I DON'T HAVE AN INTERNET CONNECTION

I don't have an internet connection, & I don't have a landline. I haven't had either since July 18. There are cataclysmic problems with the telecom lines, and the only satellite provider that services our area throttles bandwidth for data overages like it's the goddamned 90s. I finally went to Wal-Mart & bought a $50 smartphone so I could pay my credit cards and check my bank account. The phone only has 500MB data rn, but I'll buy more next week so I can actually respond to comnents. ETA on the kind of intervention our connection needs is Oct 24. I am literally dying of boredom. Drums, drums in the deep... I can't get out... I cannot get out...

i can't think of a cute title

Oh, Reader. I've had a time (another one). My family is doing much better! My mother was given ten days' worth of some kind of intravenous super-antibiotic sent to an area hospital through a high-speed space tube from the future & got all the way better (much, much better than she's been in years), and then it turned out my dad had come down with a clutch of bad-but-not-as-bad-as-we-thought syndromes — hyperthyroidism, early-stage high blood pressure, and a cranial nerve palsy partially caused by a novel vein structure in his brain (?). Not completely sure about that last one, I was pretty tired when the doctor was trying to explain it to me. He has to take medicine every day and wear special nerd glasses, but otherwise there's no good reason he won't live to be 128. Thank you for your support.

The real obstacle to a state of current & continuing bliss on my part is that my phone and internet services keep going out. First, they both died very romantically together. For two weeks. Then the phone came back and the internet slowed to a mid-90s dialup crawl barely suitable for checking email. Now the DSL has come back at normal pissy strength, and the landlines are unusable. We've made multiple calls and had multiple friendly servicepersons come out and look at the lines, but nothing's helped. Our latest ticket has been guaranteed to be resolved by the phone company by August 10 (of 2023, one imagines). I cannot help but believe this is some kind of CONSPIRACY by "THE GOVERNMENT" to SILENCE ME for my criticisms of VARIOUS DEEP STATE ACTORS TO BE NAMED LATER and THE INTERNATIONAL LINUX CONSORTIUM. Oh, wait, I didn't PUBLISH the LINUX POST yet. THAT MEANS THEY CAN READ MY MIND!!!!!!

Another important consideration re: my posting habits is that I need a new hobby because I have to stay home in order to save money. Forever, probably. In the March/April fiscal frame, I (more or less) had to buy a new computer & pay for my cat to have her teeth pulled... but I also bought a new iPod, a USB SuperDrive, a new Wacom tablet, a massive area rug for my bedroom floor, a taller desk, a bunch of expensive makeup shit including a $70 blush brush, some whimsicle Etsy decor, and $150 dyejob that completely washed out in eleven days. I also ate at least one meal at a restaurant every single day in the months of May and June. I took money out of my savings account to buy stupid stuff. (I also got fatter.) I don't have any idea what I was thinking, except that I apparently believed I could hasten the advent of the Apocalypse if I spent enough money. If only, Reader.

So I will be amusing myself, in the house, alone, for the foreseeable future. That means either levels of masturbation consistent with a regular presence in /pol/, or keeping up the blog. I know I keep saying that I'm going to start posting more any time now, but stuff was/is always happening to me that's out of my control and has traditionally kept me away from my computer — and when I have had free time I wanted to exist in a pure state, totally vacant of all thought (on my part). That ends immediately, if I want to pay off my Sephora card (and my Lowe's card) (and put money in my savings account again). 😿

This is a list of all the posts I have in draft stage right now:
  • I just read an enraging article about "cultural appropriation" in Tablet magazine that has left me yearning to create new adjectives to describe how stupid it is
  • When white people write something critical of a "culture of victimization," they are about to show their asses to the entire solar system
  • I also just read a sinister pro-Brexit (?) essay published by improbably-named British author Paul Kingsnorth in The Guardian in 2017. Seriously, this is one of the worst articles I've ever read in my life, mostly because it's proximate to many things I believe myself. I'm trying to triangulate a response that will help me clarify my own thoughts and find a nice tree to climb the man is insane
  • Comically overpriced skincare
  • Linux for the normie-adjacent + why I went back to Apple even though it's still annoying
  • The Séance by John Harwood vs. Advent by James Treadwell
  • A deconstruction(ish) of Robert Aickman's short story The Swords, plus bonus content
  • I still have 18-month-old politics posts written that I've never published because I'm waiting on my own slow ass to pick through my millions of stateless links and find sourcing for my claims
  • There are literally thousands of links
  • Spread out over multiple services
  • I'm not kidding
 We'll see which of them I get to first.

Oh! Also, I changed my layout. I found some instructions about how to unfold excerpted posts (although it doesn't cover other template formats, so I'm stuck with this sort of basic one for now), and I copied & pasted it, and now Sea Rabbits exists in like mid-2015 instead of LiveJournal purgatory. Also I changed my Blogger profile a little. I'll find or buy a new header soon. With a rabbit on it. I like rabbits.

ETA: Fixed a link & went back to my old userphoto because Blogger does something terrible to userphotos and that's the only one that still looks okay post-terribleness.


begin again

My mama is in the hospital battling MRSA-complicated pneumonia for the third time in six months; my dad was recently diagnosed with ocular sarcoidosis (probably, we don't know for sure) (other, much worse things were excluded, so it's either ocular sarcoidosis or "a weird, scary, specific thing your body does that doctors can't explain"). Your continued patience is appreciated.

I'm sad I blogged about Jordan Peterson. I would delete the post, if I deleted posts. Peterson's "ideas" and sniveling sympathy for wounded entitlement are so unoriginal as to border upon the cliché; even his name sounds like it came out of an airport paperback. I don't want to get that on me. Watching ostensibly sane adults line up four abreast to excuse the malignancy of this prick, who's kept up nights by visions of feminists & transpeople stealing the magic beans of self-actualization from innocent, kingly North American bigots — just in case it turns out he goes Mainstream — is nearly as excruciating as looking at Cletus Safari photojournamalisms of rusted-out, abandoned steelworks whose blank-eyed degenerate gaze is meant to indict anyone who enjoys flavored coffee. & as though finding yourself at a cultural or economic disadvantage is a quality reason invest in a worldview informed by irrational prejudice, right? This is of course why we all excuse the anti-American animus that exists in Middle Eastern & South American countries that have been excoriated by acts of enlightened Western humanitarian warfare haha just kidding. Also, I initially thought Peterson was LARPing Joseph Campbell for an audience too vapid to read even works of popular academic criticism, but it turns out Joseph Campbell was also an evil racist anti-Semitic prick whose own patriarchate sympathies were only tempered by his belief in the Sacred Feminine. Fuck him too.

It isn't fair for Jordan Peterson to think he has the right to write the story of my (or anyone's) life based on notes he took while observing reading someone's observations of lobsters, or creating psychomaps of fairytales (which are themselves a fallen form of art, irreparably tampered with by paternalistic capitalists who altered their form and function). The fact that some people think he might have a point goes farther than any amount of evo-psych ouija-board "science" to suggest that the Enlightenment's primary achievement was aiding monkeys to understand how important it is to comb their hair. (Or hide it under a powdered wig.)

Tomorrow night I'll be back with a post that has nothing whatever to do with goddamned Jordan Peterson.

of things unknown (but longed for still)

EDIT: Fixed a duplicated link & added a new Jordan Peterson fandom article. Because who doesn't want to read more things about Jordan Peterson's Svengaliesqe hold on White North America's precious reserve of pathetic male morons?

I made a new layout! Sort of! I bought a background at CreativeMarket & stuck a rabbit on it in PS — but Blogger destroyed its children's-book majesty by reducing its resolution, and now it looks like a bunch of wavy blobs on a fuzzy dark blue background. Obviously Blogger is trying to make me give up my love affair with the elderly LJ-style old-timey c. 2008 layouts and choose one of the new ones. YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO TRY HARDER THAN THAT, BLOGGER.

Actually, no it isn't. I'll pick one of the new ones later. I tried them a few months ago & thought they were fine, but also felt they encouraged a surfeit of image posts. Maybe I can make something work for my hectic "once every eighteen months" posting schedule.

I was going to write about Jordan Peterson, last night. Does anybody need me to write about Jordan Peterson? Everybody's writing about Jordan Peterson. He's a brainless prick who makes millions of dollars every year off other, even more brainless pricks. Peterson hates transpeople. He seems suspiciously jealous of housewives. His primary contributions to the Principles of Western Thought are: 1.) women are best served by being receptacles for men's penises and feelings, and 2.) (white) men built the world and deserve to be the exclusive beneficiaries of its wealth & wonders. I think those are very odd concepts to carry into the marketplace: "Hey, gals, queers, and brown people, why not participate in your own oppression? Things would go so much more smoothly that way! Everyone would be so much happier! Especially straight white men, who of course are the only group that in congregation amount to "everybody.'" Then again, I don't make $100K a month in donations from butthurt social media trolls who yearn for the state of holy matrimony so they can have someone to officially oppress, so maybe no one should listen to me.

The thing that really bothers me about Jordan Peterson — aside from the fact that he lives at the top of the slipperiest slope in the Whole Universe, at the bottom of which lies Death — is that he doesn't seem to have any command of the material he's claimed authority over, and nobody cares. He's like the Dan Brown of mythography. He's much, much worse than Dan Brown, actually, who embodied the sacred blood of the Living Lord in the person of a female cryptographer. That's not nothing. That's letting your little light shine, is what that is. I apologize to Dan Brown (although the attempt to use the female body as the unsullied seat of holiness is neither a feminist nor a novel practice; but I really do appreciate the effort). Peterson despises "postmodernism," and blames it for unlawfully shaking the monkeytree of white male privilege — but postmodernist deconstruction is the only lens through which his viciously absurd characterizations of world myth could actually work. "Superordinate" mythological artifacts, bro? Where the fuck did they come from?

Peterson thinks "chaos" is female, and that order & hierarchy are male. What the fuck does that even mean? When he refers to some property or group of properties as "chaos," does it mean "that abundance of formless biological constituents from which life emerges, in the womb and in the wild"? Or does he mean "feminists holding signs and shouting at me"? I think that distinction could be important. I also have a problem understanding how men can qualify as agents of order when Peterson also believes they have to be coaxed out of committing violence by having continual legal access to women's slimy untrustworthy vaginas at all times. Despite their innate competence and command of order, apparently, men are not fully in control of their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. They are, you might say, not as fully human as women, whose natural impulse is to tame our innate chaos and become silent supportive infant-fondling agreeable housewives. Now, I’m no professor, but even in its deformed native context that shit looks like it’s exactly ass-backwards.

It’s magical thinking of the most objectionably fanfictional order to suggest that any group of people embody chaos as a function of biology, of course, but if we’ve absolutely got to do it, the only choice for the job is men. Women’s bodies operate like clockwork. We are attuned to the moon and the tides. When we’re healthy, we work as well as a calendar — a decaying and artificial construct men devised to count the days we mark naturally with our bodies. Our wombs are advanced ecosystems that are so stable they can (and do) grow people. Men, on the other hand, are an ad hoc arrangement of hormones and impulses; there's no male birth control available because male bodies don't operate in regular, predictable cycles. Men are agents of violence and destruction. Men are incapable of avoiding physical harm even when they want to; their protuberant genitalia damage vaginas even during consensual sex. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Jordan Peterson.

I'm in my feelings, a little. I don't actually think men are innately chaotic, of course. I don't think women are sacred microcosms of the planet. I don't think men and women are even fundamentally (or practically) different, to be honest. I do think that if enough men insist on making women their enemies, we will have no choice but to destroy them. 😘

Here are some other people who have written about Jordan Peterson, professionally and/or humorously:
& here are a couple of Crooked Timber posts (one of which links to Beauchamp's Vox article, and maybe also to Bowles's piece in the NYT, I can't remember). Crooked Timber is great, actually. Lots of straight white men there. Probably hardly any of them are even rapists.


sláinte


Does this terrible old-man joke ever get less funny? (No.)
The quality of the Shamrock Shake has fallen off considerably, lo these many years.
My aunt passed away early this morning.
The cat is still fine.

Pictured article.
Tomorrow, more.

cats are nice

My cat is fine; she freaked the fuck out at the vet's office and had to be sedated, but her surgery went well and she got to come home later that afternoon (as promised). She lost 24 of her 30 teeth, and so far the only consequence is that her tongue sticks out when she's asleep. She still eats enough food for nine much larger cats, and bites me in the middle of the night with her three remaining canines so she can sleep in the mathematical center of my pillow. She only had the resorptive lesions, also. No sign of stomatitis, which sounds less scary but can potentially be a much bigger deal.

They sent my aunt home to die. Her cancer is inoperable. The oncologists tried to perform a surgery that would've allowed them to start chemotherapy, but the surgery failed and there were complications. When she woke up after the second surgery attempt she formally refused further treatment, and is now at home with her husband and grandkids and various shifts of hospice nurses. My aunt herself was a nurse for nearly 40 years, and she knows what time it is. It's a dismal and heart-breaking situation comprehensively, but she's an 83-year-old woman and OG feminist who spent her life doing more or less whatever she wanted. There are worse things than dying at the end of a performance like that, I suppose. She doesn't really remember who I am anymore, and I suspect that talking on the phone with a random weeping woman distresses her (& she always believed that female hysteria in any form was letting down the side, anyway). I'm not going to tax her with my grief anymore. I just hope she'll be allowed to pass away in her sleep, like a good soldier or a bad cowboy.

There's nothing to be done about it one way or the other (except cry, of course).
Thank you in advance for the kind words I'm sure you'd say to me if I'd turned the comments on, but I'm still short a computer and wouldn't be able to respond to you until the weekend.

My aunt would wish me neither to be idle nor to despair in the moment or aftermath of her timely demise, so once I get my digital shit together I'll go back to complaining about books and you can go back to indulgently pretending you care.

Until then, then.

i thank whatever gods may be

So, as is typical —
  • The prelude: On Wednesday afternoon, my iMac finally ran down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. I would say, It caught on fire!, but that would be melodramatic of me. What actually happened was that it got so hot that steam came out its vents, and it made sizzling noises and then wouldn't turn on anymore. I knew it was on its way out, so I did buy a new computer (this one + a surprisingly half-decent budget UHD monitor that I'll replace with something fancy at a later date, see below) — but it'll be a few days before it's technically usable for anything (I'm installing Linux, shifting files, etc). Right now I'm on my mom's newer iMac. Thanks, Mom.
  • Act One: On Thursday I found out that my aunt, who is the last remaining member of my extended biological white family who isn't overtly villainous, is dying of pancreatic cancer. She will likely pass in the next few months. Reportedly, she finds this outcome preferable to dying slowly of Alzheimer's, which is what was happening before.
  • Act Two: On Friday morning, I discovered that my cat has stomatitis and/or resorptive lesions in her teeth, and has likely been suffering discomfort/outright pain for months or years as a result. She will have to have some or all of her teeth pulled; she gets a full assessment, as well as the dental surgery, this Wednesday. They've told me I get to bring her home later the same day, and that feline dentistry has become a much-practiced art here in the year of our lord 2018.
  • Epilogue: This doesn't really rank up there with the other stuff, but — my Netflix account got hacked by some enterprising Colombian people on Friday, too. In one actual 24-hour day, they'd upgraded my payment package and installed profiles for like nine people. Netflix helped me get the account back in just a couple of minutes, but shit. Did they think I wouldn't notice? I watch Netflix ten hours a day on the weekend. What a bunch of idiots.
Posting will be even lighter than usual, for the next couple of weeks. For reasons.

ETA: I got my new computer working! Using Windows 10. Which is horrible and pushy and ugly. It isn't as awful as I remember it being back in my office-lady days, though. Also I'm worried that my monitor is a little too nice, because everything is so fucking tiny & sharp. And hot.

call when you want, but there's no one home (moron redux)

Aaaaand... did you see this incredibly dumb thing Dave Chappelle said a couple of days ago?

Jesus Christ, what a dumbass. How, exactly, does Dave Chappelle know the precise length of time Abby Schachner stayed on the phone with the large orange pervert? Was it a conference call? Is he judging her by the length of time he stays on the phone with unprosecuted masturbating sex-offenders? Perhaps, during the incident, Schachner thought the big orange comedian — with whom she believed she might be working, like, professionally — had just gotten into the house after a nice long normal relaxing workout, and hung up as soon as she discerned the tell-tale fapping noise of fingers on foreskin amidst all the gasping and wheezing? And how, in any case, is this a question of personal responsibility on the part of the victim? Who the fuck is this idiot, Paul Ryan? How does Dave Chappelle manage, with such resolution, to avoid drawing a line between "a woman, as an eternally-potential victim of sexual assault, has a responsibility to mitigate her exposure to predators" and "a black American, as an historically-persecuted minority, has a responsibility to mitigate their resemblance to the sort of person a police officer might feel compelled to murder"? I feel as though it might be just a simple failure of empathy: "racist law enforcement officials" is an oppressive group to which Dave Chappelle decisively does not belong, but "diseased male assholes who regard women as fuckholes with whom they are perpetually at war" is a label that might fit a little more comfortably.

Women are criticized for believing that all men are potential rapists, and then also criticized for not accepting the hard, obvious fact that all men are potential rapists. We're evil, hysterical basilisks until the exact moment we are required to become innately defenseless weaklings so their alibis will stand up in court. Get fucked, Dave Chappelle.

P.S. — I wonder if Chappelle has ever met Andrew Sullivan? Sully has some very interesting made-up ideas about hormones that he might find very compelling.

P.P.S — I don't expect comedians to be inoffensive, of course. Nor to I expect comedians, or indeed humans of any variety, to agree with all my political positions. I do expect adults of all professions to be able to prosecute a complete thought, though. I also generally prefer that a professional comedian at least make visible efforts in the direction of regurgitating actual jokes when on stage. If I wanted to be pointlessly offended, I would patronize an "offendian."

a medicine for melancholy

http://8tokyo.com/2011/08/27/a-hot-day-in-tama-zoo/ 

The problem is: Paid-for Pocket looks exactly like free Pocket, and also it crashes at the same rate. Probably I should just bite the bullet and excavate the whole archive so I can get rid of the service, which is shoddy anyway (but convenient).

Also, stupid people keep moving my goalposts all over town. Like, did you read this awful thing that famously mendacious racist Andrew Sullivan wrote about getting an injection of testosterone? This man is too stupid to live. Here's a quote:
You need testosterone to turn a fetus with a Y chromosome into a real boy, to masculinize his brain and body. Men experience a flood of testosterone twice in their lives: in the womb about six weeks after conception and at puberty. The first fetal burst primes the brain and the body, endowing male fetuses with the instinctual knowledge of how to respond to later testosterone surges.
First-trimester fetuses have 'instinctual knowledge' of the world, despite not having brains. Excellent. The rest of the science is equally hilarious; Sullivan says, "[t]estosterone, oddly enough, is a chemical closely related to cholesterol," and doesn't bother to notice that all hormones are manufactured by the body from cholesterol. "Pregnant women who were injected with progesterone (chemically similar to testosterone)[...]," what. Progesterone isn't any more similar to testosterone than estrogen, which Sullivan actually goes to the trouble of explaining can be metabolized interchangeably from the same biological components (and then he forgets about it, I guess). Men and women manufacture equivalent quantities of progesterone under normal conditions, please shut up quickly. "The Big T correlates with energy, self-confidence, competitiveness, tenacity, strength and sexual drive," and here "correlates" is doing the work of ten men. "And most of the studies of the psychological effects of testosterone take place in culturally saturated environments, so that the difference between cause and effect is often extremely hard to disentangle," which invalidates his entire premise, but so what. Andrew Sullivan didn't get this far in life by letting a thing like the total negation of his hypothesis by all available evidence stand in his way!
None of this means, as the scientists always caution, that testosterone is directly linked to romantic failure or violence. No study has found a simple correlation, for example, between testosterone levels and crime. But there may be a complex correlation. 
No there isn't. If there were, this statement wouldn't have to be decorated with qualifications like the bumper-stickers on a 1978 Volvo.
It is also controversial yet undeniable that elevating testosterone levels can be extremely beneficial for physical and mental performance. It depends, of course, on what you're performing in. If your job is to whack home runs, capture criminals or play the market, then testosterone is a huge advantage. If you're a professional conciliator, office manager or teacher, it is probably a handicap.
Controversial, but undeniable. I am going to cry. Also:
Since most men have at least 10 times as much T as most women, it therefore makes sense not to have coed baseball leagues. Equally, it makes sense that women will be underrepresented in a high-testosterone environment like military combat or construction.
Sullivan then goes on to note a study undertaken by the well-respected, publicly-funded scientific research center Toys'R'Us.

The entire article displays a pathetic preoccupation with body hair, action verbs, and "assertiveness."

So, here we go:
  1. The side-effects from testosterone injections administered to an ailing body do not, in fact, reflect the effects of global testosterone metabolism in a typical person.
  2. Speaking of ailing bodies, I suffer from PCOS and, before I sought medical intervention, I used to (naturally!) produce massive quantities of testosterone all by myself; I grew a stiff and fetching beard, and curly arm hair, and I was almost totally bald on the top of my head. Also I weighed nearly 300 pounds, and had three periods a month. [ETA: And I had painful, disfiguring acne!] Despite the unfortunate consequences of my all-natural excess testosterone production, I managed not to rape or kill anyone to prove my fitness for mating.
  3. Nor did I harass or attack anyone in a dog park, or mysteriously acquire the belief that I deserved to be stacked at the top of every imaginable human hierarchy and therefore get everything I ever wanted, whenever I wanted it.
  4. Explain that, asshole. 
  5. At the glorious pinnacle of my all-natural testosterone production, was I technically a butch lesbian, a man, or a kind of hyena? 
  6. When I was an inch-long fetus, what did my disorder train me to understand about my future ability to manufacture sex hormones?
  7. Can you explain why my possession of extremely huge quantities of all-natural personal testosterone failed to launch me directly into the Presidency, or any other lofty position? 
  8. And why didn't I start yearning to become a construction worker, or Marine Todd?
  9. I mean, mostly I just sat around having panic attacks and crying all day. And I couldn't sleep for shit! I was good for absolutely nothing. How did I manage to fail my beautiful testosterone so badly?
I would like to mention, before moving on, that Sullivan also thought #GamerGate was a reasonable reaction to women provocatively requesting to be treated as human beings rather than objects. Perhaps you think I'm kidding. "The argument seems to be that some feminists are attempting to police or control a hyper-male culture of violence, speed, competition and boobage. And in so far as that might be the case, my sympathies do indeed lie with the gamers." In the same essay, he blames libtards for the entire problem, because in high school the libtards were too socially-adequate to be bullied, and therefore don't understand how childhood bullying leads naturally to doxing, harassment, and proud misogyny in defense of innocent digital waifus. (Perhaps I should start calling him "the famously mendacious sexist Andrew Sullivan.")

The love on the left for this cretin is inexplicable. I think they just like calling him "Sully."

Sadly enough, I found that wretched article because I read this article, which also led me to read this inexplicable Twitter thread in which a bunch of tragic morons who don't understand what evolution is attempt to defend unequivocal gender segregation by suggesting that human behavior is informed by the culture of chimpanzees. I wonder how far down the road to Chimpanzeetown these fools would like to travel? Cannibalism? Gang rape? Infanticide? Circus tricks? Zoos? This is getting embarrassing. I will say that I'm willing to accept guidance on social engineering from any chimpanzee capable of getting a scientifically-illiterate, disingenuous article about testosterone published in The New York Times.

Your move, Bubbles.


the art of war

My duskglass.net strategy approaches the target from two different vantage points. First, I will examine the novel's language and culture using a critical method based in whatever I am thinking about at the time. Then, I will identify other manifestations of Uskglass-like characters in books that are not Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Also, there's a trebuchet (no there isn't).

The Uskglass parts aren't as hard as the other stuff; I think Clarke's character is such a deep-myth relic that other interpretations of it are relatively common. Uskglass has some direct (that Wikipedia image is an abomination) precursors (that Wikipedia image is also an abomination) in traditional British literature, but I'm currently pursuing antecedents in other cultures — early work has indicated possible involvement by Classical mythology, and maybe even some shady Yahweh influences. These parts are not only less than but also much different from the sum of their accumulation, of course. The transmitted object is not the clean, stable lines of some hypothetical story-symbol, but an atmosphere of mystery. Eventually the mystery usurps, and then erases, whatever was intended to be signified in the first place — and then the story itself becomes an expression of unnameable mystery. Nobody cares about that kind of thing but me, probably; I don't mind. I'm not working for tips. Vague antiquities aside, one of my favorite semi-Uskglasses appears in a recent YA novel called Archivist Wasp, in the person of a seductively nameless ghost who severs the novel's protagonist from the narrative of her own existence and initiates her transformation into the World Savior. Look at this:

The ghost was sitting in her only chair, surrounded by mismatched stacks of paper in various degrees of fire-damage, water-damage, unidentifiable staining, mildew, and general dissolution. It appeared to be reading her field notes.
“Get your boots off my table,” she snapped, and did not quite squirm under the look it fixed her with, or under the ensuing silence as it went back to reading.
Force of habit, she found herself studying it. It was all she could do not to pull out her notebook and start sketching it on the spot. Its clothing was basic and dark, something like a uniform but not one she recognized from any ghost she’d seen before. The gun and sword were in its belt. The ghost turned pages with a trained precision, a spring-loaded sort of predatory grace in which no fraction of any movement went wasted. Between its person and its clothing there was no color to it anywhere; it was all pale and dark, with those gray eyes. Its face was sharp, guarded, possessed of an icy and immaculate calm. Its posture was miles better than hers. It hadn’t moved its boots.
Usually Wasp didn’t find silences awkward and felt no need to fill them with pointless chatter, but this, this was unendurable.
“I didn’t know you could read,” she said.

And:
The ghost cut its eyes at her, pure scorn. “I see they were mistaken.”
It dropped a mocking little bow before her and walked out, trailing what remaining bonds of salt and blood she’d not yet broken, which it had snapped at whim.
I really, really, really like Archivist Wasp. I was going to review a series of YA novels last year, which I thought would be both fun and perhaps surprising. I find the Millennialesque reshuffling of gender norms inspiring, so why not their vision of the bildungsroman? Haha, what a gullible fool I am. After attempting to survive about twenty different popular books, chosen for their genre themes from Amazon, I begged off without even really starting. The worst, most conservative, heteronormative, claustrophobic, depressing, old-fashioned writing in the world is currently happening in the realm of YA novels. All the genre's heroines are exceptionally-ordinary self-inserts who are constrictingly adored by boring (and often violent) hunks. It's hunk after hunk after sad-manbaby 1950s beefcake hunk in the Young Adult World, all rendered in a primary-color paint-by-numbers palette that would strike a frustrated mid-century housewife as uninspiring. But Archivist Wasp isn't like that! Is, in fact, exactly not like that. (The ghost's lack of a gendered pronoun is suggestive, is what I'm telling you.) It was one of two YA novels published in the last 30 years by someone not named Ursula K. Le Guin that didn't make me want to kill myself. I highly recommend it, both for the Uskglass mirror-content and for itself. Best DRM-free $10 you'll ever spend. I hope there's a sequel. (That's a joke.) (Most YA novels are half-a-book's worth of content spread out into 34876 commemorative volumes.) (I would indeed be very happy to read Archivist Wasp: The Second, however.)

Well. I've also been doing a lot of reading, for the last couple of years, that pertains (in my imagination, at least) to JS&MN's literary contexts. Probably my most favorite of the contexts are written by Robert Aickman, who until very recently I believed to be a lesbian operating under a pseudonym. Aickman was not a lesbian, it turns out, but rather a very large, fluffy British cat that, in the 1950s and 60s, gained access to, and somehow learned to operate, a typewriter. I've read nearly everything Aickman ever published; I had to import hard copies of The Late Breakfasters (favorite) and The Model (not a favorite), but I read those, too. The Late Breakfasters is much different than the rest of Aickman's work, most of which he self-identified as "strange stories" because of some German mood-word that the late Mark Fisher was also interested in, and which I don't understand at all but will try to deal with later. Breakfasters has some weird-fiction attributes in common with the rest of Aickman's canon, but I believe it's primarily intended to be a social satire (?). Like Animal Farm, maybe (?), but with people. People Farm? Maybe. It's full of political and cultural details I don't get, or even understand how to unpack, but which Aickman presents in a way that makes them seem both ludicrous and performative. So... satire, right? Who knows. I identified hard with the novel's protagonist, Griselda. I consider that my life has mostly been an attenuated escape from the Geoffrey Kynastons of the world, and a simultaneous, resolute flight toward Louise. Although, unlike Griselda, I was never privileged to actually fuck Louise; I've only ever read about her in books. Still, it's maddening to imagine that she exists in the world somewhere, and I can't get to her. I'm going to keep looking. (I do realize.)

Despite the buildup, this excerpt isn't from The Late Breakfasters. I have discovered that it's hard to excerpt the book and have it look suitably meaningful, because the story is so involved with its own conditions and symbols. This is from "Bind Your Hair," a very strange story that appeared in Dark Entries:

The next morning Clarinda had to admit to herself that she was very depressed. As she lay in bed watching wisps of late-autumn fog drift and swirl past her window, she felt that inside the house was a warm and cosy emptiness in which she was about to be lost. She saw herself, her real self, for ever suspended in blackness, howling in the lonely dark, miserable and unheard; while her other, outer self went smiling through an endless purposeless routine of love for and compliance with a family and a community of friends which, however excellent, were exceedingly unlike her, in some way that she did not fully understand.

omg it me

More when I find it.

i get along with starbucks lovers

What I eventually did was, I cleaned all the emotional/personal content out of both political posts and made them into one post. After I've published it, I thought I'd write all about my precious snowflake self, separately & unencumbered by any specific political association. Not that anyone cares, probably.
But I care!

I don't really care, actually, I don't know why I said that.

Now I just have to go back in and link up some sources, which is proving to be more annoying a chore than I'd imagined. My Pocket account is disorganized, and I had to buy the "Pro" level service to get in to search it properly. 🌋

I'm switching to Pinboard.

I also rehoused duskglass.net!!! It should be up and running again in a couple of days, such as it is. I plan to work on it a lot in the next few months, but I'm having a hard time finding a good place to begin. And also I can't find any of my notes. Like, any of them. Zero notes. I'll probably have to start from scratch, which is actually a good idea, because the space between my original vision of the novel and my current vision of the novel can be measured in lightyears. Lots of lightyears. Five lightyears? 288 lightyears? How long is a lightyear, again? Probably at least a couple of miles, right? I could look it up, but what fun would that be.

If you find this phenomenon peculiar, by the way, you should know that I won't stop humping Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell because it proved to be the key that eventually unlocked the door to my psychological interior, a place I was seldom able to visit pre-Uskglass, and usually only ever at painful emotional cost. Now I can go there whenever I want! Mostly I am full of pieces of old novels, a common — and empty — desire for escape, and watery-eyed rage.

I was going to call the post about white men "i've got a dank space, baby," but of course I stopped myself at the last minute, because cringe-y out-of-date puns help no one. Also, Taylor Swift's cultural capital has diminished considerably in the last year or so, and all the songs on her new album are terrible. The first one had a funny video, but the others are a nightmare. Like, in a couple of them she raps. Unironically. About her boyfriend. And all of the non-rapping singles that have been released so far have been infected with a conceptualization of The Beat that is intended to suggest, but is not directly related to, the kind of music listened to by the young (often immigrant) people of color who are authoritatively dismantling the last remnants of Traditional Western Culture™. It's horrifying. Some white pop singers can handle stuff like that, but no, wait, no they can't. Like, that Ed Sheeran song that turned out to contain a shout-out to The Golden Corral? That song is awful. And I am the sort of undemanding consumer who typically enjoys Ed Sheeran songs, especially if they are about dragons.

Do you know what else is awful? The food at Starbucks. I had never eaten at Starbucks before — my contact with them was limited to chai lattes, which I love, and their proprietary fructose-based coffee milkshakes — but I was hungry and near a Starbucks on Sunday afternoon, so I went in. The food was really, really bad. I probably should've gotten a protein bomb, or whatever the fuck they are, but instead I got the Chicken & Double-Smoked Bacon sandwich. It didn't have any of whatever kind of sauce it was supposed to have on it, the esoteric-sounding Starbucks bread tasted like the outside of a Hot Pocket, and there was a single piece of anemic bacon pressed into the top slice of bun like Boo Radley hiding behind a bedroom door. Also they were out of whoopie pies! I got a brownie, and it tasted like multigrain crackers.

Don't eat at Starbucks.

I made a graphic for this page's background based on a default Blogger graphic, but now I'm thinking about changing the blog's title. Although I like "Sea Rabbits," it is non-descriptive and whimsical. What I should really call this blog, of course, is EMMA NEVER POSTS. Or, EMMA SPENDS ALL HER FREE TIME COMPLAINING ABOUT FANTASY NOVELS INSTEAD OF JUST READING SOME OTHER KIND OF BOOK.

Oh, I got a Kobo Aura One for Christmas! Although I am (what passes for) very excited about it, I haven't opened it yet. My computer is such a mess. My books are a mess. Imposing structure on that mess is intimidating. Although I'm often an obstreperous asshole online, I am sometimes intimidated by my own messes. (I'm actually thinking of just wiping the drive, lol.)

Well. How do you end a blog post? "Goodbye"? "My dwindling faith in the ability of humankind to survive self-created catastrophes has been seriously shaken by recent world events"? "I once ate a Starbucks sandwich on purpose, you probably shouldn't read anything I write"?

I'll put up some book reviews, next time.