed turtles -_-

But today I saw a live one, craning its neck, preparing to risk its life to get across the road. So I pulled over, went back, picked it up, and carried it across. When I set it down, it trundled on down to the water that was waiting for it.

ONE TURTLE LIFE SAVED. Yaaay!

And now I'm going to eat strawberries and whipped cream. PERFECT DAY.

**Yes, I could sharpen them. In fact I have sharpened them in the past and probably will in the future... but ... sickle!

ETA: The sickle's name should be KusaKARI, not KusaKIRI--corrected that now.

Current Music: A Change Is Gonna Come, covered by John Boutté Jambalaya, boutteworks

sovay

Thanks to the effects of prolonged illness on my body, I have even more difficulty with it these days than in previous difficult years, but

spatch took a picture of me on the way down the hill of Powder House Park that looked like I could still be the prow of a ship.

Listening to the radio in the car and tracking down songs at home, I seem to have amassed a small collection of music videos, more recent than not. I had never seen the studly single entrendres that accompany the blues-rock boasts of Elle King's "Ex's and Oh's" (2015). Rob identified the scratchy guitar chug in Sarah Barrios' "Thank God You Introduced Me to Your Sister" (2021) as a callback to Fountains of Wayne and thence the Cars, but it is a sapphic banger in its own right. It is generationally lovely to have the London Gay Men's Chorus backing up the acoustic version of Isaac Dunbar's "American High" (2024). Jean Dawson's "Pirate Radio" (2022) rocks like an Afrofuturist anthem and an autobiographical chantey at the same time. If it ever crossed your mind to wonder about a cross between the Preacher in True Stories (1986) and the High Voltage Messiah of The Ruling Class (1972), there's John C. Reilly in Jack White's "Archbishop Harold Holmes" (2025). The vintage riot grrrl of Halsey's "Safeword" (2025) is enthusiastically not safe for work. Patrick Wolf's "The Last of England" (2025) has so much Jarman in its DNA, it is almost gilding the lily to have filmed at Dungeness except that it feels like the correct acknowledgement. I just like the oneiric stop-motion of Witch Prophet's "Memory (feat. Begonia)" (2023).

Current Music: Patrick Wolf, "The Last of England"

sovay

Happy solstice!

spatch and I celebrated the longest stretch of the year's light with the third-to-last night of Theatre@First's The Tempest, the farewell production of its longtime artistic director. Their lion-bronze Caliban stood laughing, in his hands the staff the island's magic had brought him in pieces, by right, made whole. In, summer!

Current Music: Jean Dawson, "Pirate Radio*"

nineweaving

Wishing all of you joy at the summer solstice.

After yesterday's oppressive heat, it was perfectly lovely, with a little wind that stirred a dip and dazzle in the leaves, and carried on it an elusive scent of lime-flowers.

I spent part of it telling stories to Fox (age 8), of kite-battles and the Borrowers and all my summer camps, and part revising Lightwards. When I went out to walk the labyrinth to celebrate the day, I kept running into folks in garlands. Very pleasant.

Nine

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westerling

June 2021

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Page Summary

sovay - Through crime and crusade, our labor it's been stolen
nineweaving - A moveable feast
sovay - You think one plus seven seven seven makes two
sovay - J'm'installe sur le rivage pour te voir mon gros gars t'éloigner vers le large
asakiyume - a trade
sovay - I don't change, I don't even notice the scene
sovay - Waiting for you to call me up and tell me I'm not alone
marthawells - Interview with DeWanda Wise
sovay - It's two in the afternoon and thirty-four degrees
sovay - Don't know me now, then you'll never know me later
sovay - Do you believe a person should be some kind of answer?
jazzfish - and ... done?
marthawells - New Interview
asakiyume - Rhapsody to humid heat
sovay - I know you're waiting for me in secret places
sovay - How do we sleep while our beds are burning?
asakiyume - a wonderful day
sovay - But I was cruising Gawain in the mist
sovay - All of it's golden, my body is floating, I'm still alive
nineweaving - Leapfire

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