Vicissitude and Season

Well, after following the show for five seasons I should probably react to the end of "Person of Interest"! I did like the finale - "like" is a tepid word and it's not that I feel tepid about the ending, since some of it was very moving and makes me think, and there were the appropriate explosions, but it didn't whelm me overly. Good end to the show, though, decent wrap-up to a somewhat disorganized season, and a nice lack of utter tragedy ... well, finality.

Here are my quick thoughts on how all the character arcs wrapped up, plus some thoughts on redemptive arcs and those that are not:
( Read more... )

Linking because putting photos up here is stupid:

http://hedda62.tumblr.com/post/140853515771/whos-really-running-things-at-the-philadelphia (flower show)

This is entered in the Washington Post Peeps diorama contest this year. Hamilpeep, hee.

My flist has been very quiet and I know I'm part of that, but just wanted to say hi. I have been busy and will be getting busier soon, but still in winter mode and watching a lot of TV, including (since I checked in here last) "The Man in the High Castle," "Jessica Jones," and (in addictive quantities of late) "Scandal." (Which nearly made the subject line here "I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love.")

I am writing! Just very very slowly. I think the problem is that this book is so far lacking an emotional through-line that pushes me where I'm going despite plot obstacles. But I am thinking out the plot, and unlike with previous books I suspect the goals won't become evident until more of the structure emerges, so until then it's just a slog.

I am distracting myself with the Pinterest board for Time Goes By, which is much weirder and more complicated (and larger) than the ones I did for the previous two books. I am really enjoying this novel-as-patchwork concept - although I realized far too late that I should have done it backwards so the beginning would be at the top (maybe I'll manage that with Not Time's Fool), and it's still frustrating that you can't move pins. If I come up with images later that fit in the middle of the book, I guess they'll just have to go at the top, but it disturbs my sense of order.

Hope you're all well!

I don't know if it's a New Year's resolution exactly, but I am trying to see the beauty in things more, so here we go.

Serious bummer of a week, with David Bowie going and now Alan Rickman - the latter more difficult for me because I actually met him for, you know, a minute once, and because Snape and all that - but it is great to know that they left so much beautiful work behind that we can enjoy. Still, waah.

Finally listened to the "Hamilton" soundtrack on Sunday (a day before Alexander Hamilton's birthday, which I know about because J. went to Hamilton College and we have a calendar from there which of course lists it, though I'm sure it was all over Tumblr too), and (of course) it was just as wonderful as everyone said, clever and wordsmithy and heartfelt and tuneful, and I'll be returning to it many times.

Had a grand jury session yesterday which finally after all these months brought out the "Oh my God why can I not tell anyone about this?" response, when an otherwise slightly interesting but repetitive investigation suddenly turned into film-worthy drama, oh it was fantastic and made me happy about people and their beautiful crazy instincts.

I posted my old Aubrey-Maturin crossover fic on my author website for Twelfth Night, and then inevitably started rereading The Far Side of the World, which is one of my favorites and O'Brian at top form, full of glorious words put together beautifully. Here is a bit where Stephen is in Brazil with a new Peruvian friend (the scene where he's first introduced to coca leaves):

In the event Lopez needed no hints. He spoke Spanish only with difficulty, and seeing that both his guests were fluent, even enormously fluent, in that language and that they agreed very well, he excused himself on the grounds of early work to be done and bade them good night, leaving them on a broad veranda with a number of domesticated creatures on it, marmosets of three different kinds, an old bald toucan, a row of sleepy parrots, something hairy in the background that might have been a sloth or an anteater or even a doormat but that it farted from time to time, looking round censoriously on each occasion, and a strikingly elegant small blue heron that walked in and out. Two bottles of white port stood between them, two hammocks hung behind, and Lopez returned for a moment to beg them to use the mosquito-netting. 'Not that we have mosquitos in Penedo, gentlemen,' he said, 'but it must be confessed that at the change of the moon the vampires do grow a little importunate.'

They did not annoy his guests however, since the vampire really needs a sleeping prey and these two (though eyed wistfully from the rafters) never went to bed. They sat talking all night, watching the sliver of the new moon go down and the procession of great glowing stars pass across the sky: bats of a more amiable kind, two feet across, showed briefly against their light, and in the river only a few yards below could be seen the star-twinkling wake of turtles and the occasional alligator: the lion-maned marmoset in Stephen's lap snored very gently, sleeping on and on despite the continual flow of talk.

Just to show that it is not all blue-water sailing in these books, glorious as that is as well. As an aside, which I may need to expand upon at some point, I am always bemused by the people who tell me that they tried O'Brian and couldn't manage him because of not understanding all the sailing terms - which, a) I still can't follow all of it despite multiple rereadings, b) neither can Stephen, c) why the heck do you have to understand every word of fiction that you read, instead of letting it wash over you in a beautiful haze? But this is perhaps one of those substantial personality differences that I will never get, even if I substitute me reading nonfiction and try to work from there.

Anyway, and finally. Not to locate myself in the next paragraph from Patrick O'Brian, but I am working on getting Not Time's Fool out (I need to force myself to do formatting and cover work this afternoon) and I did put up the teaser chapters if you are the sort of person who reads them. I am fascinated to see what people will think of this book - I am very pleased with it, in the end, but it is deeply weird in places (like when most of the characters sit down in the middle to start telling fairy tales) and all the book-long and series-long and otherwise-partial arcs tangling together make the structure a bit wonky, not to mention the chapter that covers seven months. But there are bits that I think beautiful. Hope some of you will too.

We went to see "The Force Awakens" yesterday, and I also finished reading Ancillary Mercy, which is probably a very interesting coincidence that I will not explore in detail. The latter I enjoyed the most of the trilogy, probably because I had a clue what was going on understood the ins-and-outs of the universe from the beginning and was able to jump right in and ride. It's a nice trip, and I got a deeper sense of the characters this time, and a sense of the time depth of the world - which I think is important to getting how things have been for a good long while and how they are changing. Also, I would like to see Ann Leckie write straight-up comedy.

The Star Wars movie I had a great time with, and on the whole really liked, and then we came home and dissected it into tiny pieces, so I don't have to do that again here, but if anyone cares to discuss in the comments I'll put a few talking points behind a cut.

( spoilers of course )

There was an interesting opinion piece in the Washington Post yesterday about how [spoiler] is totally our fault because we can't stick our endings any more in today's genre world (link is, since they oddly haven't updated it, to an older version of the piece where the writer hadn't seen the film yet and didn't know for sure that [spoiler] would happen, but it says essentially the same thing). I do agree that one can get tired of franchises, but I'm not tired of this one yet, and I think that [spoiler] may have been exactly the right thing to happen, and then I read this in Ancillary Mercy:

Entertainments nearly always end with triumph or disaster--happiness achieved, or total, tragic defeat precluding any hope of it. But there is always more after the ending--always the next morning and the next, always changes, losses and gains. Always one step after the other. Until the one true ending that none of us can escape. But even that ending is only a small one, large as it looms for us. There is still the next morning for everyone else. For the vast majority of the rest of the universe, that ending might as well not ever have happened. Every ending is an arbitrary one. Every ending is, from another angle, not really an ending.

Which I entirely agree with, while still appreciating the climactic boom.

We saw the film at the iPic, which offers (for a steep ticket price) reclining comfy seats, free popcorn, and waiter service for food and drinks including alcoholic ones - I had a mocha martini, which is not a martini at all of course but was yummy - which was a great experience for this particular film, not eclipsing my first viewing of "The Empire Strikes Back" at a huge movie palace in Boston, with a thousand other people for whom "I am your father" was a total shock, but creating its own memory. Probably the only time we'll go there (if we go back, I hope they'll have fixed the huge lines for parking ticket validation and put enough toilet paper in the women's room) but I'm glad we tried it.

I read the eARC of Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen. Verdict: disappointing and, to a large extent, boring. Oh dear.

( spoilers )

On the other hand - lots of Sergyaran Shack fic coming up, I suppose there's something to be said for that.

Things that are good about traveling alone:

1. I can stop at every rest stop. (I can pee at every rest stop. I can stretch at every rest stop.)

2. No disagreements over what to listen to, except perhaps with my own conscience. (I didn't do Spanish lessons yet again.) Mostly for me it's music, because it keeps me awake and works out easiest with the intersection of the phone and the brand spankin' new car audio system that I'm still figuring out, though it did keep wanting to switch me to playing all the songs on my phone alphabetically. Finally I let it, since it's amusing to discover (for instance) how many songs that begin with "Don't" are on there. I sing them all out loud.

3. There is actually no requirement to eat three real meals a day. Though I must remember that chocolate-covered coffee beans melt if left in a hot car, even if they provide caffeine with less need to stop at rest stops.

4. Hotel rooms all to myself! Even at the conference, it turned out, since my roommate canceled at the last minute.

5. No need to feel weird about commenting out loud on the scenery or the road signs or other drivers' behavior. I mean, I do this with people in the car too, but perhaps they are silently judging the habit of exclaiming "Cows!" or "Yay, river!"

6. My choice of recreation, sights, and time to get up in the morning.

I'd say there are a few negatives, such as not having someone to look things up on a map while I am driving (like where the hell are the hotels off Illinois toll roads), but I didn't lose myself badly anywhere, had no car trouble, and didn't get sick, so it was all a great success. I was very happy to get home Monday after driving over 2800 miles and being feet-on-the-ground in 13 states (counting my own), 7 of which I'd never been to before. (I only count touching the ground with preference for buying or eating something, or making a bathroom deposit, or otherwise making an impact. I don't count airports or going through on the train - I'd done that through some of these states before - or driving through without stopping. Kansas was only brunch; and Wisconsin was only a convenience store and a rest stop, but I bought beer and snacks at the former and peed at both, so.)

I'm enough of an introvert to really enjoy the time alone, but I couldn't do two weeks of it without significant human interaction - so first I stopped in Kansas City to stay with penwiper26, which was wonderful (we went to the symphony! we had tacos and local beer and shopped for used books and watched hummingbirds and talked lots, including very usefully about Not Time's Fool, oh it is so good to hang out with beta readers in real space), and then there was the conference (on the Iowa/Nebraska border) and lots of chatting with people like-minded in the sense of loving plants, if not perhaps in all senses. (It is the Midwest; I don't bring up politics.) And I missed my family and my cats, but it was time to be away for a little too.

I have seen All the Corn Ever, which was unexpectedly beautiful, and I am home now. Bracing for floods, since after a couple of months of drought we are having a summer's rain all in one October week. Looks like the hurricane may go out to sea, though - fingers crossed.

So it was Three Weeks of Cellulitis, in the end, but I'm better now. Hurray for finding the right antibiotic! My primary care doctor was making noises about MRSA, but I just don't see how I have any of the risk factors, so I'm going with "nobody ever cultured it, so we will never know."

I also did get through (as of yesterday) all of the Amelia Peabody books, some of which I actually hadn't read before. I think perhaps I gave up initially somewhere around He Shall Thunder in the Sky and the emotional storm leading up to it, and didn't in fact get back to the series even though I thought I had. Glad to have come back and finished. Say what you will about Elizabeth Peters (and I could say a little about the editing in some of the later books) but she really knew how to write, and how to laugh at the right parts of what she was writing and take the right parts seriously, and I will always love her for that.

Also, it occurred to me partway through that this series is kind of the major key version of the Vorkosigan books, at least in the sense of a central family who pulls in many and varied characters to become part of their circle, viewed over a generation of time. Clearly this is something I like. And, because I enjoy exploring the intersection of writing and reading, I will admit to noticing how the Charles/Beatrice/Wilfrid triangle has similarities to Emerson/Amelia/Sethos, though at least I went a different direction with the unexpected familial relationships.

Aside from that my life is mostly tomatoes and Swiss chard at the moment.

Just a quick update before I run off to Annapolis for ferns class. Yes, this is my life.

- Grand jury duty started yesterday, and yes, I am on the panel (despite being #44 out of 23; apparently the "nearly impossible to get out of grand jury duty" thing is not enormously accurate). Won't be talking much about it here because it is Secret, but I'm... kind of looking forward to it? Aside from the driving to Greenbelt every Wednesday and spending the day in a windowless room with criminals and law enforcement personnel part.

- Tangentially, I have discovered yet again about myself that what really makes me grumpy is not knowing what's going to happen (in specific instances, I mean, not in the general sense of an unpredictable existence). I was in a horrible mood Tuesday because of the uncertainty - will I have to go at all? Will I be chosen if I do? - and as soon as I realized on Wednesday morning (when I got named early in the roll call) that I'd certainly be empaneled, I was fine.

- I've had a chance to read a lot of books recently, which is great! I go through periods of not reading much, and then have little reading orgies, and realize how much I miss it. The latest list I guess began with a reread of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (in anticipation of the TV series, which we are much enjoying), and then I dived into a mix of new and finally-getting-to-it: Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell), Among Others (Jo Walton), The Accidental Apprentice (Vikas Swarup), Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword (Ann Leckie), Penric's Demon (Lois Bujold), and Uprooted (Naomi Novik). All of which I enjoyed, to varying degrees. I'm currently nearly done with Mary Doria Russell's Children of God and have started Octavia Butler's Kindred (an interesting pairing of books, especially considering my current research interests).

- Not much TV lately aside from "Jonathan Strange" and "Leverage," though I did plunge through a rewatch of "Slings and Arrows" after finding out via Tumblr that the first two seasons are available on Hulu. (We own the DVDs, but the first one has been out on loan for several years to one of P's friends, and all my nudgings have not resulted in a request for return. Of course I'm just as bad, since one of my friends has Curse of Chalion in a pile somewhere (since about 2009) and I keep forgetting to ask for it back - she being one of those people who Does Not Read SFF. (She has bought at least the first of my books, which is nice, but I bet she hasn't cracked it.)) Anyway, S&A is just as delightful as always, possibly my favorite TV show ever - and hey, all of you who have not seen it, get thee to Hulu.

Okay, need to get ready to get on the road. More sooner, I hope.

(Earworm mondegreens are the worst. Although sometimes of narrative interest.)

Things that have happened:

1) Got to have lunch yesterday (as in, fairly hurried consumption of packaged hummus platters, with conversation, with only four other people) with a famous-in-my-world person I've admired for a long time. Who turns out to be simultaneously just as cool as I thought and a bit of a self-centered obsessive, but this is the way things go (perhaps someone will say that about me someday) and I will be floating on the experience for several days, I'm sure.

2) My sister has been posting online a scanned, translated-to-digital-text version of what's known in our family as the Bulletin, WWII letters that were compiled, edited, and sent out as a collection to the far-flung family by my great-grandmother. I read it all as a teenager, but it's much more interesting to revisit now, with a better sense of what it must have been like. The parents back on the farm in central Massachusetts, my great-grandfather commuting to Washington (wartime job as Executive Secretary of the National Apple Institute!), the three sons and son-in-law going off into the Navy (they all survived, despite my grandfather's ship being sunk), the daughter and daughters-in-law having babies and growing vegetables and generally coping. It's all very ordinary and yet has that "can't believe this shit is happening to us" aura fighting with relentless chin-up positivity. It's also fascinating to read with the writer brain in full gear, because it has that epistolary narrative feel and yet it is so very much not a novel: the arcs are not constructed, the foreshadowing is not intentional, the little cultural and historical notes are not placed for illumination, the characters aren't introduced, even the letter snippets are not arranged within the larger newsletter for any kind of effect, and of course often the news arrives out of sync. I could do so much better, you know? And yet it's real, and it has great resonance for me because I remember the players, but also because I get to know them better as their individual voices sing out from their letters. (I have to admit, too, that fanfic-brain occasionally steps in to comment on what offstage action someone might invent for these characters. Not that I think it would be likely to become a favorite source (did I mention the lack of narrative arc?) but I did laugh when one of the great-uncles mentioned a visit from a friend called "Bucky.") It's also fun to have it emerge a bit at a time as my sister gets around to the editing - very much the serial WIP! And of course a work-in-progress was exactly what it was, since none of them knew what the ending would be. Stiff-upper-lip New Englanders, but the tension must have been incredible.

3) It has been chilly and rainy all week, which has slowed our deck construction significantly, along with any other outdoor activities (I shivered for three and a half hours out in the demo garden on Tuesday). I've been busy in other ways and haven't made as much writing progress as I should, but at least I feel like I'm getting in gear again, even if I stop to research things much more than I actually put words down. (Next fact to ascertain: would escaped South Carolina slaves joining the British Navy during the Revolution have been given surnames, chosen their own, or left with a single name? Stuff like that there.) I can't work at home with the banging and sawing going on, so I may end up a lonely Starbucks lover myself. When it's sunny and dry I can work in parks (no wifi, but fewer calories).

4) I've been called for federal grand jury service starting mid-July. If I'm empaneled, this could mean driving to the courthouse an hour away every Wednesday for eighteen months. In practice, probably somewhat less, and I have a high enough number that I may escape. If not, at least it will be interesting, I hope (please no police shootings). It does seem rather unfair considering that long day of trial jury service last July, but it's a different random selection, and I guess my number was up. Still: argh.

5) I should probably just do a massive media consumption catch-up post (I think I have been saying that for months now, though, so perhaps I'm less than truly interested). Of note in the TV world, aside from various season finales, we've watched (unusually for us) a couple of comedies: season one of "Silicon Valley," which I found more interesting than I thought I would, because it has a real business-oriented story to ground it, but I do feel the significant lack of female characters (I know this is a self-aware comment on the industry, but surely they could have remedied the problem somehow); and "The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt," which is delightful on many levels, as long as I keep saying "comedy, comedy" to myself and don't expect deep psychological analysis. Speaking of earworms, though, OMG. They alive, dammit. (Also in cultural penetration news: the "fascinatin' transition" bit quoted in two speeches at the college graduation of son's girlfriend a couple of weeks ago.)

Onwards. Stuff.