Extremely quick life update, in bullet point form

[dolorosa_12]

Matthias and I went to London to see Cirque du Soleil's show Ovo. I'm glad we went - I had a wonderful time, and there were a couple of great acts - but overall it was not their best work. I've been watching Cirque shows since I was three years old, so I possibly have overly high standards. It was kind of fun to watch it while sitting near lots of families with small children, because seeing the acts through the children's astonished eyes reminded me of how wonderful it was to see Cirque shows for the very first time.

I've been reading my way through Frances Hardinge's body of work: so far I've read A Face Like Glass, Gullstruck Island, The Lie Tree, A Skinful of Shadows, and Cuckoo Song, and I've been absolutely blown away. They're such intricate, clever books, and so hopeful and healing, all concerned with the dispossessed and powerless, giving them their power back.

Never someone to say no to excessively rules-based stationery, I've gone completely overboard with bullet journalling. I used a bullet journal last year, but in the most basic way (the method outlined in the video on the bullet journal website). This year, I've gone beyond that with complicated habit tracking spreads, a set-up requiring multiple coloured pencils, glue, old origami paper, and a lot of fiddling around. I wouldn't do it if I didn't enjoy it (when I was in high school I had a system of organisation for my exercise books that required different coloured underlining for each day of the week, a complicated way of ruling up every page, and stern opinions as to which kinds of pens I could use for note-taking, so it was probably inevitable that I fell into the post-school iteration in the form of bullet journalling), but I do sometimes dip into the wild world of bullet journal vlogging/blogging and boggle at the excessive, overpriced stationery and the immense amount of work it seems to involve.

I found these two articles about the Salem witch hunt (and also The Crucible, and the modern twisting of the term 'witch hunt') really interesting to read in parallel. The first, by Sarah Monette, is here. The second, by Maria Dahvana Headley, is here, and I came across it via umadoshi.

Comments

[lilysea]

I LOVED A Face Like Glass! ^_^

[dolorosa_12]

A Face Like Glass is incredible! I think my favourite Hardinge so far is A Skinful of Shadows, but they're all utterly brilliant.

[kayim]

Ooh, thanks for the links on Salem!

[dolorosa_12]

You're very welcome. I found them really interesting in parallel, because both started with the same assumption - Salem was about the reactions and actions of men, not the hysteria and accusations of girls and women - but arrive at very different interpretations on the basis of that assumption.

[frayadjacent]

Ah, I read Gullstruck Island a few years ago and loved it. I haven’t read any of her other works but I downloaded a bunch from the library recently. Any standouts for you?

[dolorosa_12]

I really love all her books that I've read so far, but probably the standouts for me were Cuckoo Song (with several reservations that would be spoilerish) and A Skinful of Shadows.

[pax_athena]

I felt the same about Ovo - the pattern I see, for myself, that I like their darker, sadder shows quiet a bit more. Even though my surprising favorite so far, Kurios, wasn't really on the sad side - but also not on the funny the way Ovo was,
And I, too, was sitting next to kids - twin girls of a about 6 or 7, who were there with their grandma and incredibly excited. And seeing them enjoying the show was a joy that also reminded me that maybe I was setting my expectations a bit high.

If you ever feel like talking more about your bullet journalling or making photos, I'd be super curious! Mine is very basic (it does not even fully follow the rules?), but it works for me and I love the flexibility of finding just the right level of elaboration that works for oneself.

[dolorosa_12]

I both agree and disagree with you about darker Cirque shows being better. My favourite Cirque show, after all, is Quidam, which is probably their darkest of all (and my favourite act is Quidam's incredible, heart-stopping banquine, which is really, really dark and bleak). But then the other shows I like the most are Varekai, which is joyful, and Dralion, which is hopeful... I think for me the problem with Ovo is that it had no really incredible, standout acts - even its finale was something that would only have been a mid-show act in Quidam, Alegria, Dralion and so on. My other issue was that its music and costuming was a bit ordinary (Alegria it was not), and the band and music were not well integrated into the show and story as a whole.

The flexibility of bullet journalling is its great strength - I don't even follow its rules either, and I love that it's a system that can accommodate everything from very stripped down, basic, logging of daily tasks to elaborate, complicated, fussy spreads that require a huge amount of expensive stationery.

I may write about my bullet journalling in more detail in the future, but for now if you want to be part of a community of bullet journallers, the bujo community on Dreamwidth might be worth checking out.

[eglantiere]

hardinge is absolutely phenomenal. i have to make breaks between her books because they're very, uh, intense, but each one was a delight.

[dolorosa_12]

Intense is definitely the word for it. I've read all these books of hers over the course of about three months (starting in December last year), which is of course way longer than books of their length would normally take me to read, but the intensity is, as you say, a bit overwhelming. They're all books about people surviving emotional abuse and trauma (in spite of their whimsical settings), and that's always very hard to read.

I love them so much - A Skinful of Shadows most of all, but they're all fabulous.

[scripsi]

I love Hardinge too! Especially A Face Like Glass and A Skinful of Shadows.

I started doing a very basic bullet journal in November and I find the concept very practical. But pretty it ain't.

[dolorosa_12]

My favourites were probably A Skinful of Shadows and Cuckoo Song, but they're all amazing!

That's what I love most about bullet journalling - it's flexible enough to accommodate everything from the most basic daily logging of activities to elaborate systems requiring huge quantities of expensive stationery and hours of painstaking illustrations!

[scripsi]

Cuckoo Song is still on my list of books to read. :)

Exactly. i'd love to make it pretty, but I think I'm going to make it into a habit first.

[luzula]

I loved Cuckoo Song so much! But was not as into Fly By Night, where I thought the writing style distracted me from the story. I do plan to read more of her work, though.

[dolorosa_12]

Weirdly, I actually read Fly By Night a long time ago for work (I was a newspaper book reviewer for about ten years, during the time that Fly By Night was published) and I don't think it left much of an impression, because it didn't make me want to rush out and read more of Hardinge's books. However, so many of my friends, particularly people whose reading tastes tend to align with mine, raved about her that I finally decided to give more of her books a try. I, like you, absolutely adored Cuckoo Song. My absolute favourite so far is probably A Skinful of Shadows.