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Mostly one goes to Filoli to look at the flowers (which are indeed stupendous in the right season). But there are other bits of beauty there — like this tree branch, utterly carpeted in thick moss.
Our washing machine has been on the fritz for a while, and tonight it gave up the ghost — because of course we forgot to turn in a maintenance request before leaving for World Fantasy.
And, of course, it gave up the ghost when it was very full of water and clothes.
So we just spent a chunk of time taking items out, wringing them, and hanging them off every available bar and hook in every single bathroom. This? Turns out to be hard work. Like, seriously hard. I am reminded of the descriptions I’ve seen in history books and historical fiction, where they talk about the laundresses being beefy-armed women. Dude, they would have to be. This was one pretty small load, and all I had to do was wring it, not even shove it around a tub with a stick or anything. It makes you understand why we invented devices like the mangle.
Now I’m going to flop around like a very tired thing. (And I still have to do my PT. Argh.)
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This hunting horn has absolutely nothing to do with salt mining, but it was in the museum attached to the Wielczka Salt Mine. Which is a separate tour from the one through the mine proper, and only a fraction of the visitors to the site bother with it — but I’m glad my husband and I did.
As promised, a follow-up post on the public revelation that Requires Hate and Benjanun Sriduangkaew are the same person, and the material collated by Laura J. Mixon on that topic. This is entirely about my own feelings and opinions on the matter; they’re not statements of fact, though I’ve done my best to be clear what facts I’m basing my feelings and opinions on.
Because naming gets complicated in a discussion of someone with multiple names, my approach has been as follows: I use Winterfox or WF when referring to that specific persona, ditto Requires Hate or RH, ditto Benjanun Sriduangkaew or just Sriduangkaew. (I would like to abbreviate that name as well, but since the initials there are BS, it would have a very unfortunate effect.) When I’m talking about the individual behind all of those personas, I follow Mixon’s lead in calling her RHB, for lack of any better referent.
Some brief prefatory comments follow, before I get to the main points.
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On our way to Kourijima during the Okinawa trip, our group stopped at a roadside restaurant/souvenir area for lunch. The ramen there was unremarkable, but the sculptures were awesome: pieces of driftwood carved into huge, fantastical shapes. One of them was an entire herd of horses, but that picture didn’t turn out as striking, so instead you get a dragon — which is hardly inappropriate for this blog. 🙂
On the way home from World Fantasy tonight, I had the entire row to myself, all three seats, with my husband in the aisle seat across from me. I took advantage of this space not only to sprawl out and read a sizable chunk of Wolf Hall, but also to get some work done: 1500 words on a proposal for a Sekrit Projekt, and another 2300 on “The Unquiet Grave,” whose title has been hacked down to “Unquiet” for the time being. The only reason I didn’t finish was because my computer was almost out of battery and we were about to land anyway; after I got home and ate dinner, I parked my jet-lagged butt in the chair and knocked out the last 200 words.
So that’s a draft! Not necessarily a good one, but it’s easier to fix a story that exists than one that doesn’t. And it’s nice to write something for which I don’t have to do any research whatsoever: things like that are pretty rare for me these days. I’ll let it sit for a bit and then have some friends pull it to pieces, and then — wonder of wonders — I’ll have something new to send out!
Probably couldn’t have done it without those empty seats, though. It’s amazing, what a difference some elbow room makes.
No, I didn’t win Best Novel. That went to Sofia Samatar, who is richly deserving.
There’s a part of me that had mixed feelings about the prospect of winning the award — not because of anything against the World Fantasy Award in and of itself, but because of the thing that signifies the award: a Gahan Wilson sculpture of the head of H.P. Lovecraft. For starters, he isn’t who I think of when you say “fantasy;” I associate him much more with horror. For another — with all due respect to Mr. Wilson — I find the visual aesthetic of the thing seriously unappealing. But most of all, it’s really kind of offensive.
H.P. Lovecraft was an influential writer: no doubt about that. But he was also a deeply unpleasant person in exactly the ways that we as a genre are trying to get past.
I know there are people who want to keep the award’s design as it is. All the arguments I’ve heard from that side have amounted to “tradition” or “fondness” or something else in that vein. I’ve yet to hear anyone say that people will be hurt by changing the design. But right now, people are being hurt by not changing it. To the point where Sofia Samatar felt obliged to mention this problem in her acceptance speech.
I have a hard time seeing why tradition or fondness should outweigh that.
Had I gotten the award, I would have crossed my fingers that I could say I had received the very last head of H.P. Lovecraft ever handed out as a World Fantasy Award. Honestly, that might be too ambitious of a time-scale; I don’t know whether the WFS could get through the design and production process quickly enough to have it be different for next year. But one of my friends pointed out that they could unveil the new design at next year’s con, and that would make me very happy.
What should it be instead? People have floated lots of suggestions, ranging from the heads of other writers to various symbolic objects. Me, I say throw the doors open: let the community submit designs. We have a wealth of excellent artists among us; let them exercise their collective creativity, let the membership vote to select a shortlist, and then the board can choose the final design. Or make a board shortlist, and the membership votes on the final design. Or whatever. Something that makes the an exciting opportunity for the community, a positive to counteract the negative of the current controversy.
There was a poll at this year’s con, completely informal, to see whether it should be changed. I’m glad to see the WFS taking notice of the issue; I hope we see them take action soon.
Many of you have probably already seen these elsewhere, but it’s possible I have blog readers not covered by other sources, in which case I do want to do my part in spreading the word.
Benjanun Sridungkaew apologizes
Laura J. Mixon’s report on Requires Hate/Winterfox/Benjanun Sridungkaew/etc, with documentation of her lengthy history of abusive behavior under the guise of of social justice
I will have more to say about this later. Right now, though, I’m at World Fantasy, without the time and energy to spare that this topic deserves. And even if I weren’t, I’d want to put my thoughts in a separate post, because I think it’s important to make a distinction between what is public knowledge and what is my personal feeling on the matter. Look for that next week.
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Some shots are cliched, but you take them anyway because seriously. This is the inner edge of Santorini — the island which is the edge of a volcanic caldera — and it is every bit as photogenic as travel advertisements would have you believe.
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These are in a house in Zakopane that’s made up as a small museum, showing what rural life looked like back in the day. I don’t imagine every household carved the handles of their tools quite so interestingly, but some probably did — Polish winters are pretty long, after all — and since there’s a woodcarver’s workshop attached to the house (the place where I photographed this), it’s not surprising here.
I have a surprisingly busy weekend ahead of me. My official obligations are as follows:
And that’s not counting the various lunches, dinners, meet-up-for-coffees, launch parties, and friends’ readings I have penciled in. The good news is that my mornings are more or less free; the bad news is that, uh, pretty much nothing else is. O_O
But I can’t complain. Every bit of this is something I’m looking forward to!
Made a haphazard stab at sightseeing in D.C. today. I had only about five hours to spend on it; getting myself to the hotel and then out to the National Mall ate the morning, and at this time of year both the museums and the sun close up shop pretty early. The Mall itself wasn’t putting its best foot forward anyway: this being the off-season, they’re doing returfing projects, there were temporary fences everywhere along with some tents (related to Election Day yesterday? or something else entirely?), the Capitol dome is wrapped in scaffolding, etc. Plus the weather was rather grey. From a photography standpoint, it wasn’t ideal, though I did get some pretty good shots of the Korean War memorial — the trees there had turned red, which harmonized nicely with the metal statues and the dark green ground cover.
But photography was one of only several things I’d come there to do. My top priority was actually research for Chains and Memory. There’s a scene that takes place at the western end of the Mall, so I wandered around Constitution Gardens and the Lincoln Memorial and the bank of the Potomac to fix in my head just how far apart everything is. (Answer: quite.) Then I needed food, and somebody had told me the cafe in the Museum of the American Indian was really good, so I walked more or less the entire bloody length of the Mall just to get a very late lunch — which, to be fair, was worth it. Bison skirt steak with huckleberry reduction, cucumber and some other things I forget in fireweed honey, a truly excellent salad of wild rice with pine nuts and watercress and cranberries and other stuff I couldn’t identify in a apple cider vinaigrette, and then some fry bread to top it off, because how can you not have fry bread?
Wound up spending the rest of my afternoon in that museum, because a) I was there and b) I like anthropological stuff. It’s not at all the kind of museum I expected it to be: I subconsciously assumed there would be galleries devoted to the various geo-cultural areas, i.e. Great Plains and Southwest and so forth, but it’s organized much more around themes. One gallery had to do with the cosmologies of seven different tribes; another was about treaties between the nations and the U.S.; a third discussed how contemporary Native Americans express their identity in the modern world. I don’t think I did the museum justice, but my feet were hurting and I was a little brain-dead; I will have to settle for the value I did get out of it.
I certainly did not do justice to the Mall itself, because I lacked the time and the energy, and the weather was on the dreary side. In tracking how long it took me to get from the north end of the pond in Constitution Gardens to the Lincoln Memorial, I managed to miss the Vietnam Memorial entirely. And I meant to stop at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on my way to food, but thanks to my calorie-deprived state I went right past the place where I should have turned to find it, and by the time I realized that it was much too late to backtrack. But given how many other things I missed in the area — e.g. every museum save the one — it isn’t like I can check “see the National Mall” off my bucket list anyway. I’ll be back some day, and then I’ll see at least a portion of the things I missed this time.
And now, World Fantasy!
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I lucked out in my first trip to Japan. I was only there for five days, but my timing coincided with the cherry blossom season in Kansai — quite by accident, as they bloomed early that year. This is Himeji-jo, one of the few original-construction castles still standing in Japan, and one of the most phenomenally picturesque places I’ve ever been.
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I have a large soft spot for awesomely ornate clocks.
No, I don’t know why.
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I have no idea why rhinestone-covered skulls are a thing all over Paris . . . but they are. This one was on display in a window near the flat we were staying in, and it was easily the most stupendous example of the breed I happened across during my time there.
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In the late eighteenth century, health concerns led the city of Paris to empty all the cemeteries within city bounds and move the remains to a series of catacombs outside the walls. There are an estimated six million people down there — you see only a fraction of the remains on your tour — and most of it is very difficult to photograph, as they don’t allow tripods or flash (so as to protect the bones). This picture, however, came out splendidly.
A while ago I posted about needing new dress shoes. A lot of you gave helpful feedback, whether on LJ, on DW, or by email, and I was optimistic for the future.
Then I actually tried to get some shoes.
Really, I should have started this hunt way sooner — and with that in mind, I’m going to continue the hunt, because the shoes I bought for my immediate purpose meet basically none of my initial criteria. The heels are too high, they have no padding, they have no arch support. They’re just the best I was able to obtain on short notice. The shoes I found that might have worked weren’t available in my size, or couldn’t be obtained in time (one site has no shipping option faster than 10 business days — wtf). But this rant is about something bigger.
This rant is about the dress shoe industry basically telling me to go to hell.
ME: I would like a pair of heels that are not an ergonomic disaster.
INDUSTRY: I suppose I can help you. Here, have a small selection of shoes with padding and arch support and heels of less than two inches. They are very suitable to wear to work.
ME: No, I need something dressy. Evening wear shoes, not business shoes.
INDUSTRY: Oooh! We have those! You can enjoy a wide selection of beautifully designed platforms and wedges and stilettos, with heels ranging from three inches up.
ME: Did you forget my first criteria? I want dressy shoes without insanely high heels.
INDUSTRY: Three inches isn’t insane.
ME: Yes, it is. Look, I don’t want to argue; just give me the kind of shoe I’m looking for.
INDUSTRY: They don’t exist.
ME: What? Why not?
INDUSTRY: Because fuck you, that’s why. If you want to look fancy, then you have to pay the price. You have to be unstable, incapable of walking quickly, and in pain by the end of the evening. Those are the rules.
There are exceptions — a very, very, very small number of them, in the grand scheme of things. But on the whole, the dress shoe industry is flat-out uninterested in letting women look nice and take care of their feet. The shoes that are comfortable are also sensible, in the aesthetic meaning of that word. Even though there’s no reason you can’t design an attractively strappy shoe with a heel of, say, an inch and a half. Even though there’s no reason you can’t build a small amount of padding into the sole of something other than a sedate pump. We live in a world where anything less than two and a half inches is a “low heel,” and the three-inch mark is treated as the median. Never mind the detrimental health effects of wearing shoes like that on a regular basis: as a woman, you can wear good shoes, or you can look nice, but you can’t do both at once. (And god help you if you decide to flip the bird to the notion of “looking nice.”)
Ten minutes at DSW and I wanted to light the entire dress shoe section on fire. I ended up walking out with a pair of not-too-expensive heels that have no padding or arch support, but do unexpectedly offer ankle support — not by intent, I imagine, but simply because they have a decorative bit that laces up. These are not the shoes I want; they are not the dressy black heels I can wear with many outfits for the next ten years. I’m going to have to keep searching for those. But I can’t say I’m very enthusiastic about the hunt, because the industry has zero interest in providing me with what I want.
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Closing out our tour of the three great cemeteries I’ve visited, we have this mausoleum in Brompton, which makes me think inescapably of New Orleans — probably because that’s one of the few places in the U.S. where you’re liable to find this kind of mausoleum, weathered and stained and picturesque.
These have been piling up for a while, so I might as well put them all in one post:
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One final shot from Highgate: another funerary urn, this one beneath a tree whose clusters of berries were catching the sunlight beautifully.
