The bees, adrift; the light, drifting
Mar. 15th, 2026 04:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Hot cross buns have reappeared at my favourite bakery in town (the time between them posting about this on their Instagram stories today, and me rushing out to the bakery to buy some was six minutes), everything is all wild garlic, all the time, and I hung my laundry on the washing line outdoors for the first time this year. All, in their way, are my personal markers of spring's return — although it began raining after lunch and I had to rush out into the garden to rescue everything before it had completely finished drying.
Yesterday I was in Cambridge for the afternoon. I went for a massage (the masseuse told me my shoulders and neck were the tensest she'd ever seen in a client), refilled my spice jars at the refill shop, and got my hair cut. My hairdresser, who is prone to belief in conspiracy theories and quackery, didn't even spout any nonsense this time around (apart from recommending black seed oil as a cure for all medical ailments), which was something of a relief.
After the haircut, I met Matthias for dinner at this restaurant, which was fantastic, and of course featured at least one dish involving wild garlic!
The three books I've read were quite varied. The first, Little Bosses Everywhere (Bridget Read), looks at the history of multilevel marketing in the United States, a subject that has long fascinated me. While the overall shape of this destructive, deceptive industry's story, and the identities of its major players were already known to me, what the book did really well was tie everything all together, showing a clear, deliberate trajectory, and demonstrating without a doubt the efforts taken by this industry (and in particular the people at the top of its various pyramids, raking in billions) to ensure its continued, unregulated existence, and their conscious efforts to build their own right-wing political power as part of a longstanding, decades-long project. As I suspected, the Venn diagram between MLMs, evangelical Christianity, and predatory, victim-blaming self-help is more like a circle, and pretty much every single destabilising political, economic, or sociocultural current within 20th- and 21st-century United States has been seized upon by MLMs as an opportunity to sink their claws further into people's economic lives, and into centres of political power, morphing with each new decade to suit the times. All this, set beside interviews with the industry's longstanding critics (some of whom have been at it for over forty years), is illuminating and demoralising.
I then moved on to Tasha Suri's The Isle in the Silver Sea, a standalone fantasy novel about a slantwise version of Britain sustained by stories and including in its population people who are the embodiments of the island's most powerful stories, constrained by the narratives of these myths and doomed to follow their course without any chance to escape the chains of the tales that bind them (and bind them to other characters-made-flesh as well). Rogue stories, characters who don't fit, and, above all, stories and characters from 'Elsewhere' (i.e. everywhere beyond this mythic — white — Britain) and attempts to graft or intertwine these things into the island's canonical stories are viewed as a threat to its stability and existence. It's a profoundly unsubtle exploration of national origin myths and the stories peoples tell about themselves and their history — and who gets excluded — and I found myself wishing, as I do quite frequently these days, that this level of blunt, infantilising beating the reader over the head were unnecessary. But perhaps this belief of a past genre fiction utopia in which authors were free to explore meaty ideas with more subtlety is as much a myth that I feel a need to believe in as Suri's characters with their belief in uncomplicated, unchanging stories.
Finally, I read Our Daily War, the second of author Andrey Kurkov's diaries of his experiences living through Russia's fullscale invasion of Ukraine. The first volume covered just the first three months or so of the war, whereas this one runs from around the summer of 2022 to the early months of 2024, and there's a real trajectory from intense emotions (adrenaline, outrage, optimism) to weary resolution that mirrors my own impressions of Ukrainians' psychological transformation over that time. It's a vivid picture of civillian life, with a forensic eye taking note of all the small and big ways the war has changed the ordinary features of everyday life, conveyed with a wry, open tone. The surreal and absurd (the story of a conscripted beekeeper who houses a colony of bees — which fled its hive due to active military hostilities — in his ammunition boxes and then arranges for a friend to transport them to western Ukraine) sit beside injustices, corruption, and atrocities, and everywhere there are moments of incredible human courage and generosity. It's a profoundly human account, of things no human should have to experience.
Today has been sleepy and slow: laundry, cups of coffee, hot cross buns, reading in the living room. For most of the morning I was following the sun around the room like a cat, basking. Now, I'm watching the rain on the windows.
Yesterday I was in Cambridge for the afternoon. I went for a massage (the masseuse told me my shoulders and neck were the tensest she'd ever seen in a client), refilled my spice jars at the refill shop, and got my hair cut. My hairdresser, who is prone to belief in conspiracy theories and quackery, didn't even spout any nonsense this time around (apart from recommending black seed oil as a cure for all medical ailments), which was something of a relief.
After the haircut, I met Matthias for dinner at this restaurant, which was fantastic, and of course featured at least one dish involving wild garlic!
The three books I've read were quite varied. The first, Little Bosses Everywhere (Bridget Read), looks at the history of multilevel marketing in the United States, a subject that has long fascinated me. While the overall shape of this destructive, deceptive industry's story, and the identities of its major players were already known to me, what the book did really well was tie everything all together, showing a clear, deliberate trajectory, and demonstrating without a doubt the efforts taken by this industry (and in particular the people at the top of its various pyramids, raking in billions) to ensure its continued, unregulated existence, and their conscious efforts to build their own right-wing political power as part of a longstanding, decades-long project. As I suspected, the Venn diagram between MLMs, evangelical Christianity, and predatory, victim-blaming self-help is more like a circle, and pretty much every single destabilising political, economic, or sociocultural current within 20th- and 21st-century United States has been seized upon by MLMs as an opportunity to sink their claws further into people's economic lives, and into centres of political power, morphing with each new decade to suit the times. All this, set beside interviews with the industry's longstanding critics (some of whom have been at it for over forty years), is illuminating and demoralising.
I then moved on to Tasha Suri's The Isle in the Silver Sea, a standalone fantasy novel about a slantwise version of Britain sustained by stories and including in its population people who are the embodiments of the island's most powerful stories, constrained by the narratives of these myths and doomed to follow their course without any chance to escape the chains of the tales that bind them (and bind them to other characters-made-flesh as well). Rogue stories, characters who don't fit, and, above all, stories and characters from 'Elsewhere' (i.e. everywhere beyond this mythic — white — Britain) and attempts to graft or intertwine these things into the island's canonical stories are viewed as a threat to its stability and existence. It's a profoundly unsubtle exploration of national origin myths and the stories peoples tell about themselves and their history — and who gets excluded — and I found myself wishing, as I do quite frequently these days, that this level of blunt, infantilising beating the reader over the head were unnecessary. But perhaps this belief of a past genre fiction utopia in which authors were free to explore meaty ideas with more subtlety is as much a myth that I feel a need to believe in as Suri's characters with their belief in uncomplicated, unchanging stories.
Finally, I read Our Daily War, the second of author Andrey Kurkov's diaries of his experiences living through Russia's fullscale invasion of Ukraine. The first volume covered just the first three months or so of the war, whereas this one runs from around the summer of 2022 to the early months of 2024, and there's a real trajectory from intense emotions (adrenaline, outrage, optimism) to weary resolution that mirrors my own impressions of Ukrainians' psychological transformation over that time. It's a vivid picture of civillian life, with a forensic eye taking note of all the small and big ways the war has changed the ordinary features of everyday life, conveyed with a wry, open tone. The surreal and absurd (the story of a conscripted beekeeper who houses a colony of bees — which fled its hive due to active military hostilities — in his ammunition boxes and then arranges for a friend to transport them to western Ukraine) sit beside injustices, corruption, and atrocities, and everywhere there are moments of incredible human courage and generosity. It's a profoundly human account, of things no human should have to experience.
Today has been sleepy and slow: laundry, cups of coffee, hot cross buns, reading in the living room. For most of the morning I was following the sun around the room like a cat, basking. Now, I'm watching the rain on the windows.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-15 04:36 pm (UTC)I've never tried a hot cross bun! I'd like to. :D
no subject
Date: 2026-03-15 04:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-15 05:09 pm (UTC)I found myself wishing, as I do quite frequently these days, that this level of blunt, infantilising beating the reader over the head were unnecessary.
This, 100%. Whenever I read something that I think is unnecessarily obvious, all I have to do is glance at the news to see why it's still necessary to spell it out so explicitly.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-15 05:20 pm (UTC)My other marker of spring is that we run out of apples from our apple tree, and have to buy them from the market stalls again. The last of our apples — picked in August — were used up this weekend!
no subject
Date: 2026-03-15 06:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-15 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-15 11:20 pm (UTC)ETA that I DNF'd this Suri too, feeling somewhat surprised. Considering her past books, which have really had a grasp on the intricacies of religion that stands out from among her generational peers for its sensitivity, I hadn't expected this specific pitfall in any of her work! (I feel like a book about mythopoeia definitely falls under the overall "religion" umbrella.)