ashmusing | Reading

The other Polly Barton-translated book I read recently was Asako Yuzuki's Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder, which I ended up suggesting for my book club on account of intriguing DW posts from several of you.

Butter focuses Rika Machida, a magazine journalist, on the cusp of becoming the first woman in her company to break the glass ceiling and join Big Editorial, who decides that her next big feature is going to be an insider interview with the infamous prisoner Manako Kajii. Kajii is accused of murdering several men that she met on dating sites after seducing them with a fatal combination of sex, personal attention, and French cooking; in the eyes of the public, however, her greatest crime is that she somehow managed all this femme fatale-ing while being Kind Of Fat.

After a tip from her best friend Reiko -- a housewife who quit her own promising career in hopes of starting a family -- Rika, despite having no previous interest in cooking or domesticity, writes to Kajii about getting her recipe for beef stew. This opens the door for a connection that gets very psychologically weird very fast; Kajii, behind bars, tests Rika with various little living-by-proxy challenges -- eat some good butter! go to the best French restaurant in town! eat late night ramen! after having sex! and tell me all about it -- and Rika, fascinated despite herself, allows herself to be manipulated. For the interview, of course. And also because it turns out good butter is really good, and that eating and making rich food for herself instead of working to keep herself boyishly thin (the prince of her all-girl's school! One of the Boys at work!) is changing her relationship to her body, and her gender, and to the way that people perceive her in the world and she perceives them.

This is more or less what I'd understood to be the plot of the book -- a sort of Silence of the Lambs situation, if the crime that Clarice was trying to solve by talking with Hannibal was societal misogyny -- but in fact it's only about half of the story, and societal misogyny is only one of the big crimes under consideration. The other one is loneliness, and so the rest of the book has to do with Rika's other relationships, and the domino-effect changes that Rika's Kajiimania has on the other people in her life. The most significant is with Reiko, which is extremely fraught with lesbian tension ( spoilers I suppose ) But there's also Rika's mother, and her boyfriend, and the older mentor that she has secret intermittent just-lads-together meet-ups with in bars to get hot journalistic tips; all of these relationships are important, and usually ended up in places I didn't expect and that were more interesting than I would have guessed.

Not everything landed for me about this book, but this was one thing it did pretty consistently that I appreciated -- Rika would think about something, and I would go, 'well, that was didactic, you just said your theme out loud,' and then the book and Rika as protagonist would revisit it and have a more complicated and potentially contradictory thought about it, and then we'd go back to it again, and it usually ended up being more interesting than I would have thought the first time around. It's a long book, possibly too long, but it's equally possible I think that it does need that space to hold contradictions in.

It was however quite funny to read this shortly after Taiwan Travelogue -- another book I have not written up and should probably do so soon -- and also shortly after What Did You Eat Yesterday and also seeing a lot of gifsets for She Loves To Cook and She Loves To Eat ... fellas, is it gay to be really into food? signs point to yes!

jesse_the_k posting in

access_fandom

When I started working on WisCon access in 2007, some kind soul (name lost) gave me a black teeshirt printed in tactile gold--with both Latin letters and braille. It sang the praises of ELECTRICAL EGGS, who advocated for handicap accessibility in the 1970s and 1980s. I loved the shirt but didn't know their history.

So I was thrilled when the September 2025 Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, volume 14 number 2, starts off with Eric Vero's article:

Oral History of The Electrical Eggs: Science Fiction, Disability Activism, and Fan Conventions

https://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/article/view/1262

The journal offers PDF, HTML, and "simplified HTML" versions of each article; all are open access, peer-reviewed, and Creative Commons licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

ABSTRACT

Before the Americans with Disabilities Act was enacted in 1990, American science fiction fans in southern states organized, collaborated, and practiced accessibility at conventions. This grassroots movement began with the work of Samanda B. Jeude and a coalition of other science fiction fans who fought for visibility and access to convention spaces. In this oral history of their organization, “The Electrical Eggs,” I interview two key members decades after their participation in making conventions accessible. I complement these oral sources with brief histories of the role of eugenics and ableism in science fiction and the rise of disability activism in America. Although, the science fiction fandom still faces historical forces like ableism that have been present since its beginnings, the work of the Eggs is a testament to the power of collective action to provide accessibility in fan communities.

soc_puppet posting in

access_fandom

Between a friend contacting me a couple of weeks ago for help setting up Accessibility at the new con he joined, and just tonight hearing about the absolute bullshit that's been going on at TwitchCon (no ramp for their Guest of Honor wheelchair user to get up to the raised stage to receive an award, third year in a row with no ramps for him as a GoH), I figure I may as well share this here.

It's far from perfect, since I'm still almost entirely self-taught, and I built it on the convention I used to run Accessibility for, so there's some stuff that's not exactly universal, but hopefully it'll help someone out there!

( Convention Accessibility Timeline and Jobs )

This is far from perfect and from comprehensive both, but if you work on Accessibility for a convention, or are looking to get started doing so, hopefully you can use this as a sort of template to build around or tweak to your needs. Suggestions in the comments are very welcome, though I don't know if I'll be up to incorporating them into the post. Questions are also very welcome; I'll do my best to answer how I dealt with things, but anyone who wants to is free to chime in!

I've got more info to share as well, but I'm going to hold off on that for another post or two, as this one wore me out a bit already 😂

Edit: For clarity, since I was just overthinking it: This isn't a comprehensive list of services that were provided at the convention I worked; it's just a behind-the-scenes look at how I was involved in setting up some of the services we provided. (Plus some that I never got around to, like the ASL interpreters and Braille documents 🤦‍♀️) If you want inspiration for that, I suggest looking around for convention Accessibility Policies. Those should list out the various accessibility measures that a given convention has in place.

skygiants

Speaking of literary sff about how humans project out their loss and grief, Mai Ishizawa's The Place of Shells is sort of the opposite of Luminous -- where Luminous sprawls out into big branching intersecting plotlines and detailed, evocative worldbuilding, The Place of Shells spirals in on itself, carefully layering its metaphors on top of each other as the world echoes its protagonist's own interiority.

The unnamed narrator is a Japanese PhD student studying medieval saints in Göttingen, Germany, in the summer of 2020. The first quarantine regulations are just beginning to relax, and, as the world opens up a little bit again, she's visited by her old grad school friend Nomiya, who unfortunately died in the 2011 tsunami, and whose body was never recovered. The meeting is, inevitably, a bit awkward, mostly small talk -- it's hard to make a connection after nine years, especially when one person has been changing and moving through the world and the other has not -- but Nomiya seems to be enjoying Göttingen. He decides to stay for some time. The narrator feels that it would be rude to ask him whether he's going to return home to Japan for the Ghost Festival.

As the summer unfurls, in a series of encounters and re-encounters with friends new and old, the city of Göttingen gets stranger. The planet Pluto, which was removed from Göttingen's scale-model planet-themed walking trail some time ago, keeps intermittently re-appearing. The narrator's roommate keeps taking her dog out to look for truffles and instead the dog finds strange lost objects, all of which seem to have profound significance to somebody. Nomiya comes to dinner with the narrator's old grad school advisor and brings a friend, a nice man who appears to be experiencing the city from approximately a century previous. In fact, time is slipping all over Göttingen: and what is time, or memory, except something that lives in a landmark or an object? The narrator studies medieval saints. She understands things in terms of iconography.

I picked this up largely because it was translated by Polly Barton, who also translated Where The Wild Ladies Are and Butter (post on which forthcoming) and at this point I've decided I should probably just read everything she translates because it's clearly going to take me interesting places. This book, absolutely another data point of reinforcement.

skygiants

ME, THREE CHAPTERS INTO SYLVIA PARK'S LUMINOUS: I often experience powerful sad pet emotions in books about humanoid robots so I think it's unfair for Luminous to also contain actual dead pet emotions
MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE: if it helps I don't think there are a lot of sad pet emotions in the rest of the book, I think you've hit the worst of it! the robots are not really sad pets
ME, WITH AN EMOTIONAL HANGOVER AFTER FINISHING SYLVIA PARK'S LUMINOUS: well, broadly speaking, you were right about the robots, but you were absolutely wrong about hitting the end of the sad pet emotions --

So Luminous, as you may have gathered, is a book that made me feel emotions; also a literary science fiction novel about humanoid robots; also a near-future cyberpunk noir; also a bittersweet children's adventure; also, or perhaps most of all, a family saga about three estranged siblings in post-unification Korea:

Jun, the middle child, a transmasc army veteran turned robot crimes cop whose war injuries have resulted in a VR addiction, an unsurmountable amount of debt, and a messy combination of gender euphoria and dysphoria about his new mostly-cyborg body
Morgan, the baby of the family, a successful MIT graduate with a well-paying tech job in robot design and a secret illegal off-the-books robot housekeeper-slash-personal-assistant-slash-boyfriend designed to help her get over her miserable insecurities, a task at which they are both Unfortunately Aware that he is Not Succeeding
and Yoyo, oldest and forever youngest, the advanced prototype child robot designed by their brilliant roboticist father who entered Jun and Morgan's lives as children and played the role of big brother for a few critical years, leaving them both haunted by his absence and his ghost

Where is their brilliant father now, aside from living rent-free inside his children's brains? Great question. For mysterious reasons he's decided he no longer wants to work on humanoid robots and has bounced offscreen to Boston to work on designing robot whales and tigers and so on, a project that museums love but which most serious roboticists think is rather silly.

Where is Yoyo now, aside from living rent-free inside his siblings' brains? Also great question! Two of the book's plotlines (cyberpunk noir) follow Jun investigating the increasingly troubling case of a missing child robot, and Morgan working on the launch of a new next-gen child robot, Boy X. (Crimes against robots are not illegal broadly except as theft, but crimes against child robots are illegal in the same sort of way that child porn is illegal.) In the third major plotline (bittersweet children's adventure), classmates Ruijie and Taewon -- a bright girl from a wealthy family with doting parents and the best high-tech leg braces for her advancing neurodegenerative disorder, and a bitter North Korean refugee boy more-or-less under the care of his criminal uncle, respectively -- find a strangely advanced child robot abandoned in a junkyard ...

(In this near-future Korea, btw, reunification was brought about by an event that propaganda cheerfully characterizes as "the Bloodless War" because it was mostly fought by robots. The experiences of several of the characters beg to differ with this characterization.)

There's a massive amount going on in this book, and all of it is complicated and none of it maps onto simple metaphors. For all the POVs that we get in the book, for all the fact that unexpected robot actions are frequently driving the plot, we're never in the heads of any of the robots themselves: all we can really know is what the various characters project onto them, an endless sea of human emotions about gender and disability and parenthood and childhood and societal expectations and trauma and grief.

On a plot level, I'm not at all sure it fully comes together at the end -- there's so much going on that 'coming together' seems almost impossible, tbh -- or that I actually understood all of what had, technically, happened, per se. On an emotional level, I will reiterate that the book made me feel feelings!! laudatory!!!

skygiants

Last night

genarti and I took advantage of Skirball Theater's remote Halloween production, a virtual Phantom of the Opera broadcast live every night for the next two weeks from a tiny apartment in New York City with a handful of actors, a variety of very small sets and very large cardboard props, and a lot of neat visual/camera tricks.

As a bonus feature, you can see exactly how most of the visual/camera tricks work because there's a second camera set up from the front of the apartment that shows the broader view of the cast and crew rushing around to cram themselves into the tiny sets and lurk in front of walls to cast dramatic shadows and so on. As a viewer, you always have the option to toggle between the main, intended view and the backstage view to see how they're doing whatever they're doing -- tbh this in itself made it worth the price of admission for me, as a person who loves practical effects. See Carlotta's entry evoked by a giant high-heeled foot and then toggle over to the crew member carefully dangling the foot into the frame! Superb!

The production itself evokes the aesthetics of German expressionist film, with an operatic organ soundtrack and most of the dialogue conveyed by classic silent film inter-, sub- or supertitles. It's a shock when the Phantom speaks out loud to Christine, and she speaks back to him. When Raoul says he heard someone in her dressing room, Christine looks understandably baffled by the way this breaks the rules: how could a silent film man hear an angel speak?

Christine can also break the silent film framework to sing, as trained, and, eventually, talk out loud about the Phantom as well as to him, but not about anything else. I love this conceit and I think it's probably the coolest thing the show does thematically.

genarti remarked while watching that she'd also never seen a Phantom with this much actual opera in it. The production is definitely interested in Opera qua opera -- trying to say something about Art and the temporality of all artistic media and the fact that opera itself is a dying form, and tbh I'm not sure that it fully landed for me. However this may have been because these Themes were mostly conveyed in a big speech by the Phantom actor at the beginning as he puts on his makeup, and the biggest technical problem with the show (at least on the night that we saw it) was that the Phantom actor's mic was way out of balance with the background music and he was always kind of hard to hear. Which perhaps is thematic in and of itself!

Anyway, I really enjoyed the experience, worth my $20 to sit on my couch with the lights out and toggle between a Spooky Silent Phantom and a tiny apartment full of theater professionals moving tiny sets back and forth to make Spooky Silent Phantom happen, would recommend.

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

skygiants

I recently had the excuse to reread my favorite epistolary romance, Zen Cho's novella The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, which I love just as much now as I did when it came out in 2012, if not more.

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo is set among the avant-garde literary circles of 1920s London, and Jade herself is a sharp young Malaysian writer who accidentally becomes the main character of the day by penning a scathing review of the latest book by Literary Darling Sebastian Hardie. Fortunately or unfortunately, Hardie thinks this is the hottest thing he's ever seen anyone do; moreover, Hardie's very accepting wife thinks Jade is so charming; and as for what Jade's handsome and serious editor Ravi thinks ... well, events unfold from there, carried along by Jade's unique and delightful and irrepressible voice. If every first-person protagonist I met had even a quarter of Jade's verve and personality, I would be content, but the fact that they do not just makes me cherish Jade all the more.

If you've not met Jade Yeo, or if like me you have indeed already met her and would like her to live in your house forever, the book is getting a new print edition through the small press Homeward Books and preorders have just opened!

(The Kickstarter also has NYC and Seattle book rec party tiers which unfortunately I cannot attend as i will not be anywhere near those locations but I very much hope someone else does and tells me about them.)

skygiants

( Yuletide letter )

skygiants

For our friend/former roommate M's birthday last weekend he decided to host a screening of the recent two-part Three Musketeers film adaptation, D'Artagnan and Milady.

Apparently this is the first French film adaptation in sixty years?! (which I did not know before looking at the Wikipedia just now) and I think we all had a vague conception that, being French, it was likelier to be moderately book-accurate than the run of modern English film adaptations. As it turns out this was foolish and prejudiced of us. French directors have just as much fun picking and choosing their favorite bits of The Three Musketeers and jettisoning the rest as anybody else.

That said: I think most of the changes are quite fun and interesting! Perhaps most notably, this is the most successful Milady Positive Musketeers adaptation that I've yet encountered. At least 50% of the plot changes are in service of ensuring that the Musketeers continue to see Milady as a primary antagonist while ensuring that we-the-viewers are tilting our heads like 'hmm ... but is she though ......'

Case in point: the biggest plot change is that suddenly we are very concerned about Huguenots. Athos now comes from a Protestant family and has an ardent Huguenot brother who is on the other side in La Rochelle; meanwhile the whole conflict is being escalated by Gaston of Orléans, who's the real villain of the piece. Why does Gaston of Orléans need to be the real villain of the piece? So that by comparison Cardinal Richelieu is not so bad, so that the schemes on which he's sending Milady are really not so bad, so actually --

( more Milady changes, big spoilers )

The other two biggest plot changes are also very funny to me .... one is that the creative team were like "what do Porthos and Aramis have going on with the Milady plot? Well ... nothing really. So instead we are going to give them a comic b-plot about finding which hot soldier knocked up Aramis' feisty sister. Since when does Aramis have a feisty sister SINCE NOW." ( more spoilers )

The other is that midway through movie two they slide in a new semi-historical OC (semi-historical because he's based on this guy but sixty years too early) who immediately steals the show in every possible way; he drops the best one-liners in the film, saunters casually in to save the Musketeer's asses on at least two different occasions, and is also the hottest man on the screen. To be clear I love this, big ups to the New Improved Musketeer, absolutely in the spirit of Dumas Pere. It did not at all shock me to learn that the creative team were now angling to make a TV show with this guy as the lead. I hope it succeeds because I'd watch the hell out of it.

Other notes: the costuming is very brown in the way that is clearly intended to shout "historical accuracy!" while demonstrating the exact opposite. One of the friends attendant at the party is a historical costume hobbyist and she spent the whole evening glowering at the screen muttering 'where is everyone's LACE?' And then every so often someone would show up with a plasticky lace border around their neckline and we'd all shout 'LOOK! LACE!' which strangely did not soothe her.

ON the other hand, at one point a character in a fraught chase sequence is shown actually changing horses, which so delighted the horse-knowers among us that they immediately forgave Eva Green every implausible corset lugged straight off the set of Penny Dreadful.

On the third hand: no valets. WHEN will someone make a Three Musketeers adaptation with valets?

alierak posting in

dw_maintenance

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

highlyeccentric

Attempts to Post About Things this week have mostly failed. Instead, let me inform you all that I noticed that The Longest Johns had put out the last of their eight-part series "Pieces of Eight" (instead of an album, eight "singles" of three tracks each). I had actually missed pieces 5, 6 and 7, so I have many shanties and ballads to catch up on.

Currently I am particularly enjoying:

Watch on YouTube

But there is also new-to-me Australiana! And I believe it also ought to be brought to the attention of

monksandbones, who I know keeps a playlist of "Peril on the Sea".

Watch on YouTube

The fun thing about this being recorded by the Longest Johns is that Longest Johns fans keep a "longest song" wiki with surprisingly good historical info and links out to other sites. Why have I never heard this "Traditional Australian folk song"? Well, the answer is it probably just wasn't that popular. "Folkstream" quote John Meredith, who in a later publication said he had collected the song in 1954 from Mary Byrnes, who at 73 recalled having sung it as a child (late 1880s or early 1900s).

The wreck in question was of a steamship travelling between Melbourne and Newcastle, which foundered off Jervis Bay in 1876.¹ The lyrics as recorded at Folkstream, from Meredith's version and from a contributor's father, have the look of "ballad made to go in newspapers".

I guess John Meredith didn't like the song that much - a founding member of The Bushwhackers, many of the lesser-known folk songs in their discography were drawn from his collecting work. And so the song, or at least the tune, passed out of all knowledge, until, when chance came, it ensnared a new musician...

The Longest Song says that Australian folk artist Kate Burke found it in the Australian Folk Music Archives in the NLA - they cite Mainly Norfolk, but only one of the sources quoted there says she was the one who found it. The quote from Burke and her collaborator Ruth Hazelton says they were given Meredith's 1954 recording of Mary Byrne singing by Chris Sullivan (mind you, when I look up the late Chris Sullivan talking about his PhD research, not only does it seem that his contribution was working with the _music_ of Australian folk song, not just the lyrics, but a substantial chunk of the tapes in his collection he found in the NLA).

One way or the other, Kate Burke transcribed Mary Byrnes' version, and added the refrain. Her basic arragement and refrain are now the standard for all subsequent recordings. That explains why the refrain feels... different. The tune continues but the style is different (although I also think I have encountered this mix of ballad with lullaby-esque refrain before, in other modernised folk songs).

But wait, there's more! I can use Trove too, friends, I can use Trove too. Mary Byrne also pops up in the newspaper record: in 1954 (the same year she spoke to John Meredith), she appears to have spoken with, and sung for, a Russel Ward, who recorded the lyrics of The Wreck of the Dandenong in an article for the Sydney Morning Herald (25 May 1954). Ward specifically notes that Byrne recalls this as a song she sang during harvest time, part of a class of songs which, Ward feels, are unknown in the city or even in coastal settlements.

I could only fish two results out of Trove: the earlier one provides not a song, but a poem. The Newcastle Sun, on 12 September 1931 commemorated the 56th (why?) anniversary of the sinking of the Dandenong on its childrens' page, complete with a poem which pretty closely resembles the version collected by Meredith - but more closely matches the fragmentary version which folkstream published, sent in by Margaret Lloyd-Jones according to the memory of her father Mick Frawley of Toowoomba (QLD). The Newcastle Sun in 1931 attributes the poem to James Brennan of Anvil Creek, near Greta (NSW), and report that it was sent to them by his daughter Mrs R L M Robinson, of Mereweather West (NSW).

I don't have access to a copy of John Meredith and Hugh Anderson's "Folk Songs of Australia and the Men and Women Who Sang Them" (various editions 1960-something-1980-something), but the google books snippet for volume 2 of the 1987 edition tells me that someone named Harry sang them a version to "quite different" tune, which was in fact so close to Auld Lang Syne that the said Harry slipped seamlessly from one to the other.

Now, it's quite possible that the daughter of James Brennan misremembered her father's authorship. I'm annoyed that I can't find any earlier printing of that poem than 1931 - a very plausible origin for a little-known folk song with two tunes, one relatively distinct and one very close to Auld Lang Syne would be if people had independently picked up a poem and set it to music - one resulting in the current tune, with drift in lyrics over time, and the other set originally to Auld Lang Syne, with slight drift in the tune over time through musician-to-musician teaching/adjusting. Mouvance, as I am obliged as a medievalist to say.

This has been: peril on the sea, and voyages into Trove.nla.gov.au.

Edit: of all the things that are Wrong on The Internet, I do not know why this one is the first thing to actually impel me to edit a wiki, but screw it, I have made a fandom.com wiki editing account and added the citations from Trove to the Longest Song. The WaybackMachine has a record of the version of the page that I used originally.

1. Observers of niche Australian facts may know that while most of the bay and its shore are within NSW, most of the southern headland - including Jervis Bay Village and Wreck Bay village - are an exclave consituting perhaps the least-notable Territory of Australia: the Jervis Bay Territory, exclaved from NSW in 1915 to provide a port for the future capital. It currently has a naval base, it is administered directly by the Federal Government (in addition, the Wreck Bay Aboriginal Community Council exercises various governance functions over about 90% but not all of the Territory). The laws of the ACT apply there, and its residents vote in the Division of Fenner (same as ACT residents) for Federal elections, but it is not part of the ACT and its residents do not vote in ACT elections. All of this postdates the wreck of the Dandenong, I just wanted to share these largely useless facts.

the muse's others

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We're part of a movement: The Electrical Eggs

Oral History of The Electrical Eggs: Science Fiction, Disability Activism, and Fan Conventions

ABSTRACT

Bare Bones Convention Accessibility Timeline

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Database maintenance

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AWS outage

Peril on the Sea update!

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