Afternoon folks, and happy May Day Bank Holiday!

And, equally, Happy Star Wars Day!

Following one of the themes of the day, and with a hat-tip to a certain Sir Terry Pratchett...

What union or guild would your pup be in? What would it be called? Bonus points for fun Dog Latin motto <3

When I say that reading Aster Glenn Gray's Diary of a Cranky Bookworm feels like spending several delightful hours with an old friend, this is just about the least surprising statement in the world I could possibly make, because:

a.) Aster is indeed a longtime friend, and also
b.) both the book and Sage-as-protagonist are drawing explicit inspiration from many other teen-girl-writer bildungsromans (I Capture the Castle, the Montmaray trilogy, the collected oeuvre of LM Montgomery, etc.) that are beloved old friends to me, and also
c.) every character and interpersonal dynamic in this book does indeed feel like an exact portrait of someone I either was or knew in high school, with pitch-perfect and sometimes painful accuracy

Sage Perrault, Our Heroine, is an imaginative, judgmental misanthrope from a small town in Minnesota who was fortunate enough to form a small tight friends group in elementary school who also proved themselves worthy of her affection by being precocious readers:

- Georgie, Sage's best friend since kindergarten, when her mother (terrified of Sage becoming a miserable loner like Gay Cousin Rachel who Never Comes Home For Christmas) seized on the other precocious reader in class and started arranging playdates with feverish speed. Sensible, driven, raised by an overprotective mom who never got out of town and is thus double determined to Get Out Of Town. Friends outside of Sage: church youth group
- Arielle, the dramatic friend, with inattentive divorced parents, a moderate case of main character syndrome, and a rich life of the imagination often expressed through implausible lies about her past. Passionate in her enthusiasms but will not stop obnoxiously sending you fanfiction that you do not care about. Friends outside of Sage: drama club
- Hilary, the chillest friend; always delighted to run with any bit that she's given and make it more fun and funny, but holds her own emotional cards close to the chest. Has a very nice boyfriend and never talks about him. Wonderful to hang out with at any time but is planning for pre-med so will almost certainly be far too busy to stay in close touch with anyone when they scatter. Friends outside of Sage: almost the entire school, everyone loves Hilary because she's a delight, and the fact that she chooses to eat lunch with Sage and Hilary and Arielle is frankly a great compliment to all of them

This has left Sage peacefully free to hold onto grudges also formed in elementary school, continue happily hating the kids in her class that she has hated since they were all eight, and avoid going through the effort of speaking to anybody else. Unfortunately, it's senior year! College is looming, and with it new tensions and unpleasant questions, such as:

- can being a precocious reader really continue as the be-all and end-all of Sage's perception of her own self-worth? and how can she write a college essay about it?
- how much of what Arielle's told them all about her plans for college is normal bad ideas, and how much is outright lies, and how much is in fact a cry for help?
- how can Sage break it to beloved best friend Georgie that she doesn't want to go to the U [University of Minnesota Twin Cities], which is the ultimate apex of Georgie's ambitions, and instead kind of wants to attend a small liberal arts college somewhere in the middle of nowhere?
- but if she doesn't go to college with Georgie, will she ever successfully speak to another human being?
- and on that topic, is it possible that a Longtime Beautiful Enemy is in fact a human being worth talking to, to despite the fact that she's bad at spelling and was mean in middle school?

Sage, early on: Arielle always tries to blow on whatever flickering embers of bisexuality she finds within herself, which I admire. I'd be far more inclined to play Whack-A-Mole. And obviously part of the book is also that Sage has to stop playing Whack-A-Mole, but the big emotional question of the Longtime Beautiful Enemy subplot is less "will they kiss" [though they do, eventually] than "can Sage build an emotional connection with a new person, at the same time as she's facing fundamental shifts in all her other most important relationships?" At its heart this is a book about friendship in all its different shapes, the different kinds of ties you build with different people and the way those change with you as you grow.

And also, of course, about being judgmental about books and films and art. There's a whole other conversation that I feel like I've been coincidentally having in various different contexts about the purpose of the literary cross-reference in this sort of text; I am definitely one of the people for whom there's a profound self-indulgent pleasure in watching characters react to another work [Kage Baker's infamous Cyborgs Watch D.W. Griffith scene my beloved; what a bad idea to spend a whole chapter on it and what a delight it was for me personally] as long as I don't believe that the author believes that all right-thinking people should agree with the character's opinions. Fortunately I am in no danger of this with Sage. Sage has a LOT of opinions about books and films and art, and I disagree with many of them but so do many of Sage's friends; this, too, is one of the important shapes of friendship.

Legend of the Magnate is the first historical cdrama I've watched that's interested in the middle class, and for this alone tbh I'd recommend it. The Qing Emperor dies pretty early on and nobody cares except inasmuch as it leads to some national policy changes, because not a single one of our main characters knew him personally!

The year is 1860; the Qing Empire is struggling with the aftermath of the Opium Wars and the ongoing Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rebellion; and our protagonist, Gu Pingyuan, a nice young man with scholarly ambitions from a family of tea farmers, has unfortunately spent his twenties in prison-exile in the frozen north after getting sabotaged by an Unknown Enemy into making criminal amounts of noise at the big civil service exams in the capitol. During his years in exile he has learned various survival skills and at the start of the show he makes his escape so he figure out who sabotaged him, as well as what happened to the long-disappeared father he went to the capitol to seek information about the first place.

Given this setup -- and the fact that the show is a high-budget historical drama that shares several cast members with Nirvana in Fire -- we were kind of expecting Gu Pingyuan to be a master schemer and puppeteer with martial skills and elaborate plans. Not so! It turns out the survival skills that Pingyuan learned in prison mostly included Wheeling, Dealing, Bullshitting, and Occasionally Falling On His Face And Begging. Very refreshing also tbh to see a clever protagonist who has no pride whatsoever. Many times Pingyuan's brilliant schemes to manipulate the market forces around him do succeed! (Often I didn't understand why, because I'm not a financial genius, but I was willing to nod sagely along and agree that they probably were brilliant.) And many other times they result in heavily armed men throwing him in prison because his bullshit immediately backfired on him and he has to wait for someone else to come and rescue him, because he did not in fact acquire any martial arts skills in prison, he leaves that to his love interest.

I should probably at this point talk about the other main characters of the drama. They are:

- his love interest, a nice young woman whose family runs a horse caravan for long-distance deliveries; as this often takes her into somewhat dangerous situations, she's picked up some martial arts skills and low-key considers herself part of the jianghu but in like a normal person way. She's lovely. So is her dad, who loves Gu Pingyuan almost as much as she does. Unfortunately Gu Pingyuan has a pre-prison-exile fiancee that he thinks he's duty-bound to be getting back to and as a result he fumbles her so many times
- his foil, the son of very wealthy merchant, Li Million, who owns a massive chain of pharmacies; as a result before we learned his name we spent several episodes calling him the Heir to CVS. The lonely CVS Junior has a deep and powerful attachment to Gu Pingyuan, and the plot keeps briefly letting them get into joyous financial cahoots and then immediately putting them into rivals situations; every mini-arc includes a scene where Li Million (a major ominously antagonistic figure, played by the Emperor from Nirvana in Fire) is like "I have told you Many times you are Forbidden to associate with that Convict" and CVS Junior stares up at him with big sad eyes and goes "but daddy ... I love him he's my only friend ...."
- his ex-fiancee, who unfortunately for Gu Pingyuan is busy having her own plot, ( which is spoilery )
- his ... hmm I don't really know how to describe Ms. Su in context of Gu Pingyuan as she doesn't actually care that much about him; she's obviously the main character of her own drama that occasionally intersects with this one in which she is a ruthless master puppeteer engaged on her own mysterious business. She appears in the plot every few episodes, often cross-dressed, often waving large amounts of money, occasionally trying to assassinate somebody, and half the time it's like "thank God she's here to help our friend out of prison, we couldn't have done it without her" and the other half the time it's like "well, five men are now dead." You never can tell with Ms. Su!

The show is somewhat interested in politics, but much more interested in how things are made, who makes them, who sells them, and how they get from place to place. At one point some East India Company white guys show up with something ominous under a cloth, and genarti was like "is it a Spinning Jenny?" and the cloth came off and INDEED IT WAS A SPINNING JENNY and we all screamed. The real villain of the story has appeared!

-- though the villain of the story, I want to be clear, is not capitalism. The show wants to be very clear on that. About every three or four episodes it's clearly been mandated by Someone that Gu Pingyuan have a conversation with somebody to reiterate his Ethical Vision for Ethical Business That Truly Serves the People. And when that doesn't happen and when businessmen act badly? That is the fault of the FAILING QING DYNASTY, or possibly the BRITISH, but it is Not the fault of Business, which is Good, and Ethical, and also Patriotic. The last scene of the drama -- this isn't a spoiler, it has nothing to do with the plot of the show in any way -- is a brief post-show epilogue set fifty years in the future where we learn that Gu Pingyuan's business wealth acquired through years of ardent dedication to the free market is of course funding the Communist Revolution.

But the flip side of this dedicated Business Propaganda is that the rest of the show is free to be nuanced, messy, and politically ambivalent. The show doesn't particularly support either the rebels or the Empire; the show just thinks that the civil war sucks for everyone who's caught up in it and makes tea production very difficult. When aristocrats and officials appear in the plot, they're small disruptive typhoons oversetting everything in their wake for the merchant- and working-class people whose lives we're following. Upward mobility is possible, but also perilous; Gu Pingyuan is constantly getting put into glass cliff situations by more powerful people who need a scapegoat, because the Empire is a powder keg and fundamentally our protagonist is just an ex-convict from a tea farming family.

( big major show spoilers )

All this is to say that I enjoyed the show very much, but I do have one -- well, two major complaints. The first is that Gu Pingyuan has a younger brother and in a show where most people broadly do get interesting characterization and growth this brother never once transcends Comedy Status. Earth-shaking revelations are destabilizing the rest of his family to their core and nobody ever bothers to tell him! What is even the POINT of a Comedy Brother if you don't get a moment of shocking and unexpected poignance! Absolute waste.

The second is that there is an arc with Wolves, all of whom seem to have been imported straight into China by way of Hammer Horror. RIP to those many, many monster movie wolves.

Subject line seen on a banner carried by multiple people, leading what was likely a significant percentage of East High School's student body on the march to the square, complete with school marching band (and they had mad rhythm, holy cow). Translation: We're here, and we're not going away!

So yes. Sang and chanted up a storm. Marched until I got mildly footsore. Practiced my Spanish comprehension, and honestly, both official language (our mayor and a county supervisor both read proclamations out to the crowd) and prayers are good for that. I do mean that about prayers, too. I am unexpectedly grateful for the opportunity given me by faith leaders and interpreters on the mic - one pastor, one rabbi. Then went down State Street and had a late lunch at a restaurant pretty definitely run by members of the immigrant community. Taste of Sichuan makes delicious seafood noodle wonton soup, for any local folks so inclined. The relative I was with wasn't, and said, summarily, yuck! :)

I don't believe we had any arrests, disturbances, or difficulties today. If we did, someone clue me in. And if I'm being entirely honest, a significant portion of a high school arriving all at once, doubling the assembled crowd and getting a jubilant welcome by the people already there? That was worth the whole day. I wish I'd seen West and Memorial arrive.

Challenge #1088 is paradox.

The rules:

• All stories must be 100 words long.
• Please place your story behind a cut if it contains spoilers for the current season.
• Remember, you don't have to use the challenge word or phrase in your story; it's just there for inspiration.
• Please include the challenge word or phrase in the subject line of your post.
• Please use the challenge tag 1088: paradox on any story posted to this challenge.

In other words (that aren't lyrics quoted from the In The Heights movie adaptation), I'm shortly out of here to a May Day protest. I suspect turnout will eclipse the last No Kings utterly; we have the support of Madison's public school teachers and, very probably, students, to the tune of citywide school closures, and atop that, the UW is in session. You know I'll be keeping a language count, singing and chanting myself hoarse, and marching until my feet take notice. You know I'm hoping we make the news, locally and nationally, for all the best reasons and none of the worst ones.

If I need bailing out by the end of this, I'm calling you, meimichan. :) Seriously, if I need someone to throw my bail, it means the ice-hearted and/or some towering racists showed up and tried something reprehensible. That would be monumentally stupid, given Madison's crowds (diverse, peaceful, vocal, and unlikely to tolerate random innocents being snatched for no reason) but given the ice-hearted... well. Let's just hope I'm imagining the unlikely.

unsent_letters_exchange is an exchange for in-universe correspondence! We have some post-deadline pinch hits.

Requirements: 1000 words of fic, of which at least 500 words should be in a requested epistolary format
Due date: May 8th, 11:59PM UTC

Requirements: 1000 words of fic, at least 500 of which must be in a requested epistolary format.

PH 2 - Minecraft: Story Mode (Video Game) x2, The Protomen x2, Bionicle (Generation 1) x2

PH 8 - Dune (Movies - Villeneuve), Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson, The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrard

For more details, or to claim: https://unsent-letters-exchange.dreamwidth.org/27840.html

Thank you for your consideration!

Ferry season started today. Well, yesterday, but I have WFH on Mondays and Fridays.

I don't care that the ferry ride adds half an hour each way to my commute and costs more than the bus plus the T. I'm not underground trying to sit despite people's elbows, shoulders, bags, etc. intruding into my seat's airspace. I'm not dealing with the urge to grab people and yell YOUR SMARTPHONE CAME WITH EARBUDS, IF YOU ARE WATCHING A VIDEO, WEAR THEM. I'm not underground being shaken around like a Red Devil paint mixer.

I saw the first common tern of the season today while I was waiting for the ferry.

Totally worth it.

From petra Reply to this post saying 'icon', and I will tell you my favourite icon of yours. Then post this to your own journal using your own favourite icon.

This was actually really hard to pick a favorite icon but I love this one which I call 'running towards a happy ending'. I just love the hopefulness of this. It feels like where I am today as well since the day ended up warming up and being sunny, it felt like Spring for the first time in a bit.

It's been several days since I finished Cristina Rivera Garcia's No One Will See Me Cry (translated by Andrew Hurley) and I've still sort of singularly failed to formulate an opinion about it; I just keep sort of mentally picking the book up and turning it over and putting it uneasily down again.

In some ways this book reminds me of A Month in the Country, in that both are historical novels that delicately build up a picture of lives destabilized by and lived in the cracks after an epoch-shaking event, while carefully avoiding -- tracing the parameters of, writing around, turning the camera consistently away from -- the event itself. The difference is that A Month in the Country does in fact feel light, delicate, balanced against the heavy thing at its center, while No One Will See Me Cry isn't in any way a light book; aside from the heaviness of its subject matter, feels laden with symbolism at every turn, although the symbolism itself is often specific and startling.

The premise: in 1920s Mexico City, an aging, morphine-addicted photographer who's been hired to take portraits of asylum inmates meets Matilda, a woman he last photographed many years ago, when she was a prostitute. Joaquin engages in a kind of narrative barter with, first the asylum doctor, then with Matilda herself, in an attempt to understand her story and how it intersects with his own to bring them both to this asylum. Both of them, it turns out, formatively knew and formatively loved the same woman, a revolutionary, in the years before the war -- but neither of them was actually involved in the Revolution, neither of them were active agents for or against the transformation of their livetimes; Joaquin describes himself more than once as the only photographer of his generation who didn't take any photographs of the war, and Matilda was, at the time, involved in an emotional affair with a desert landscape.

There are some tropes that one expects, and is braced for, around Women and Lost Women and Madwomen, especially when insanity is used as a thematic metaphor around national trajectory, especially when all that is inextrictable from questions of poverty and indigineity. Rivera Garcia is definitely deploying some of those tropes with purpose and to a point and I absolutely do not know enough to have a full sense of what she's doing with them. This is one of those situations where I wish I was reading a book in context of a class or a club. As it is, what I'm left with is interest, unease, some beautiful and surprising images, and a sense that I ought to read a lot more about the Mexican Revolution.