As we face the sun
Apr. 6th, 2025 03:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12This weekend has been absolutely glorious, albeit somewhat tiring. The sky is cloudless and cornflower blue, the breeze is warm and gentle, and Matthias and I have made the first efforts towards getting the garden into shape this year. I planted poppies, marigolds and cornflowers in the raised beds, he mowed the lawn for the first time since late autumn, and we both sealed the deck with two layers of oil — messy, tedious work that made my legs ache, but that I'll appreciate later on. Here's a photoset of various blossoming fruit trees and other flowers in our garden.
Yesterday's two hours of classes in the gym involved dance fitness (instead of the regular zumba), in which we spent the hour-long class learning an entire dance routine from start to finish, which left me feeling jubilantly ecstatic. It reminded me a bit of doing dance classes in high school and after school when I was a teenager, and made me wonder if I'd enjoy doing some kind of actual dance classes now. The main problem with this is that I dance like a gymnast: i.e. I am incapable of dancing in shoes, and (as a consequence of having ten years of gymnastics drilling into me that one's body should be held as straight and unyielding as a board when undertaking any physical activity) I am incapable of moving my hips or chest with any fluidity. A gymnastics background does have some benefits (I pick up routines quickly and have a good memory for movement, I have very good balance, and a good sense of how different parts of the body interact and work together), but is severely limiting when it comes to most styles of dance.
Other movement this weekend included swimming through liquid sunshine for 1km this morning at the pool, and yoga next to a sunlit, open window. It does feel a lot easier to move when the weather is like this, that's for sure!
Matthias and I continued making use of our current MUBI subscription, and watched Crossing, a Georgian- and Turkish-language film in which an ageing Georgian woman, accompanied by an aimless but enterprising young twentysomething guy travel from Batumi to Istanbul to track down the woman's trans niece in order to fulfil a promise she made to her dying sister (the niece's mother). Once in Istanbul, they have no luck finding the niece, but drift into the orbit of a found family of sorts: a trans Turkish woman working as a sort of all-purpose advocate at an LGBT nonprofit organisation, and a pair of impoverished children who eke out a precarious existence scamming and selling tat to tourists. The film's title is very pointed: crossings of various kinds (over borders, back and forth on the ferry between Istanbul's European and Asian sides, and of course from gender assigned at birth to living openly as characters' real gender) feature throughout. It's a beautifully made film about people who've never quite fit in, brushing up against the rough edges of the world, and finding unexpected softness in each other — and a reminder, again, that Istanbul is one of the most beautiful cities in the world (which makes me feel even more irritated that it's unlikely I'll be able to see it in person any time soon).
I only managed to finish two books this week: a Thousand and One Nights retelling, and a nonfiction work of political analysis that's already out of date.
The retelling is Every Rising Sun (Jamilah Ahmed), which I found worked in some areas and was weaker in others. She chose to set the retelling in medieval Central Asia (although her characters journey east via current day Iraq to join Saladin defending Jerusalem against the Crusaders), and I did enjoy reading a work of fiction whose geographical orientation was so different to how we normally perceive the world. I also appreciated the way Ahmed approached the source material (the frame narrative really does need to be retold as something of a horror story, rather than YA romance, which I've seen done before), and the folk stories told by her Shaherazade are fantastic. I take issue with some of the choices Ahmed made in order to finish the book with a sense of character growth and justice — I would have preferred something messier, I think.
The nonfiction work is Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy, a slim essay on the global growth of authoritarianism that suffers by being published in 2021, and therefore outpaced by current events. Her assessment of the far right authoritarian turn in Poland, Hungary, the UK, and the US (and the globally interconnected nature of far right authoritarianism) is sound and persuasive, and the personal anecdotes serve to humanise and contextualise what could otherwise be a fairly dry book. She opens the book with a New Year's Eve party she and her centre right Polish politician husband hosted in 1999, making the point that within the next five years, she was crossing the street to avoid half the guests, and those guests were likely to deny that they had ever been guests of Applebaum and her husband, such was the political rupture and divergence. She closes the book with another party held in 2019, making the point that although many of the guests were her usual crowd (political and intellectual elites of the centre right), her social circles and political allies had now been expanded to include a lot of similar figures from the centre left — her own politics hadn't changed, but 'the Right' had drifted so far to extremes, and embraced authoritarianism so wholeheartedly that she'd been left behind. The weaknesses of the book are the weaknesses of Applebaum's own political ideology: she's a conservative at heart and has been well served by existing social organisation and institutions, and so sees little need for large scale systemic, structural change, and she views the world through a prism of authoritarianism versus democracy, which leads her to equate things like left-wing Twitter mobs 'cancelling' people or protesting the presence of their ideological opponents giving speeches at university campuses, with the governments of Boris Johnson or Victor Orbán. (Although I think the former are often ill-informed, ill-advised, or counterproductive, to equate them with the latter is ridiculous, because it does not take account of important things like their relative power.) All in all, an interesting read, but confirming things I already believed and knew, and very much outpaced by political events of the past four years. It reads almost like an artefact (even though based on what I've seen Applebaum writing and saying these days, I think it still remains broadly her position on both national and global politics).
Yesterday's two hours of classes in the gym involved dance fitness (instead of the regular zumba), in which we spent the hour-long class learning an entire dance routine from start to finish, which left me feeling jubilantly ecstatic. It reminded me a bit of doing dance classes in high school and after school when I was a teenager, and made me wonder if I'd enjoy doing some kind of actual dance classes now. The main problem with this is that I dance like a gymnast: i.e. I am incapable of dancing in shoes, and (as a consequence of having ten years of gymnastics drilling into me that one's body should be held as straight and unyielding as a board when undertaking any physical activity) I am incapable of moving my hips or chest with any fluidity. A gymnastics background does have some benefits (I pick up routines quickly and have a good memory for movement, I have very good balance, and a good sense of how different parts of the body interact and work together), but is severely limiting when it comes to most styles of dance.
Other movement this weekend included swimming through liquid sunshine for 1km this morning at the pool, and yoga next to a sunlit, open window. It does feel a lot easier to move when the weather is like this, that's for sure!
Matthias and I continued making use of our current MUBI subscription, and watched Crossing, a Georgian- and Turkish-language film in which an ageing Georgian woman, accompanied by an aimless but enterprising young twentysomething guy travel from Batumi to Istanbul to track down the woman's trans niece in order to fulfil a promise she made to her dying sister (the niece's mother). Once in Istanbul, they have no luck finding the niece, but drift into the orbit of a found family of sorts: a trans Turkish woman working as a sort of all-purpose advocate at an LGBT nonprofit organisation, and a pair of impoverished children who eke out a precarious existence scamming and selling tat to tourists. The film's title is very pointed: crossings of various kinds (over borders, back and forth on the ferry between Istanbul's European and Asian sides, and of course from gender assigned at birth to living openly as characters' real gender) feature throughout. It's a beautifully made film about people who've never quite fit in, brushing up against the rough edges of the world, and finding unexpected softness in each other — and a reminder, again, that Istanbul is one of the most beautiful cities in the world (which makes me feel even more irritated that it's unlikely I'll be able to see it in person any time soon).
I only managed to finish two books this week: a Thousand and One Nights retelling, and a nonfiction work of political analysis that's already out of date.
The retelling is Every Rising Sun (Jamilah Ahmed), which I found worked in some areas and was weaker in others. She chose to set the retelling in medieval Central Asia (although her characters journey east via current day Iraq to join Saladin defending Jerusalem against the Crusaders), and I did enjoy reading a work of fiction whose geographical orientation was so different to how we normally perceive the world. I also appreciated the way Ahmed approached the source material (the frame narrative really does need to be retold as something of a horror story, rather than YA romance, which I've seen done before), and the folk stories told by her Shaherazade are fantastic. I take issue with some of the choices Ahmed made in order to finish the book with a sense of character growth and justice — I would have preferred something messier, I think.
The nonfiction work is Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy, a slim essay on the global growth of authoritarianism that suffers by being published in 2021, and therefore outpaced by current events. Her assessment of the far right authoritarian turn in Poland, Hungary, the UK, and the US (and the globally interconnected nature of far right authoritarianism) is sound and persuasive, and the personal anecdotes serve to humanise and contextualise what could otherwise be a fairly dry book. She opens the book with a New Year's Eve party she and her centre right Polish politician husband hosted in 1999, making the point that within the next five years, she was crossing the street to avoid half the guests, and those guests were likely to deny that they had ever been guests of Applebaum and her husband, such was the political rupture and divergence. She closes the book with another party held in 2019, making the point that although many of the guests were her usual crowd (political and intellectual elites of the centre right), her social circles and political allies had now been expanded to include a lot of similar figures from the centre left — her own politics hadn't changed, but 'the Right' had drifted so far to extremes, and embraced authoritarianism so wholeheartedly that she'd been left behind. The weaknesses of the book are the weaknesses of Applebaum's own political ideology: she's a conservative at heart and has been well served by existing social organisation and institutions, and so sees little need for large scale systemic, structural change, and she views the world through a prism of authoritarianism versus democracy, which leads her to equate things like left-wing Twitter mobs 'cancelling' people or protesting the presence of their ideological opponents giving speeches at university campuses, with the governments of Boris Johnson or Victor Orbán. (Although I think the former are often ill-informed, ill-advised, or counterproductive, to equate them with the latter is ridiculous, because it does not take account of important things like their relative power.) All in all, an interesting read, but confirming things I already believed and knew, and very much outpaced by political events of the past four years. It reads almost like an artefact (even though based on what I've seen Applebaum writing and saying these days, I think it still remains broadly her position on both national and global politics).
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Date: 2025-04-06 03:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-06 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-06 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2025-04-06 09:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-06 09:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-07 04:23 pm (UTC)I did enjoy reading a work of fiction whose geographical orientation was so different to how we normally perceive the world
I LOVE anything set in Central Asia, so I will read this one but with my expectations lower than they would have been.
lthough I think the former are often ill-informed, ill-advised, or counterproductive, to equate them with the latter is ridiculous, because it does not take account of important things like their relative power.
Exactly!
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Date: 2025-04-08 07:59 pm (UTC)Applebaum is a frustrating commentator and historian for me for this reason. She's a textbook example of a very clever person, incredibly perceptive about some issues (i.e. the global interconnectedness of right-wing authoritarianism) so trapped by certain biases and ideological frameworks that she's incapable of seeing past them.
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Date: 2025-04-09 12:37 pm (UTC)YES! I am obsessed with the area I think of as the Silk Roads world--the area around the Mediterranean over to the edges of China. From ancient times up till the Renaissance, basically. This sweeping area where people were swapping ideas and goods and religions! It's so cool to me!
She's a textbook example of a very clever person, incredibly perceptive about some issues (i.e. the global interconnectedness of right-wing authoritarianism) so trapped by certain biases and ideological frameworks that she's incapable of seeing past them.
As frustrating as they are, I sometimes appreciate encountering these people because they remind me to think about what my biases are. But gosh they're so irritating to read!
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Date: 2025-04-08 05:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-08 07:52 pm (UTC)