thanate | Reading

This week is starting off terribly, but a neatly overstuffed envelope of tiny, brightly jacketed chapbooks of poetry by Romie Stott—Love, Witness, Today, Going Under, Prompt, Offline, Political, Splinter, in shades of cone-orange and map-blue and mint-green—arrived in the mail and even without being absolutely the best thing in the last couple of days would be pretty great.

Current Music: Felled, "Ember Dream"

moon_custafer

Friday night’s paintings of cat food and Beatrice.

A tie-dye experiment with a thrifted linen jumpsuit went awry when I realized the zipper in the side meant I probably shouldn’t microwave it as per the instructions, and would instead have to let it sit twenty-four hours before putting it through the wash. Popping it in a white plastic bag from the kitchen, I told myself “of course I won’t mistake this for a bag of garbage and throw it down the chute when I clean the bathroom tomorrow morning.”

You can all guess what happened.

I find my chief regret is that I’ll never know if the design turned out.

Air quality was much improved today, so we went down to the boardwalk. Did a sketch and took some photos, all of which I plan to work upinto paintings at the next session.

I’m also planning to go to this poster-making session Thursday for No Jets T.O.

Big thanks to

sovay for posting where one can donate to Namaygoosisagagun First Nation Response in the wake of the community having to up and flee from the wildfires.

moon_custafer

In which I try to figure out if the sign-painters’ apostrophes that annoyed me in this transcription of Marc Bolan’s The Warlock of Love (1969) were errors that had crept in, or part of the original text. Spoiler—they’re Marc’s fault; and/or the galley proofreader’s. That said, the weird pagination style seems to have come from the 1992 reprint by the Tyrannosaurus Rex Appreciation Society.

Still thinking about the poems themselves. Like T. Rex’s songs, I find them uneven, sometimes terrific and sometimes corny. I prefer the ones that read like Bolan didn’t reach for his thesaurus:

The vanquished Sun
Is like the withered yolk
Of a weathered egg.

Or the ones where there’s a punchline to cut through the gilding:

Sleek Andromeda swirling in an undershift,
a pimple temple like on her portcullis longship
lip. I dance on her gliding stomach of fibs and
erect my many coloured mast in her belly-button.
Take a cheekbone, any cheekbone, lay it pastely
on a furnace brasier and look for sand. Marrow
melts, mud squelches and belches over my
handsomely haunted hand but no sand.
A beach I whimper I need to bask upon a sun-dipped
dripping moon of beach. My face feels the draft now,
my shaggy face lags like a quilled pig — my bones
burnt and not a seed of sand remains only a high
forked pitch of light cine-marly sailing my sagging
dripping wood-wild skipping face.
And now reader I have only half a head.

marthawells

It's been a while! Unchanged from the previous post, I'm still tired. I haven't been doing much since I got back from Europe but working, getting sick, dealing with annual and family medical appointments etc.

Things coming up:

* I'll be one of the special guests at Bubonicon August 21-23 in New Mexico: https://www.bubonicon.com/

* I'll be a participant at the WorldCon in Los Angeles, August 27-31: https://www.lacon.org/

I'm up for a Hugo Award for Best Novelette for: “Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” by Martha Wells (Reactor, July 10, 2025)

And Murderbot is up for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form for:

Murderbot: “All Systems Red”, written by Paul Weitz & Chris Weitz, directed by Roseanne Liang, based on the book All Systems Red by Martha Wells (Apple TV)

Murderbot: “The Perimeter”, written by Chris Weitz & Paul Weitz, directed by Paul Weitz, based on the book All Systems Red by Martha Wells (Apple TV)

* I'll be at ArmadilloCon in Austin on Saturday September 12: https://armadillocon.org/

***

I'm also on the longlist for an Ignyte Ember Award, for unsung contributions to genre, which is really cool.

https://ignyteawards.fiyahlitmag.com/vote/

sovay

With the disclosure that I have not myself seen Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) despite it doing numbers at the Somerville Theatre in 70 mm, I read the kind of glowing profile of the film and its maker that leaves me wondering what he valued in it at all beyond its ability to be retold to his specifications:

"We broke the fragile bonds between men," he says after the massacre, essentially repeating the words he uttered about his earlier shame. "And for centuries of darkness to follow, the stories of Troy will only be sung." [. . .] And in case we haven't gotten the message, Odysseus delivers one final prophecy. When Penelope asks him why the stories of Troy will only be sung, he says, "Because songs will be all they have to remember those of us who could write." (At the collapse of the Bronze Age, written language was lost for centuries; we have no evidence of writing from this period. Surely nothing like that could ever happen again.) "A new dawn will break over the darkened world," Odysseus says. But his prediction isn't a happy one. He adds, "And all our mistakes will once again be forgotten." In other words, history will repeat itself. Again, he's talking to us.

There is indeed a lacuna of known literacy in the Greek language. By the eleventh century BCE, the syllabary of Linear B had ceased to be used to write Mycenaean Greek and it would take until the eighth century for inscriptions in the contemporarily recognizable Greek alphabet to start to show. (Elsewhere in the Mediterranean we find no comparable rupture in the record. Hittite cuneiform does conk out after the Late Bronze Age Collapse, but Luwian trucks right on through the Greek Dark Ages and Akkadian which got its start in the third millennium will persist in the written record as late as the first century CE. The Phoenician alphabet which provided the Greek template will run down through the destruction of Carthage into the Christian fourth century of Sirte. Sumerian may be too far east and inland to count for purposes of this parenthesis, but Egyptian hieroglyphs are close to four thousand energizer bunny years. There was not some kind of global, apocalyptic forgetting of the concept of writing. The Cypriot syllabary, in use into the Classical period, derives from Minoan Linear A.) It still feels breathtakingly culture-bound to conclude the retelling of an oral tradition by lamenting it as a means of transmission—the post-technological leftovers, second best of a fallen world, no real substitute for the hard historical fact of fixed and impartial, implicitly more civilized text. Those of us who could write. The ones who mattered? Who should have been telling the story? As if the Odyssey were not full of singers of tales from Demodokos to the Sirens to Odysseus himself and so much of it concerned with the shaping of stories, of histories, of memory beyond a punch line. As if the improvisation and reperformance of an epic tradition were inherently naïve and mendacious, larding rosy-fingered glasses of gods over the brutal truths of burnt walls. As if we're all still stuck at Hisarlık with Schliemann and its archaeological accuracy is the most important thing about an epic poem. Of course, what was lost when the lights went out over Hellas was exactly what we would have mourned most. What you should grieve is the impossibility of never hearing a passage from the Iliad or the Odyssey or any of the rest of the Epic Cycle as it would have been sung in those so-called Dark Ages, never twice the same around the formulae, a living story instead of its papyrus-fossilized bones. I am a text-oriented person, terrified by the current popular indifference to reality, and I was primed from early childhood to respond favorably to stories that disappear into their own meta: and, in time, only the bards knew the truth of it. Assuming an accurate report of this one, hell, no. How can you spend so many years with a story and still miss how it worked in its world? It makes a good mic drop. It's just a silly thing to say. Anyway, they'll remember you through the vase paintings, too.

Current Music: Felled, "The Sentinel"

siderea

Here at Casa Sibyllea, we're using a few online tools to navigate The Smog.

Most useful so far has been https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current which is an animated map of the continent that shows an hourly prediction of where the smoke will actually be when for the next day or two. We've been using this to time when to open up the windows to get fresh air. This has the advantage of not being American and thus not being subject to the vicissitudes of the US federal government.

Also modestly helpful has been Google Maps, which has a view for air quality and a separate view specific for wildfires. These are under the "Layers" tool (position depends on the platform you're using), and you might have to click the "More" option. Here's screenshots the desktop (Mac + Firefox) and Android app UIs with the Layers tools indicated. They are not predictive, they only show the present or recent past (which is unclear – these would be much more helpful if they had datetime information attached, so the user could tell how fresh it was). In air quality view, you have to click a specific location to get an actual air quality number. Widefire view also shows the rough perimeters of smoke clouds.

Over on https://fire.airnow.gov, you can see a map that has regional textual forecasts and alerts, like a weather report for smoke, and dots that correspond to actual air quality sensors, so you can see where precisely the data is coming from near you. The dots are color-coded to how bad the air quality they are reporting is, so you can see at a glance how the whole map is; when you click on a sensor location, it gives you that sensor's (presumably current) particulate reading (PM2.5), a trend indicator, and a little graph of recent readings. Down in the right lower corner, it tells you how recently the page was refreshed, which is a good thing, but that's not the same as how recently the sensors updated. (I have my own domestic sensor hardware, and have become very aware that the online data they share is not necessarily very fresh; today my air filter started alerting, but the linked app didn't show there was an issue until a half hour later.) I just recently checked this out, so I don't know how useful it will be for me, but looks promising.

AccuWeather, like firesmoke.ca, has an animated forecast map. I can't figure out how to nagivate to it directly in AccuWeather for a specific location – the "air quality" tab only has static images. I found Boston's by Google searching "smoke map today" and letting it geolocate me. You can start there and navigate to wherever. It seems to cover much but not all of North America; it goes as far north as Saskatoon, and it's not clear how far south it goes. This is also new to me, but looks very promising because it's specifically a map of "near surface smoke", as opposed to merely satellite-visible smoke plumes. Intriguingly, it seems to be reporting something other than just particulate matter: it's units are "µg/m3" which it describes as "micrograms of gaseous pollutant per cubic meter of ambient air".

ETA: h/t

graydon, this fascinating mashup map at earth.nullschool.net, configured to show "Wind @ Surface + Sulfate Extinction (Aerosol Optical Thickness, 550 nm)". Not sure what "sulfate extinction" means here, but the info shows it refers in some sense to SO4, sulfate ions. Nullschool Earth's main page says, "a visualization of global weather conditions
forecast by supercomputers
updated every three hours".

sovay

This afternoon the sky has lost its pest-fire sickliness in the intermittent washout of rain, but we are into the red blobs on the map and I am using my inhaler. I dreamed of a supporting character from Winterset (1936) as if during the prologue to the plot. I feel brainless and abraded.

Because I had Felled's "Fire Season on the Outer Rim" (2017) on my mind after this ash-fall week, I was reminded that I had never gotten hold of their sophomore LP The Intimate Earth (2021) and behold, there's another bog body in "Sphagnum in the Hinterlands."

I put another pin in the awfulness of the last two years by the fact that I missed the existence of Emmett Nahil's From the Belly (2024), which looks rather barnacle-crusted to my interests. I am not sure I even agree with the author's assertions about the foundations of nautical horror, but I like his passionate championing of Melville over Lovecraft. I never recomended Avi Burton's "We Are All in the Same Boat" (2026).

I meant to grab a copy of M.A. Knight's Feverchain (2026) while I was still at Readercon, but after a lovely and too-brief interaction with the author and the designer in between panels I never made it back into the dealer's room. If we shared the same social media, I could ask if they would be at NecronomiCon.

I would cheerfully read further adventures of this psychogeographer in Albuquerque, but this one stands as an excellent one-shot for anyone who cares about land, water, and the Situationist International: Rath Mercury, "Herkimer Inquiries" (2026).

Yesterday the most complicated thing I did was take a walk, read two novels, and reconstruct my long-lost favorite burger from Christopher's with pepper jack, avocado, and homemade chipotle mayo on an English muffin. I watched a movie for the first time in ages, even if I do not seem possessed of the intellect to do anything about it. It was nice. I am tired of the most boring people in the world doing so much to harm it.

Current Music: Felled, "Sphagnum in the Hinterlands"

jazzfish

Mr Tuppert calmed down once we got on the plane, where it was dark and quiet, and slept the whole way. He and I then spent two nights in a hotel, and got into the condo on Wednesday. This is our fourth day here and I think he's getting used to it. I might be too.

In Corvaric he spent a lot of time on his heating pad on the table, or on the foot of the bed, where he could see me. Here he's been burying himself in the bedclothes a lot. It may be chillier than he's used to; it may be just stress and overstimulation. Today I've turned the temp up a notch and he's out asking for attention, which is nice.

I'd hoped to get a new bed for move-in day, but the earliest they'll deliver is Monday, so til then I'm sleeping on an air mattress of Steph's. It's fine, now that I've laid some blankets between me and it.

The apartment is... it's also fine. The living room is a bit narrower than I'd thought/hoped. There's no pantry and no bar/counter, so the kitchen may well have both less storage space and functionally less counter space than previous, which may be a Problem. On the bright side there's laundry, and a giant bedroom closet, and a nook in the bedroom for a desk and/or cat tree.

I've got or am getting a sufficiency of Stuff to tide me over: a few plates and bowls and mugs, a new nonstick skillet. A table and two chairs from a thrift store, which I consider myself to be renting. That sort of thing. The living room is all but empty, as is that enormous closet.

It still feels ... unmoored, temporary, unreal. And it likely will until my stuff gets here, in two to four weeks.

Yet I'm doing ... well, I think. Optimistic, and even hopeful. A plan has come to something like fruition, after months of being stalled out. There's an enormity of logistics to sort, still, but they're sortable, they're things I can make progress on. I'm no longer wholly waiting on other things to happen to make them possible.

And I think it's gonna be alright
Yeah, the worst is over now
The morning sun is shining like a red rubber ball

The farmers market is just downstairs in the parking lot, so I shall go and see what wonders that brings.

mrissa

Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang, eds., Violent Phenomena: Essays Toward the Future of Literary Translation. This is a collection of essays by translators who are either working in global minority languages or global minority situations, with a wide range of thoughts and attitudes. Very cool stuff, very interesting if you're interested in translation generally, which I am.

Joe Boyd, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain. This could fruitfully have been much shorter. Boyd did a lot of work in the music industry and is sometimes speaking of his personal experience of different parts of world music (separated by chapter geographically except when not). When he leaves his personal experience, he gets both less interesting and less reliable--I believe, for example, that the events he discusses being privy to in Jamaican music are real and even interesting, but his brief comparisons with Trinidad and Tobago, from my own knowledge of those musical subgenres and their cultural context, are far more suspect. Anyway it's a giant weird book, and I'm glad I read much of it, but also gosh was it a relief to be done.

Hayan Charara, These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit. Intense and varied, personal, political, natural, all the things. Sometimes bookstore shelf-talkers are the greatest.

Agatha Christie, The Seven Dials Mystery. Kindle. I've seen the recent filmed version of this, and uh. "Version" may be too strong. This was fun but not one of her more outstanding efforts IMO (the secret society plot that this era tends to do is a hard sell for me whether it's in book version or movie version), but the transformation of it was...well. I guess they could put "Agatha Christie" on it to draw people in. Meanwhile I do like how exasperated the young women were with how they were perpetually underestimated.

Dorothy Dunnett, King Hereafter. Reread. There sure is a lot of this, and all of it Dunnett, start to finish. Patterns of melodrama and withholding of information: check. Characters who make vividly self-destructive choices: check. Oh Dorothy. I continue to maintain that if you try this one and don't like it, there's no need to go on to the two longer historical series. But I will love her forever for noticing that Macbeth's world was the North Sea world and for going all-in on that, and this is one of my favorites. And despite its size it's far less of a commitment than either series.

Alix E. Harrow, The Slantwise Histories. Discussed elsewhere.

Rochelle Hassan, The Spell for Unraveling. The last in its series, and I don't recommend starting here, start with the first one like a sensible person. One of my major questions was how Hassan was going to treat the plot where a person's One True Love was treated like a metaphysically real thing rather than a personal choice influenced by circumstances, and uh...almost well? but not really well? I'm not sure there was an ending with that plot that would have satisfied me, but otherwise this was a reasonably nice YA contemporary fantasy trilogy, sort of like YA contemporary fantasy used to be but with more varied characters, and I'm glad I read it.

Oliver K. Langmead, The Killing of a Chestnut Tree. Discussed elsewhere.

E. C. R. Lorac, Murder By Matchlight and Two-Way Murder. Kindle. These sure were Lorac mysteries. The first one was both written and set during WWII, which I always find interesting. I am just continuing to get these as the library makes it possible.

Tessa McWatt, ed., Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada. Some of these essays were about WRITING (in Canada), some were about writing IN CANADA, some were about indigeneity, some where about immigrant experience, there was a really good breadth and also some very specific good depth. This could have been a much more mediocre/standard-issue book, and I'm thrilled that it was as specifically good as it was.

M.E. O'Brien and Eman Ahdelhadi, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072. What a weird lovely thing this is. I think if you don't read leftist oral history at all it might not hit as hard how very good they are at what they're doing. It's not a novel, per se, there's not a linear plot that's going somewhere, it's a vision of a multifaceted future. I wouldn't want everything to be like this, but I'm delighted that this particular thing is like this.

C.L. Polk, The Feywild Job. I haven't read a D&D novel in over 30 years, but I read everything Cee puts out, so I read this. I had some "wow I have been out of the loop moments," such as when I learned that Baldur's Gate is a D&D thing (I really felt like Roger De Bris in The Producers saying, "I for one did not know that the Third Reich meant Germany," and boy was my godson happy to explain more to me on this topic), but on the whole it was a fantastic-romantic romp that was very Cee. I think it will also be satisfying to those who have been up on the D&D developments of, uh. This millennium, but I'm the wrong person to ask.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth. Reread. Definitely there's a reason I am rereading Macbeth stuff, but not an immediate reason. In any case I thought a lot about the witches. It looks to me pretty transparent that they displayed their evil spirits to Macbeth later in the play for Doylean reasons (specifically to make the scenes more varied and do some impressive stage effects but not do them enough to run out of budget/ability to accomplish them). Also thinking about dynasties is wild, that's what I have to say about that.

Kristen Stapelton, The Modern City in Asia. Kindle. Really interesting stuff about how colonized and non-colonized cities modernized, how war affected these questions, very short and pithy, good stuff.

Jane Yolen, Briar Rose. Reread. I was not done mourning Jane (nor yet), so this is what came to hand. It's warmly and sweetly done, which sounds like a strange thing for a Holocaust novel, but...it's also a granddaughter/grandmother novel. And I need more of that in my life. Recommended if you come into it braced.

sovay

I saw earlier this evening that the man in the White House is threatening to increase tariffs on Canada for the wildfire smoke, reminiscent of Leo Rosten's celebrated definition of chutzpah except specifically with arson. I can wish him the same luck with his lungs as with his reflecting pool. In any case, it is how I saw that Namaygoosisagagun First Nation has been entirely burned out by said wildfires and all donations toward emergency response and community recovery should be vectored through the Anishinabek Nation 7th Generation Charity. I hope my state is sending firefighters, as we have done in the previous fire seasons that start to char into one long combustible drought. I am not even sure we are getting to the healing of the world at this point, but it's better than further burning it down.

Current Music: Car Seat Headrest, "Beach Death"

sovay

Five days from the end of Readercon and seven days after a confirmed contact for COVID-19, I have tested multiply negative for pandemic and may even have dodged regular old con crud, seeing as my sore-throated wheezing of the last few days is equally consistent with wildfires blowing into town. Today we are in a clearer patch and there is birdsong in the yew trees. Huzzah for paranoia and the N95.

Meanwhile,

spatch has shingles.

Current Music: Circle Takes the Square, "A Crater to Cough In"

sovay

Acting on a suggestion from

phi, I have successfully regained access to my files within Microsoft Word. It is less of a solution and more of a deferral than I would have liked, but since it enabled me to resume control of my own work without forking over any further monies to a corporation that just kicked the goalposts over onto the cross-country track, I am counting it as a species of victory and dreaming of arson. That the process was complicated by a glitch within one of Microsoft's own tools feels like one of those choices between malice and incompetence that there's no point in trying to make.

Yesterday I had to dash out into the sulfuric sunset to collect my interlibraried copy of Randolph Stow's The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980) from the Malden Public Library before it was shipped back out of reach again, but then I left with the predictable armful of books I had known nothing about prior to venturing into their multifarious stacks. Winston Graham's Woman in the Mirror (1975) trips over the rake of its own twist in the last two pages, but learning that it was revised from his earlier novel The Giant's Chair (1938) has made me curious whether the original more successfully stuck the Gothic landing. I have already lent my mother the Ghost Box-styled The Magic Valley Travellers: Welsh Stories of Fantasy and Horror (1974) for its unexpectedly sweet inclusion, under an alternate title, of John Wyndham's "Chinese Puzzle" (1953). The hallucinogenically mediated time travel of Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand (1969) looked in line with the strangeness of her short fiction. Joseph Conrad's Almayer's Folly (1895) may be in the public domain, but I hate reading novels off screens. For

spatch I obtained histories of Penn Station and Sesame Street and we coughed our way back out into the 16 mm evening. The strip-mall hole-in-the-wall of Fresco's may have served me the largest and one of the most delicious roast beef sandwiches I have ever ordered in my life.

I checked out early on the fifth column shenanigans that make up the action of J. E. Harold Terry and Lechmere Worrall's The Man Who Stayed at Home (1914), but emotionally it is another radiation of the Scarlet Pimpernel, this time on the home front of World War I, and as such fascinates me with its fidelity to the drawl and the eye-glass, among other conventions of the silly-ass mask: "Hello, everybody! By Jove, I say, isn't it a jolly mornin' for the war, what?" Tonight's adventures in college car radio have included Sam & Dave's "Hold On, I'm Comin'" (1966), Frog Eyes' "The Akhian Press" (2004), and James Chance's "The Devil Made Me Do It" (1983). If I do not get some kind of time to myself before this month ends I may explode.

Current Music: Frog Eyes, "The Akhian Press"

swan_tower

This is honestly closer to a theory-type essay, as I've already talked about more concrete angles like prostheses and assistive devices (in Year Four), and this time around I'm looking more at the dynamics of presenting physical disability in fiction.

Activists for better representation of disability often object to worldbuilding that imagines magic or advanced technology has erased that issue from existence, and advocate for greater visibility for disabled characters in our stories. I want to take a moment to say: in any setting that doesn't have such handwavy solutions, quite frankly, disability ought to be vastly more common than it is.

Let's take the specific example of trachoma and its accompanying condition, trichiasis. It roughens the inside of the eyelid and causes it to turn inward -- eyelashes and all -- resulting in repeated abrasion of the cornea. Though it was eliminated in the developed world during the 20th century and a 21st-century push has thus far wiped it out in thirty countries where it was still endemic, historically, this has been one of the leading causes of infectious blindness. It ran rampant through army camps and other crowded environments; it spread in cities; it infected people repeatedly throughout the course of their lives, until they lost their vision entirely.

How often have you seen it in a story?

Or consider osteoarthritis. We may occasionally note an elderly character being "stooped" or groaning at their stiff joints, but the reality is that any person whose job involves a lot of heavy manual labor is at high risk of developing such problems . . . and "heavy manual labor" is a great description of agrarian life at any point prior to industrialization. (During industrialization, it depends a bit more on what type of factory you're working in.) Archaeologists can look at a skeleton and judge what social class that person belonged to just by comparing their age to the wear and tear on their joints: two sets of remains recently found in Pompeii were fairly clearly identifiable as some middle-aged lady of the house and some younger male servant or slave, based on the damage to his bones -- and the lack of such damage to hers.

Injury in particular plays a key role here. Just in my lifetime, the tendency to send someone to physical therapy after an accident or surgery has skyrocketed, because we now have a much better idea of how to return the body to full function. But in the past? People often had to return to work as soon as they were anything like physically capable of it, instead of taking time to fully heal -- or, if they were wealthy, they got coddled with bed rest that actually made their recovery harder. How often do we see the results of that in fiction, though? Sure, we all know the trope of the character with old injury who can tell when it's about to rain . . . but we say much less about reduced range of motion, persistent loss of strength, or the ways that compensating for one problem (like an uneven gait) can screw up some other part of your body (like your back).

Of course, this is in part because we complain most about discomfort and limitations when we feel like we shouldn't be subject to them. If literally everybody around you starts experiencing arthritis by the time they're thirty because you're all constantly doing backbreaking labor, then when your own aches and pains begin to set in, that's more apt to feel like par for the course. It's a mark of how far medicine has come in the last century that we in the developed world expect we ought to continue to feel good for decades on end.

But also, I suspect that if we were to depict physical disabilities being as widespread as they were in historical reality -- and still are, in many parts of the world -- it would come across as unrelenting misery porn. If we tried to represent the honest rate of painful and disfiguring scars, missing teeth, deteriorating vision, weak grips, backaches, neck pain, reduced mobility, disturbed digestion, and more that probably afflicted the average rural village, market town, or overcrowded city of the past . . . frankly, I'm horrifying myself just trying to imagine it.

And even if you're writing science fiction of the sort that imagines a more technological future, this won't all go away -- or at least, it won't for all of the characters. Anyone on the bottom end of the social scale is liable to experience more disability relative to the elite, who can afford time to heal or expensive treatments and therapies to address their problems. The nature of the problems in question may change, and might include fictional ideas like neurological issues caused by the use of brain implants, but they're still likely to be there.

I am not, for the record, advocating that half of all characters under the age of forty should have some kind of disability, and every single character above that line. I suspect the result would end up distracting rather than effective -- one of those situations where truth winds up seeming less realistic than fiction. But I do think that all of us, not just the disability activists, would benefit from acknowledging more often how much this can be threaded into characters' lives, without them being explicitly marked out as Characters With Disabilities.

Especially because, when these issues are so widespread, they're no longer going to define someone's identity in the same way we might expect today. Having a bum knee or terrible vision or a stomach that regularly sends you to the privy at a run is just going to be how people are. That character can't walk without a cane? The same is true for six other people in the village. Some disabilities will still stand out -- seizures, for example, are going to be rarer, and quite possibly attributed to supernatural causes rather than ordinary life -- but many of them will seem like business as usual.

Which means that, in fiction, noting their presence can be done through simple traces of description. Two characters are having a conversation; one of them, upon being given a heavy object to look at, grimaces and transfers it to her stronger hand. The other one, standing up to leave, leans on the arm of his chair and then gently eases his weight onto his right hip. The servant, summoned to escort him out, stops rubbing at the infection reddening their eyes. The narrative doesn't have to stop and explain that these people have physical problems; it's just part of the descriptive texture, used to break up the dialogue and exposition.

Am I thinking of these things more right now because I'm moving through my forties? Is that "right hip" example possibly drawn from personal experience, which I only recently mitigated with physical therapy? Nahhhh.

But man, does age give me more sympathy for characters whose bodies don't work perfectly on command, every time.

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(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/07/17/new-worlds-physical-disability/)

siderea

This is a rumor, but a pretty good one run in the Washington Post:

2026 Jul 16 5:06 pm EDT: WaPo: "Lettuce supplier identified as potential source of cyclosporiasis outbreak":

The CDC has linked the Taylor Farms produce supplied to Taco Bell to the outbreak of the parasitic illness, according to two persons familiar with the investigation.

Investigators have identified shredded iceberg lettuce supplied to Taco Bell restaurants by Taylor Farms as a potential source of contamination in the outbreak of a parasitic illness that has sickened thousands in the United States, according to two individuals familiar with the investigation.

The two spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of the ongoing investigation.

Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week that they have identified a likely link among cyclosporiasis cases in four states — Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky — marking the agency’s clearest public indication yet that many of the illnesses are connected to a common source. A top official from the Food and Drug Administration said earlier this week that its investigation involves multiple produce items, including lettuce.

“The signal we have gotten is that there is a very high percentage of people who got sick at Taco Bell, and when investigators asked what their menu items were in common, lettuce came up frequently,” said one of the individuals. When the FDA asked the company where they sourced the lettuce from, it was Taylor Farms, not just for the Taco Bell stores in Michigan but also for restaurants in the three other states, the person said.

The r/ContagionCuriosity thread has people identifying other brand names owned and operated by Taylor Farms.

mrissa

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I'm kind of delighted by this title, which signals its short story collection nature even more clearly than a semicolon and "stories" would do. And it fits, these do very much come at their source material at an angle--not always the same kind of source material, not always the same angle. There are fairy tales and tall tales and histories and love stories and tales of death. I think one of the things I particularly appreciate is how much there's a pervasive awareness of class in this collection, a sense that these are not characters who will have their way smoothed seamlessly by wealth and power. Not all of them are what I'd call mid-Southern US in their setting and influences, but a lot of them are, in a way that is grounded and textured, and I really appreciate it.

I'd read most of these in their original publications, but not all, and having them collected gives a sort of rhythm to the enterprise that I appreciate being able to see. I feel like the variety of this kind of collection is one of its strengths, but that means that there may be a few stories you like less than others, and that's okay too--the joy of a collection is that you can just skip to the next one and know it'll be different.

swan_tower

As I promised when The Writer's Little Book of Platitudes got republished, I am continuing on with the series! And as you can guess from the fact that the first two are focused on writing advice and the sociolinguistics of naming, the series will continue eclectic.

Next up -- and fairly timely, given the release of The Eye of Leviathan -- is The Writer's Little Book of Research, now available for pre-order via the retailer links there. This is all about the tricks I've used over the years to find information and sources for my stories, offered up in the hopes that it might make research a little less intimidating for those who didn't spend six years in grad school . . .

That one will be out in August. But wait, there's more! In September (and also available for pre-order now) comes The Writer's Little Book of Readings, i.e. my advice for performing your work in public: everything from selecting what to read, to preparing and practicing, to specific techniques, to handling the actual event. Now with a coda addressing how to read poetry!

Nor, of course, am I ending there. But for what comes next, you'll have to wait and see . . .

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/07/16/two-more-writers-little-books/)

jadelennox

Yesterday I cleaned all the HEPA filters in the house and ran them on full roar, wore an N95 mask when out, wore a KN95 indoors in my house during the worst of it, and still was absolutely laid out by the particulates. This smoke plume is no joke even on the east coast. Take it seriously.

Grateful to live somewhere that has so normalized masks that I lost count of how many I saw outdoors yesterday.

sovay

I can't participate in the poll itself, but I spun the wheel of Greek mythological figures as dictated by this meme and got Achilles trying to kill me and Odysseus trying to protect me and considering their respective hit rates on those fronts I think I'm just going to hang out in lyric poetry for a while.

Current Music: The Mountain Goats, "Candlebox"

sovay

All day the light through the wildfire smoke has looked like a pair of Ray-Bans. It tints sulfurously through the windows like Eliot's fog or Gilman's wallpaper. Our house is not airtight and everything smells rasping and bitter. I have a wheeze and a nosebleed and we are nowhere near the epicenter. It is not even the metaphor of the trash fire; it is just the burning world.

Hestia did her winsome and inexorable best to collect six days' worth of back petting when I finally got home last night. She planted herself on the hall runner with her small paws foursquare and then disposed herself upon her side like an impatient odalisque. She interposed herself in every doorway so that I could not pass without ostentatious rudeness to cat. She ran under my hands as I unpacked and coiled her tail over my wrist and swatted peremptorily in the same spot so that I carry yet another red-scratched mark of the loving claws of kitten. She purred like a two-stroke engine. Just now she yawned her pink and particolored mouth and I petted her between her soft alert ears which smell so much sweeter than the surrounding air. It is a good thing to be in the same house as a small predator. She blinks slow gold.

I dreamed of Tarot cards and a stage show by a queer contemporary artist whose music did not exit the dream with me: electrochemical, the aesthetics of vintage video games. At the moment the balance of Readercon is still holding at worth it.

Current Music: Johnny Flynn, "The Mountain Is Burning"

moon_custafer

Heat wave and wildfire smoke is keeping us indoors. Still job-hunting, but Andrew sold off a portion of his pulp-magazine collection for a Lovejoyesque sum last week, so we’re financially stable for the time being. I didn’t get Ontario Works, because Andrew’s CPP, while not enough to live on, is just high enough to disqualify us for any government assistance.

I was able to register for a government-funded women’s-job-skills program; which mainly involves attending Zoom lectures. Depressingly, there’s been encouragement to use ChatGTP; and aside from that, I feel like most of the interview advice boils down to “Smile, look them in the eye, and bullshit,” which is one skill I’ve never been any good at.

I’m hoping the classes on Canva will be more interesting and practical. A lot of graphic-design job postings want someone who knows Canva—it’s actually supposed to be way simpler than Adobe Creative Suite (which I’m used to), but I’ve never actually used it.

Somebody in the first meet-up/lecture recommended a community mental-health initiative called “Women Under Stress,” which makes me feel stressed just to think about, even if she assured us that we don’t need to partake in the yoga or the group-therapy discussions, we can just hang out in the corner and paint.

My own form art therapy these past two days has been to alter an oversize t-shirt with a Keith Haring design into a crop-top and miniskirt; and to tie-dye a Club Monaco linen-jersey t-shirt, originally an uninspiring light grey colour, with a kit I found on the freecycle shelf downstairs.

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December 2025

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Page Summary

sovay - A mycelial vixen trailing autumn as she roams
moon_custafer - Weekend Report II: The Weekening
moon_custafer - Weekend Report
marthawells - Updating
sovay - No bones stacked by the hearth, no ghosts on the heath
siderea - Air quality predictions [meteo]
sovay - I arrive as if a ghost, sphagnum flesh tinder-dry
jazzfish - i bought my ticket with my tears, that's all i'm gonna spend
mrissa - Books read, early July
sovay - So I took a vacation to another station and I took pictures of the ground
sovay - O Moon, thou pluckest me out, O Moon
sovay - I wish I was the mother of an engineer to be
swan_tower - New Worlds: Physical Disability
siderea - Cyclosporiasis: potential source allegedly identified [pest, cur ev]
mrissa - The Slantwise Histories, by Alix E. Harrow
swan_tower - two more Writer's Little Books!
jadelennox - Blame Canada? (Sorry Canada. Probably blame us.)
sovay - Whole team full of Roman accountants at their desks the day Hannibal crossed
sovay - The cause and effect never met
moon_custafer - Update

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Page generated Jul. 21st, 2026 02:30 pm

entering the whirlpool

what I do when I'm not with you

Reading

A mycelial vixen trailing autumn as she roams

Weekend Report II: The Weekening

Weekend Report

Updating

No bones stacked by the hearth, no ghosts on the heath

Air quality predictions [meteo]

I arrive as if a ghost, sphagnum flesh tinder-dry

i bought my ticket with my tears, that's all i'm gonna spend

Books read, early July

So I took a vacation to another station and I took pictures of the ground

O Moon, thou pluckest me out, O Moon

I wish I was the mother of an engineer to be

New Worlds: Physical Disability

Cyclosporiasis: potential source allegedly identified [pest, cur ev]

The Slantwise Histories, by Alix E. Harrow

two more Writer's Little Books!

Blame Canada? (Sorry Canada. Probably blame us.)

Whole team full of Roman accountants at their desks the day Hannibal crossed

The cause and effect never met

Update

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December 2025

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