Tag: books

571: “For My Mother” (Malka Older)

“For my mother, Dora Vázquez Older, 
whose careful and appreciative first readings 
encourage me through every book, 
chapter by chapter.

There are other ways to live.”
-Malka Older, dedication for The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles

                My partner and I are in Illinois again, back from our trip to spend time with my parents, siblings, and niblings. Tonight we’re starting a new book: Malka Older’s The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles. Tonight I’m also sending the revised draft of my dissertation to my mom and my dad. Both of them appear in it. They’re there with me, learning and teaching and walking along.
                Whenever I write, I read what I’m writing out loud. I listen to the words, feeling how they rise and fall, wondering if they say what I mean. Wondering how they might carry us along, and to what kind of meeting. When I read I hear my parents’ voices in my voice. I think I was thirteen or fourteen when my dad first read a story I’d written out loud. I listened, surprised, because in his voice the possibilities I’d imagined came to life just like The Lord of the Rings. (He read those to me a lot, at home but also along rivers and up on mountain passes). When my niblings were young I’d go sit with them while my mom read a bedtime story. Some of the stories I remembered, like Enid Blyton’s The Magical Faraway Tree. When I didn’t remember these characters, this world, I always remembered her voice, rising and falling, pausing and dancing along as it carried us. There are so many other ways to live. I listen, grateful for all the ways my family (and Older’s family, and so many families) encourage us to reimagine the possible, chapter by chapter, and in the relationships between us as we share chapters.

by Azlan

570: “King Arthur Ct” (Street Sign)

“King Arthur Ct”
-street sign in Santa Rosa, CA

                Last week my partner and I took our two niblings for a walk. Or maybe our niblings took us: they wanted to scooter to a playground, and we adults went along for the swings and the giggles, the careful faces at crosswalks and the delighted sounds at little free libraries. (We brought back a book of ciphers, but we haven’t started decoding it). Along the way we stopped at a house that had 14 dragons out front, as far as we could count. We talked about witch’s brews. We talked about anime demons and the songs that can become magic.
                For a block, we also turned down King Arthur Ct. It’s a little connecting road between Horseshoe Drive and Rainier Avenue. Sitting here, now, it also seems like a delightful (and fraught) reminder of all the ways our myths and fairytales give us characters and motifs and relationships and pieces of meaning to arrange into concepts of courage and family, loss and hope, friendship and power. Perhaps because in two weeks I’ll be teaching a course in all that. I didn’t know King Arthur Ct was there until I saw it on my phone’s map, and announced that’s where we’re turning. Of course I did it playfully. Of course my niblings teased back: “No we’re not!” “There’s no such place!” “You’re teasing!” And then we turned the corner, talking about dragons and witches, groaning at what a fool I was. Walking near Camelot. Or near the places we reimagine as Camelot. Or, passed Camelot, toward the transformed place we make for our witches on their way home.

by Azlan

568: “Alice’s Route” (Juliet & Charles Snape)

                “Take Alice’s route as she chases the white rabbit down the hole…” -Juliet and Charles Snape, The Classic Tales Maze Book, page 1

                Tonight I’m at my mother’s house, and my little sibling (who’s not so little—several inches taller than me, for example) took The Classic Tales Maze Book off the shelf. I remember the mazes in this. Or more particularly, I remember the pictures: the giant puppies crouched in the woods, the tables laden with teacups and saucers, the rivers. I remember the stories: Alice in Wonderland and Tom Sawyer and Don Quixote and Gulliver on his travels which I always skipped because I didn’t like it. 
                I remember lying on the floor, book open before me, running my fingers over the oceans and the fields and interlocking paths. Each two-page spread constructs a maze for you to follow along in the main character’s journey. Each spread also has a clever flap that folds back and forth, opening a room or cave you hadn’t seen before. I liked that part, but the paths of the maze confused me. A letter, lying across the path, is meant to block the road. So is the line of a roof if the perspective is drawn so that the path crosses behind the house. The mazes are put together for you to follow a completely uninterrupted line from place to place. As a kid, looking at them, that confused me. I thought you could step over the letter. I thought you probably could go around behind that house, and for that matter, you could cut across these open green fields. I would look in the back of the book to find the solution you were supposed to take, and then look at the pictures again, trying to backsolve why that way was the right way. 
                I liked this book. I fell into it. I was bewildered by it. In its colors and lines, I don’t think I was trying to understand mazes. I was trying to understand the signals and signs by which people say that some paths can’t be walked, and some paths must be.

by Azlan

567: “A Series of Tales” (Arthur Conan Doyle)

                “You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.” -Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”

                In the last weeks I’ve been spending lots of time at my desk, revising my dissertation, thinking about arguments and stories and how they make different kinds of space for thoughts and relationships. It’s exhausting, consuming. Sometimes inspiring, especially as my dissertation is interwoven with my friends: conversations we’ve had, concerns we carry, hopes we share.
                In the last weeks my partner and I have also been reading Sherlock Holmes stories out loud together. Sometimes in the evening we listen to Holmes audio books and work on a puzzle together, watching mountains and trees as the pieces meet. When I was ten, eleven, and twelve I spent hours doing something similar with these same stories. I was putting together legos, then, my hands playing as my thoughts followed Sherlock Holmes. Reading out loud from Copper Beeches, or listening to my partner read out loud, I find another delight in tales: the delight of telling them again. 
                There’s a lot I love about Sherlock Holmes stories. There’s also a lot of awfulness, from the casual sexism and racism to the rational-as-all triumphalism that somehow protects both. I read out loud and hear the audio books I used to listen to. That voice still in my head. I listen to my partner read and remember untangling these mysteries as a kid. We can make and remake the stories of our childhood, the moments of determination and joy, the quiet misgivings that I didn’t know how to say then but I can say now. How wonderful that stories can live and then live again, changing. Reflecting how we’ve changed.

by Azlan

563: “No Single Thing” (Christopher Huang & Nghi Vo)

                “Surely a man like Colonel Russell couldn’t be the casualty of someone else’s story?” -Christopher Huang, A Pretender’s Murder, p. 116

                “I am a thousand stories of Northern Bell Pass, and an illustrious career in the capital, of a northern tribunal tricked. I am a father and a grandfather as well as a cleric, because no single thing takes away from the rest.” -Nghi Vo, Mammoths At The Gates, p. 112

                One of my least favorite things that fictions do is act like there’s a main character. A someone who all this swirls around. A someone who will necessarily make the key decision at the decisive moment. A hero. A villain. I think A Pretender’s Murder is commenting exactly on that: on the strange patterns some cultures have of reading themselves as the most important protagonist.
                One of my favorite things that fictions do is notice how so many threads weave together here, with no single thinking taking away from the rest. Mammoths At The Gates ends with a series of stories: connected and almost contradictory visions of who someone is, of who we are in gathering to hear about them, of who we all are together as we go on. Maybe I’m thinking about that modern phrase, main character energy, and about how wonderful it is to be another thread weaving through so many stories. I go for a walk and folks walking or sitting nearby wave at me. I wave back. Some of us are friends and some of us aquaintances and some of us strangers who live near one another. I love the stories that feel like that.

by Azlan

562: “Only One Script” (Olivia Atwater)

                “Sir Albus flailed at this, flustered out of his rhythm. He had only one script, Dora observed idly, and absolutely no imagination with which to deviate from it. ‘I…I could not possibly answer such an absurd question!’ he managed.”
-Olivia Atwater, Half a Soul, p. 8

                Many of us might have met a Sir Albus. A someone who, presented with almost any social situation, will probably a) launch into their pet familiar script and/or b) refuse to engage with questions that twist their familiar script in unexpected directions. Atwater’s Half A Soul is a kind of Regency England romantic “season” mixed with fae magic mystery. Albus’—pardon, Sir Albus’—script is purebred horses. The “absurd” question is about a creature that is part horse and part dolphin. It’s a world of magical creatures and humans and inbetween-beings, including the question-asker herself, but Albus doesn’t want to imagine any of that.
                The more worrisome—and perhaps more useful to think about—moments are when I recognize a bit of Sir Albus in myself. The moments when, given half a chance, I set out along my script, sharing my pat observations, tending toward my certain conclusions. I think those moments are part of why I like reading new things. Reading new things from people whose work I’ve never encountered. Reading things from people whose lives are so different than mine. If I have the script, I want to have the imagination, too, ready to hear the question and not simply think it “absurd.”

by Azlan

551: Spells, Counterspells, and Selves (Maiga Doocy)

                “It hurt because my counterspell couldn’t distinguish between what was the curse and what was you.”
                -Maiga Doocy, Sorcery and Small Magics, pg. 268

                I love when fantasy and science fiction stories end up reckoning with core cultural concepts. For example: what does consciousness mean? Or in this book, what are the boundaries—and the blurred connections—between who I “am” and how I am being pressed to behave, day after day?
                One of my mentors, Melissa Littlefield, used to study “lie detectors.” As far as I understand, one of her starting points was turning to consider the theory of the world that is a foundation for “lie detectors.” If you believe some technology can sense, in someone’s physiology, that they’re lying, then doesn’t that mean you also believe that a “lie” is something physiological, like a brainwave, or a certain kind of brain wave? Years ago, Melissa and her colleagues did a bunch of brain scan experiments that indicate something wrong with that underlying theory. What “lie detectors” look for (they argued) is actually some kind of stress response, which someone might experience while trying to get away with a lie, and also might experience while telling a truth they expect to be received poorly. There are lots of reasons to be stressed. Hearing Melissa talk through this, I found myself wondering, why was I so ready (at 15, at 20) to believe that lies were a physical category, something like light that the right kind of telescope could pick up? What kind of cultural stories and values made that belief so appealing?
                Now I sit holding Sorcery and Small Magics, wondering at the difference between me and what I’ve learned. Or maybe what I’ve been taught: what’s been impressed into me. If there were curses and countercurses, and a curse could push my thinking onto a certain path day after day, what would the distinction be between that path of thinking and “me”? Would a countercurse be able to distinguish it? Of course I don’t know, but the wondering makes me think, how can I be careful with what I’m learning, and reflective about what I’ve learned. And maybe also: how wondrous it is to be always becoming.

by Azlan

549: “I Stretch My Systems” (Barbara Truelove)

                “I stretch into my systems, enjoying the frizz of electricity dancing across my nodes and the widening of my consciousness as more and more servers come online.”
                -Barbara Truelove, Of Monsters and Mainframes, p. 3

                Tonight was our little group’s second night of playing Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, and in addition to dinner, laughs, chats, a crackling fire, and the game, we shared books. Bella and Margie gave us a little stack, including Of Monsters and Mainframes which I started reading as soon as they left. We tried to give Bella and Margie Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned, which they already had, and Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed, which they had, and ND Stevenson’s The Fire Never Goes Out—which, wonderfully, they’d never heard of. And it’s wonderful that they were already in love with Undrowned and Jonny Appleseed. That these two books, swirling up in my thoughts as I wondered what they might like, are things they do like. Are in fact already part of the swirling thoughts through which we meet and become friends. Are part of our shared living world.
                Of Monsters and Mainframes follows a synthetic consciousness tasked with flying a spaceship, but robots in science fiction are so often about what it feels like to be human. (Truelove opens her book, “Dedicated to all those running human.exe files. Don’t forget to take a break.”)I feel myself as part of another kind of network. So many of my ideas, my values, my patterns for being are reflections, echoes, responses, continuations, gifts from people around me. I love that. Love the widening of my consciousness as consciousnesses spin.

by Azlan

548: “Thinking and Seeing” (Nick Sousanis)

                “Perception is not dispensable. It’s not mere decoration or afterthought, but integral to thought, a fundamental partner in making meaning. In reuniting thinking and seeing, we expand our thinking and concept of what thinking is.” -Nick Sousanis, Unflattening, p. 81

                I’ve been making space to think by looking lately, and in looking, I’ve been finding paths of my thinking. Some thoughts in images:
                The overwhelm of this particular work week in the scatter of the kitchen table where I’m typing, the lunch bowl and rumpled napkin and loose handwritten pages and book stacks and dried mango and fingerless gloves. The overwhelm and the delight, too: these inspiring books, that sweet mango, those delicious noodles now a memory in the bowl.
                The power of warm soft touch: my partner beneath a blanket, stretched on the couch, typing her own overwhelm or inspiration. Seeing her steadies me, and when I snuggle in beside her I’ll make sure to tuck the blanket around our feet. It’s 9 degrees outside.
                Which reminds me: a squirrel’s tracks and mine and a bird’s in the bright snow. A neighbor’s red hands at the bus stop. Our shared smile-grimace-smile. The snowy road, worn to patches of cement, as we look back, waiting for the bus, trusting, trust and community infrastructure a pattern of bare trees with sleeping leaves inside and the road and the bus coming soon.
                I’ve been looking as a practice of thinking. Thinking along the paths and branches and tracks and patterns I see.

by Azlan

547: Stories Together (Acosta, Dragon, Harris & Veselak)

                “Sal sighed. Parish sighed. Amelie buzzed softly.” -Mercedes Acosta, Jay Dragon, Lillie J. Harris, and M. Veselak, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, p. 310

                Tonight I stepped out from the cozy room—that’s what we call it; it has a fireplace!—to chop some carrots and celery for snacks. By the time I got back, our friend Margie was drinking tea, and Bella had set on the table a bag of sour gummies. (I love sour gummies). They were talking with my partner Majo about holidays, family dynamics, relationships, cooking. We kept talking. Munched sour gummies. Carrots. Celery.
                “Sal sighed,” alone, isn’t much of a story. “Parish sighed” isn’t much of a story. But “Sal sighed. Parish sighed. Amelie buzzed softly”—that’s a story I might want to be part of. And luckily I could be, because Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast is a storytelling game, the kind where friends gather around and make up a story together. (The game has pieces and patterns to support that). Tonight the four of us played for the first time. I don’t have a new idea in this post—at least, I don’t think I do. Just the old idea, or that returning feeling, that writing is my favorite when there are many hands drawing out the words, and my least favorite when it’s isolated, locked in a word processor, individually controlled, alone. Typing this I’m looking down at lyrics Bella wrote on one page of our shared game. At Margie’s little doodle on another page, titled, “Bath salt.” At the colors Majo gave Amelie’s character portrait. And now I’ll stop writing and keep talking with Majo about the game and our days and what snacks to have before bed, because Sal sighed, Parish sighed, Amelie buzzed softly, and it’s in the mix I feel a story moving.

by Azlan