Beyond Selidor

This weekend has been a very welcome chance to catch my breath, after weeks of intense work, travel, and a lingering sense that I'd been trying to cram too many responsibilities into too little time. I feel physically and mentally rested for the first time in ages.

Of course, 'catching my breath' in my context still means that I went out three times to the market in the past two days, plus three times to the gym (or rather, two times to the gym and one time to the cinema which is in the same complex), did two loads of laundry, batch-cooked a bunch of stuff, and spent most of this morning doing little bits and pieces in the garden, so I haven't exactly been spending the weekend lounging around on the couch. I never want inactivity — I just want to feel that all this stuff fits easily into the time I have available.

Yesterday afternoon, Matthias and I did the time-honoured Australian hot weather activity of decamping to the air conditioned comfort of the cinema, and watched Sinners. This is probably the first time in a year I've seen a film in a cinema, and it was well worth it! It's been a while since I've seen a movie that works so perfectly on all levels — narrative, acting, visual and aural storytelling, and the seamless interweaving thereof — and this was an absolute feast for the senses. There's so much going on: it's a story about Black American history, culture, and music, it's about cultural appropriation (particularly of Black music of all genres), and of the tenacity of Black people throughout the entirety of their presence on the American continents in building and creating and clawing their way to success and prosperity in the face of the full force of racism that will impede them every step of the way, and tear down everything they've built whenever possible, with zero consequences. In particular, it's about the immense trauma at the heart of the Black experience in the United States — on both an individual and communal level — of the rupture of slavery, and the way it robbed the descendents of the enslaved of knowledge of their history, and the way that, in spite of that, there is this incredible cultural continuity, particularly when it comes to music, that transcends and survives this traumatic rupture, resulting in this most exquisite music, from whose roots pretty much every popular musical genre has sprung. (And of course, all this exquisite musical talent and innovation has been plundered and whitewashed by non-Black musicians ever since mass entertainment became a thing, a point which the film weaves throughout its narrative.)

It's also a vampire horror movie.

There were some scenes that I can't describe without spoiling what really should be seen unspoilt, but which were so visually striking and emotionally arresting that they took my breath away. The music is incredible, and made me want to dance in the cinema. In other words, I was immersed and entranced, and it took away my cynicism about film as a storytelling medium (which, after a big dose of franchise/reboot/blockbuster fatigue, had been pretty high).

Other than movies, I've been slowly reading through the only kind of reading material I can handle at the moment: Consort of Fire (Kit Rocha), an undemanding, tropey romantasy that feels like the equivalent of junk food for the brain.

Beyond that, it's been a weekend of gardening. Last year, I planted an sweet pea seedling, which grew absolutely gigantic, and was laden with flowers of varying shades of pink and purple. It made me so happy, I was planning to get another seedling this year — until I went out to the vegetable patches and realised I didn't have to, as about five new sweet pea plants had self-seeded from last year's. I spent a bit of time this morning constructing frames from bamboo, and training the new seedlings to the frames so they'll grow upwards. I also planted a bunch of seeds in propagator trays: radishes, chili, spring onion, rocket, dill, parsley, chives, peas, marigolds, and nasturtiums. It really is too late for all this — see above for how rushed and lacking in time I've felt for weeks on end — so I'm philosophical about how successful any of these potential plants is likely to be. If anything sprouts and grows, I'll count that as a success. Benign neglect seems to be the route to success in our garden — without having planted any, we have masses of strawberry plants (including one that self-seeded in the cracks between two paving slabs in the patio), a bunch of supposedly dead foxgloves in the front garden suddenly revived (these are not meant to be perennials) and covered themselves with budding flowers, and the unkillable mint died back as it always did in winter, and sprang to life in spring, filling the entire herb garden. The wood pigeons have, as always, stripped half the leaves and unripe fruit from one of the cherry trees, but in a month or so, there should be a veritable feast of pinkish-white cherries nonetheless.

It's nice to have had a good stretch of time to devote to Dreamwidth this afternoon. I've missed this place.

This 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).

This Saturday, the sky unfolded in a curve of clear blue, dotted with fluffy clouds and lit with golden light, and I felt no irritation at having woken at 5.30am for no reason. I hung the laundry outside, then headed off for my usual two hours of classes at the gym, and then into Cambridge to get my hair cut, as mentioned in my previous post, and to refill all my spice jars at the organic food shop that does refills. I was happy to be able to bypass the centre of town; both the hairdresser and the organic shop are in clusters of shops in mainly residential areas, as opposed to the chaotic historic centre, which is always heaving with tourists on the weekend.

Today has been colder and more grey, although there were still pockets of sunshine; Matthias and I walked along the river past all the houseboats (one of which was home to one of the biggest, fluffiest dogs I've ever seen, lounging on the deck like a placid white rug), then up into the market, where we bought fresh pasta for lunch. It was still pretty cold when sitting still, so we basically stayed out long enough to finish eating, then headed home. Now we're both curled up in our armchairs in the living room, reading and resting and generally gathering our breath before the new working week.

This week I reread a truly ridiculous number of 1990s Australian YA novels, about which I won't bore you (if you're truly interested in the full list you can see them at my Goodreads account), as well as a fantastic pair of novellas.

The first was The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar, a writer I've always felt was criminally underrated. Rather than try to sum up my own thoughts, I'm just going to link to this interview Samatar gave at the time of the book's publication, which gives a clear idea of what it's about and her intentions in writing it. In general, I've been spending a lot of time with Samatar and her thoughts, working my way through the conversations and essays linked on her website. I remember reading this piece from 2017 when she left social media entirely; returning to it in 2025 I'm struck even more forcefully by her perception and foresight.

The second novella, The River Has Roots is described as a novel by its author Amal El-Mohtar, but given the print edition only runs to 110 pages or so, with lots of illustrations, I really don't feel that's entirely accurate. This is a book that I knew would be incredibly Relevant to My Interests on the strength of its description (a retelling and reclamation of the Two Sisters strand of folk songs), an impression that was confirmed when I actually read the book. It's hard to think of another instance in which so many of my favourite things are all pressed together within the covers of a single slim book: reclaimed, female-centric folk tales, weird bargains with supernatural beings, fairy otherworlds lying beside and above and underneath and within our own world, magic that is also song and is also riddles and is also language, and stories that put relationships between sisters, and relationships between women and bodies of water at their heart. I loved it to bits, and you couldn't have written anything more closely to my own specifications for the perfect story if you'd tried.

Beyond books, it's been a weekend for films. On Friday night, I watched the Netflix documentary about Avicii, whose story was the typical music industry tragedy: an immensely talented individual, thrust into international superstardom (and astronomical financial success) at a very young age, unable to cope with it, given zero help from management or record label (since what he needed, of course, was to pause working and pause touring, and everyone was making too much money from his output to risk putting a stop to it), turning to the inevitable alcoholism and opioid addiction to keep going, until he couldn't keep going any more. The arc of such stories is, of course, more obvious in hindsight.

Finally, last night Matthias and I watched Benedetta, an extremely male-gazey French-language film about lesbian nuns, and the turmoil and drama of life in their convent during a period when the bubonic plague was at its height. The film was allegedly drawing on real historical events and figures, but if so I can only assume it took great poetic license. I'm not sure I'd recommend it.

And that's been the shape of my weekend so far.

Last night, it was so cold that we elected to put a bottle of wine outside the kitchen door in the garden, instead of in the fridge — and it chilled to a far cooler temperature than would have been achieved in the fridge. Everything is covered with a thick layer of spiky frost that doesn't melt away in the sunlight. I have been outdoors — to the gym and the market yesterday morning, and for a brief walk with Matthias today — but it's a bit too biting even for me. I like to look at the landscape, rather than be within it, if possible.

( Three books and a movie )

Beyond films and books, I've been keeping an eye on the prompts at threesentenceficathon, and have been sporadically adding my fills to this series on AO3; I'll try to add some prompts of my own once a new post opens up.

fandomtrees is close to opening — there are a handful of requests which need at least one more gift before the collection is ready to go. If you're able to fill any of the prompts here, I'm sure this would be very welcome by the remaining participants. You can see a list of all requests on this Google spreadsheet.

I hope everyone's been having cosy and nourishing weekends.

Another Sunday afternoon, another cosy autumn weekend wrapping itself up. The clocks went back last Sunday, and it's absolutely striking to see the change in the quality of light, and the relative levels of light in the sky at specific times of day. When travelling in to work, Matthias and I leave the house at 6.50am to walk down to the train station, and for weeks this journey had been under inky dark blue skies — now it's silvery and clear in the mornings again, at least for now. In contrast, the light has well and truly left the sky by 5pm, and it's already pretty dim now, at 2.30.

Saturday began as always in the gym, moved on to the market (we had vague aspirations of trying the new cheese/wine/charcuterie shop on the high street, which opened yesterday, but the endless queue out the door put us off, and I will attempt to visit next week on one of my days working from home, when things are less chaotic), and then returned to our house, where I filled the fridge with all the vegetables we'd bought. I had the uncharacteristically spontaneous idea, around 5pm, to go for a little walk in the dying light, and stop for a drink in one of the pubs in town — the one that feels as if you're sitting in someone's living room, under a canopy of string lights — so Matthias and I headed out again. Our way was barred by the Bonfire Night event, which had cordoned off a large segment of the park next to the cathedral, so we cut our intended walk short and just headed straight to the pub, which was so crowded we had to sit on the stairs, while I nursed my glass of prosecco and fetched board games from the shelf behind me (which we were blocking) for other patrons when requested.

I enjoy fireworks, and enjoy watching them from public spaces, but I resent being made to pay £12 for the privilege of standing on a hill in a public park in November, and in any case the fireworks are mostly visible from our house, and I watched the whole display while cooking Saturday's dinner. It was the perfect night for it: clear and inky and still, and the colours of the fireworks were vivid against the wintry sky.

After dinner on Saturday, Matthias and I watched Love Lies Bleeding, the lesbian romance/revenge thriller starring Kristen Stewart at her vulnerable, prickly best as a gym employee in a small town near the US-Mexican border in 1989, dealing with the triple challenges of new love with a statuesque aspiring competitive body builder who's blown into town, her cross-border gun-smuggling father who seems to be running the town like his own little mafia empire, and her sister's refusal to leave her physically abusive husband. The whole thing has a dreamy, almost magical realist feel, a synth-y 1980s soundtrack, and a spare, precise script which communicates much in what is not said.

Today began in the crisp, early morning, as I walked to the pool in a world completely absent of any other people. I was in and out fairly efficiently, back home for crepes, pottering around, and finalising plans for dinner. Around midday, Matthias and I headed out again, walking along the river, then up to the market, where we picked up pizza from one of the food trucks, and ate it in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar. It wasn't quite warm enough for me to be outside, but in my coat and my big, bulky blanket of a scarf, it was manageable. We returned home before I could freeze to my seat, clutching takeaway coffee and handmade Christmas pudding fudge, which I've been sipping and nibbling on as I write this post.

This week, my reading has been mainly all Timothy Snyder: an On Tyranny and On Freedom double-header. The former is his essay-length polemic, written during the Trump presidency, a sort of survival guide (for people as individuals, and for the institutions and norms of democratic countries) for authoritarianism, the latter is in essence a 350-page case (with personal anecdotes, analogies from history and our current times, and an accessible overview of the works of various theorists and philosophers) for Snyder's own values (i.e. liberalism, the rule of law, a robust and free press, a strong civil society with robust horizontal organisation, and a strong, well-funded social democratic state with the cradle-to-grave wellbeing of its citizens taken seriously). I read Snyder's writing (both book-length, and the shorter pieces on his Substack) for comfort and affirmation; it makes me feel less alone, as if someone else sees the world as I see it, and properly recognises the seriousness of the threats to our shared values. As always, though, the scale of what he's up against: oligarchic authoritarian populism fueled by appeals to people's worst emotions feels so overwhelmingly strong against the calm, deliberate statement of facts that forms the core of Snyder's response.

Apart from earnest essays on totalitarianism and democracy, I also read Babylonia (Constanza Casati), a historical fiction novel about the real-world female Assyrian ruler, Semiramis (Sammuramat). When I tell you that Casati's previous book was a retelling of the story of Clytemnestra, you can probably slot Babylonia into the appropriate niche: a 'feminist reclamation' of a controversial female figure, with a focus on the misogynistic obstacles she had to overcome. There's court intrigue and a love triangle, Game of Thrones-level violence designed to provoke a strong emotional response, and a relentless emphasis on the brutality of the characters' world, and the damage they do to themselves and each other in trying to survive it. It does involve one of my favourite character arcs ever — that of a person who was made to feel vulnerable and afraid, and reacts to that by remaking the world in order to never feel fear again, destroying themselves in the process — but I am ambivalent about the book's purported feminism. It's another one of those stories where its female protagonist's even action is justified, and where the author tries to sand down any sharp edges and shies away from moral greyness.

( US politics note )

This post opened with discussion of the changing light, and now the light has almost left the sky in the half-hour or so since I began writing. Winter is well and truly waiting in the wings.

Yesterday afternoon, Matthias and I picked the remainder of the apples from our tree, which necessitated climbing the tree itself and handing them down to him. Our fridge is now filled with close to 80 Bramley apples. Autumn is well and truly here!

We've just returned from our monthly walk with our walking group, a meandering loop through the fields (and sometimes some very overgrown, blackberry- and nettle-filled pathways, including one point where an elderly woman emerged from the undergrowth with her dog, informing us that she'd gone through the whole area with a pair of secateurs), on a walk that took us past a massive — and unexpected — three-day eventing equestrian competition, which at least explained where all the horse floats we'd seen driving past were going. The walk finished in an orchard, where we spent some time scrounging around for windfall apples under the trees, just to add to our fridge apple collection! The photoset from the walk is pretty much peak fenland autumn!

Matthias and I added an extra 6km or so onto the walk by walking out in advance to the village where it began, where we had Thai food for lunch in the pub (which is run by a Thai family) before meeting the others. We got home before 5pm (which is early for these things), and now I'm just lounging around, catching up with Dreamwidth for a bit before sorting out dinner.

The only books I've finished this week are a reread — Jo Walton's Arthurian Tir Tanagiri Saga duology, which I deliberately left until this point in the year, because Arthuriana, with its sense of fleeting beauty and irreparable loss, always feels autumnal to me. These books were among my very favourite when I was younger, and I was curious as to how well they would hold up. The answer is very well, and I seriously feel that they are probably the best Arthurian retelling published in this century that I've read, and I could make a case for them being the best Arthurian retelling of the current and previous centuries, depending on how I feel about T.H. White and Susan Cooper's books.

They're set in an alternative version of our own universe, told from the point of view of a female war leader serving under the Arthur figure (this is a world which has gender equality — to a point), and most characters, countries, and plot points are easy to map onto familiar characters from the legends and places and peoples from our own world. (The one exception is the narrator, who has no analogue, and indeed about whom Walton goes out of her way to emphasise has no analogue in a very clever moment that passed me by until this reread.) This retelling draws heavily from the Welsh Arthurian tradition, but later medieval versions are there as well, plus the medieval Irish Táin, and loads of other western European medieval poetry and stories.

Different Arthurian retellings choose to emphasise different things, and Walton's focus is on people's experience of social, political, and cultural rupture brought about by the departure of the equivalent of the Romans from Britain 40 years before the start of the first book, and the arrival of the equivalent of Christianity and the spread of this proselytising religion. Characters who are young adults at the start of the first book have experienced nothing but chaos and civil war, and are in essence fighting to restore a well-functioning political structure in which safety and justice are not dependent on enforcement at the hands of a single powerful ruler, and in which written law will live on and persist after the death of the king whose regime created such law. In other words, they are fighting to build something which they themselves have never experienced, but which their ageing parents describe as some kind of half-forgotten, nostalgic dream.

Walton writes the sheer logistical effort of this — in a way that emphasises the monumental task — in brilliant way, in which polite diplomacy and political marriages, the work of keeping supplies well stocked, the need to have reliable communication through trusted messengers across the length of the country, and the work of setting up communities with marketplaces and prosperous craftspeople is of equal importance to valiant military deeds on the battlefield, and in which all of these things need to work together, with all the personalities involved working harmoniously. She's also one of the few writers writing fantasy (or indeed historical fiction) in a pre-industrial setting in which I really feel that her characters actually believe in their various religions in a tangible way. (It helps that in this world, the divine is palpable; people converse with their gods, the elemental powers of the land can be called on to provide fresh water or safe passage in moments of crisis, characters use charms in their everyday lives to heal wounds, and curses made in earnest are felt in such a way that they become part of the fabric of the universe, and inescapable in their doom.) It makes her depiction of the disruptive, disorienting arrival of a proselytising, monotheistic religion in a world that has until that point been pluralistic and pagan feel real and believable, with characters' individual choices in the face of such change seeming understandably human. The books do a fabulous job of depicting people whose values are very different to our own in a way that doesn't whitewash these differences, but still makes you empathise with their dilemmas and choices.

For me, Arthuriana should have an elegiac tone, a sense that it's written in mourning for something aspirationally beautiful, with built-in flaws that, from the very beginning, inevitably lead to its destruction. There should be a sense of ideals never quite lived up to, whose loss is mourned nevertheless. Walton's books do this, and they do it in a way that is lovely, and that is full of heart. I'm glad I returned to them, and found them to be as I remembered, while discovering new little things that served to increase my admiration of the writing even more.

It's another long weekend here in the UK, although this time around I have to work on the Monday, so it's just a regular old weekend for me. We've managed to pack quite a bit into the two days nonetheless.

On Saturday morning, Matthias and I headed off fairly early into Cambridge in order to see Furiosa in the IMAX cinema. I'm glad we did so from an audiovisual perspective, since it was a great spectacle, and was served well by the format, but my feelings about the film as a whole are quite mixed. When I first heard George Miller was making a prequel about Furiosa, my immediate reaction was one of Do Not Want — and all those misgivings were confirmed. Fury Road was pretty much close to flawless (it's my favourite film), precisely because it left so much about its world and its characters unexplained, operating in an almost mythic space in which viewers fill in the blanks according to their own experiences. I didn't need Furiosa's backstory, I didn't need to know every little detail about the social structure of the lives of the inhabitants of the wasteland — and in general I'm kind of fed up with this perception that fannishness of a particular fictional universe equates to a desire to see every blank spot fleshed out and every plot hole filled in. The chase scenes, as always, were incredible, visually it was beautiful, the world felt vivid, three-dimensional and lived-in, and Chris Hemsworth was clearly having the time of his life playing a character who was essentially Thor, but evil — but overall, this was not a film that I needed to exist.

We were out of the cinema in time for a late-ish lunch at a Korean restaurant, then sat for a while under the trees in a pub beer garden before heading back to Ely. It was warm and clear enough for us to eat dinner outside on the deck, which was wonderful.

I'm writing this post a bit earlier than I would usually do on a Sunday because we will be heading out after lunch for the monthly walk with our walking group. Unfortunately the lovely clear weather of Saturday has blown away, and it's been raining on and off all morning, with thunderstorms promised. We'll see how that goes. The walk itself will be flat and easy (there's no other kind of walk in this area, given the landscape), along the river and through fields in a loop of about 5-7km. An easy Sunday stroll, and hopefully without rain!

The other thing that happened this weekend was author reveals for once_upon_fic, so I'll stick my recs for the collection in this post, now that I'm able to give credit to the authors.

I must start, of course, with my lovely gift, which gave me exactly what I wanted in terms of character dynamics from Tochmarc Étaíne fanfic:

Carried by the Wind (1468 words) by Nelja-in-English
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Irish Mythology
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Étaíne/Fúamnach (Tochmarc Étaíne)
Characters: Fúamnach (Tochmarc Étaíne), Étaíne (Tochmarc Étaíne)
Additional Tags: Canon Rewrite, Love Potion/Spell, Metamorphosis, Dreams, Magic, Temporary Character Death, Mentions of Midir and Aengus
Summary:

Fúamnach tells the story, this time. And when it gets away from her, she gets help.

I also enjoyed these other fics in the collection:

Gold Tree by water_bby (I assume the user has archive-locked it so I can't embed it)

Blush-Rose (2893 words) by RussetFiredrake
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid | Gold Tree and Silver Tree (Fairy Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Craobh-Òir | Gold Tree & An Darna Bean | The Second Wife (Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid), An Darna Bean | The Second Wife/Am Prionnsa | The Prince (Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid)
Characters: Original Female Character(s)
Additional Tags: Fairy Tale Retellings, First Kiss, Curiosity, Bisexual Female Character, implied threesome
Summary:

A prince's new bride fears she is in a story where her curiosity will be her downfall. She finds herself in a different tale altogether.

A Rose of a Different Form (1438 words) by BardicRaven
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: La Belle et la Bête | Beauty and the Beast (Fairy Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Belle | Beauty & La Bête | Beast (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Belle | Beauty's Brothers(La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Belle | Beauty's Sisters (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Le Marchand | Merchant (La Belle et la Bête)
Characters: Belle | Beauty (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | The Beast (La Belle et la Bête), Le Marchand | The Merchant (La Belle et la Bête), Belle | Beauty's Brothers(La Belle et la Bête), Belle | Beauty's Sisters (La Belle et la Bête)
Additional Tags: Redemption
Summary:

As soon as sundown came on the day that the merchant was to have brought his daughter and no-one had darkened his doors, the Beast knew that the merchant had lied

Grant Me Clemency (4039 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Bertilak de Hautdesert & Gawain
Characters: Bertilak de Hautdesert, Gawain (Arthurian), King Arthur - Character
Additional Tags: time loops, A Game of Questions, Rash Actions Lead to Rash Consequences, Ruminations
Summary:

Sir Gawain is trapped in an endless cycle of repetition, from Arthur's hall to the green chapel, attempting to find a way out of his predicament, but he has no earthly idea what he is supposed to change, or who is responsible for this cycle. So he plays the game again, hoping this time might be the one that finally breaks it.

when you return, go to the sea (14840 words) by celaenos
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Selkie Bride (Folk Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Selkie's Children (The Selkie Bride), Selkie Wife (The Selkie Bride), Human Husband (The Selkie Bride), Original Characters
Additional Tags: Once Upon a Fic Exchange 2024, Sister-Sister Relationship, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Family Feels - Struggling To Be A Good Guardian, Family Feels - Fraught Sibling Relationship, Fairytales & Folklore, One Shot, Original Character(s), Fic Exchange, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Abuse
Summary:

She learns about her ma three days after her seventh birthday—but she doesn’t learn the whole of it until many years after that.

My own assignment was another fic for 'The Selkie Bride' folk tale. Women/the sea: my ultimate OTP.

Ripples (2035 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Selkie Bride (Folk Tale)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Selkie Wife (The Selkie Bride), Selkie's Children (The Selkie Bride)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Selkies
Summary:

The sea takes, and the sea gives back its own unexpected gifts.

Two of the selkie's daughters try to find their way through uncharted waters in the wake of their mother's departure.

And now the sun has come out! Let's hope the weather holds during our walk.

Saturday began with an early morning train into Cambridge, in order to lead a workshop for a bunch of nurses, midwives, and physiotherapists. I don't normally work on Saturdays, but I'll do so on occasion if people ask me to present/do a training session at their conference or workshop. In the end, things worked out well: the workshop venue was just a twenty-minute walk from the train station, and the timing of my spot on the programme coincided perfectly with the IMAX schedule for Dune (the IMAX cinema also being about twenty minutes' walk from the workshop), so I could meet Matthias afterwards and immerse myself in audiovisual spectacle.

Dune itself was an aural and visual feast, and overall I enjoyed it a lot, but I have to say that the pacing didn't work. I rarely say this — I'm usually of the opinion that films should be cut and edited down, or should have been a TV miniseries instead — but this really should have been split in two, to give all the plot and characters introduced in what felt like the last half-hour of the film time to breathe. There even was a natural stopping point at which these hypothetical two films could have been split! In any case, I mostly got what I was expecting: drama and spectacle and terrible, manipulative people being dramatic and destructive on a galactic scale, and it was well worth watching in the IMAX cinema — but it could have been even better if I'd been in charge of editing!

After that, Matthias and I made our meandering way back to Ely, rounding off the day by watching the Melodifestivalen final (Sweden's Eurovision selection competition). We don't watch the national selections religiously, but watch Melfest from time to time if it's scheduled at a convenient time, simply because Sweden takes the whole thing so seriously and the result is always a fun couple of hours of glittery pop music.

Today has been filled with relentless rain, which left me with zero interest in leaving the house (although I did go out to the swimming pool first thing); thankfully my only plans for this afternoon are to potter around on AO3 and Dreamwidth, and eventually cook dinner. (I got overexcited when I spotted that there were now six The Silence of the Girls fics, and then extremely deflated when these were all revealed to be The Song of Achilles crossovers; people can write whatever they want to write, of course, but I find it dispiriting when my tiny fandom-of-one that's all about the interior lives of the women of the Iliad ends up wall-to-wall crossovers with the Achilles/Patroclus megafandom, focused solely on that pairing, and to be honest their The Silence of the Girls tag feels like false advertising. The solution, of course, is just to write the Briseis/Chryseis epic for which I'm always fruitlessly searching.)

I feel as if that's a slightly sour note on which to end this post, so I'll close instead with all the little things making me happy: daffodil and freesia bulbs just beginning to flower, the perfectly calibrated caffetiere of coffee that I made this morning, the landscapers making good progress on the work for which we hired them in our back garden, lazy Sunday afternoon yoga, chatting with my mum on FaceTime as she travelled home on the ferry across Sydney Harbour, turning the camera around to show me the bridge, the Opera House, and the lights on the inky black water. They all feel like little pockets of happiness — bursts of candle flame held against grief and frustration.

It's been a good, restful weekend, all of which was sorely needed. Matthias brought a cold back with him when he returned from Germany last Sunday, which hit me like a truck on Tuesday, and I was sick for most of the rest of the week. I preemptively cancelled all bookings for swimming slots and fitness classes, and even stopped doing yoga (although I suspect I would have been able to manage that). Beyond that, I just did the bare minimum. For the most part, I feel recovered by now, but it was good to have an excuse to stay at home and nest.

I cooked the usual wintry stodge — congee on Friday night, covered in an excess of chili oil, a thick tomato-y vegetable stew last night, Polish goulash tonight — so most afternoons have begun with something bubbling on the stove. I lounged around under a blanket, rereading old favourite books (of which more later), and watching biathlon out of the corner of my eye. Apart from a trip into a cafe in town which sells mulled wine, I basically haven't left the house since Thursday. Last night Matthias and I watched Polite Society — a film we've had our eyes on for a while, a comedy in which a British-Pakistani teenager becomes increasingly suspicious that her sister's fiance and his overbearing mother are not all they seem, and chaos and hijinks ensue. It's the work of the same writer who was behind We Are Ladyparts, and written with the same affectionate humour and focus on the relationships between women and girls.

I had meant to spend time writing a second Yuletide treat (the main assignment, and one treat are finished), but somehow that ended up being a lot of time spent on Dreamwidth, with posts that generated a lot of comments. A reminder, for those who missed them on Friday, that I have one post up where people can share their fandomtrees sign ups and holiday love meme threads, and another post up acting as an kind of all-purpose recs collection. Feel free to add your own contributions.

I also managed to transcribe the last four old newspaper book reviews from 2005 to my reviews blog ... so now I just have the years 2006-2013 to go! It should get easier soon, though, as the later years I still have in Word documents, whereas the earlier articles were either saved to desktop on an old computer, or written in now-incompatible file formats. As always, I feel a bit amused at the self-righteous certainty with which I wrote, and the way that I constantly asserted my own narrative tastes and preferences and ~thoughts about literature as if they were objective facts. The reviews are as follows

Weaving a magic thread (on The Curse of Zohreh by Sophie Masson)
Magic: the garden variety (on Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier)
Love and dreams for better things (on Alyzon Whitestarr by Isobelle Carmody)
A fantasy novel like a pebble set (on The Well of Tears by Cecilia Dart-Thornton)

Suffice it to say that my tastes have changed a lot since 2005.

Nowhere is this more starkly illustrated than in my experience rereading, back to back, six Sharon Penman historical doorstoppers in quick succession. Penman debuted with an extremely partisan account of the life and rule of Richard III, and then wrote a trilogy about the Angevins and Poitevins, and another trilogy about medieval Welsh princes, the Norman-English monarchy, and Simon de Montfort, and it's these latter trilogies that I've been rereading. I remember absolutely loving these books when I was in my early twenties, and being filled with admiration for (what I saw as) Penman's meticulous research and attention to detail. She certainly researched the books thoroughly — in the sense of knowing which historical figure was where, doing what, when, and day-to-day minutiae of medieval material culture — but their flaws are much more apparent to me now. They're aggressively heterosexual (in a way which I suppose was much more common in historical fiction published in the 1990s and early 2000s), and although Penman is conscious of the fact that medieval sources could be partisan and untrustworthy, her own firm opinions about certain historical figures introduce their own kind of bias which is understandable, but of which I don't quite believe she was ever fully conscious. If she likes or admires a character, they display modern sensibilities, challenging (even if only in the privacy of their own mind or marriage) religious and sociocultural certainties of their era, so as to make them more likeable to Penman's perceived 21st-century readers' capacity for empathy. I don't always mind this kind of thing, if I feel the author is conscious that they're doing it, but I'm not convinced that Penman was, and, if challenged, would have protested about her in-depth research and so on.

I also just remember finding all the central relationships in these novels to be the height of romance and tragedy, whereas now — although I still enjoy the endless messy Plantagenet soap opera — it's as if I enjoy the story of these historical figures while trying to ignore Penman's writing and interpretation, which makes for a strange reading experience.

It's been an interesting experience, that's for sure!

I'm still catching my breath from this weekend, which was unusually jam-packed by my standards, and the fact that every researcher in my faculty seems to have decided they need (individual, time-consuming, and complex) help from me this week specifically isn't helping matters. So that's why there was no weekend catch up post, and why I haven't felt able to give the comments section in Friday open thread posts the attention they deserve.

However, I do have a brief moment to write a little bit about all the various things I did over the weekend.

On Saturday, I needed to be in Cambridge for several errands. Whenever this happens, Matthias and I always go in for the day to try out new restaurants or go to old favourites, and just generally enjoy the wider range of stuff that's available in a slightly larger town. This time, we were also able to see a museum exhibition covering the material culture of Crete, Cyprus and Sardinia from prehistoric to Roman times. The exhibits ranged from prosaic day-to-day objects such as cooking and drinking vessels to elaborate sculptures and gold jewellery, and the emphasis was very much on the importance of the sea (as an avenue for trade, travel, political change, and the exchange of ideas) to these regions.

We returned home with enough time to watch a film — a rather ridiculous Michelle Yeoh martial arts movie called Reign of Assassins. It had a cardboard-thin plot (various individuals, gangs, or pairs of mentors and students team up or double cross each other to gain control of a MacGuffin which will supposedly give them mystical kung fu abilities) which is basically an excuse for lots of elaborately choreographed fight scenes.

On Sunday, I'd been invited (with a plus one) to the soft launch of a new food venue run by the owners of the bagel bar, and the best coffee roasters/cafe-which-is-actually-an-outdoor-rig in town. (To be clear, these two places are already run by the same people.) They've now got a permanent spot which incorporates a bar selling cocktails, beer and wine, a coffee cart, a kitchen serving hot food (mainly burgers and rotisserie with lots of vegan options), and another kitchen serving baked goods. All these back onto an outdoor seating area (with some tables indoors), and the idea is that you can pick and choose between all the various options and put together a meal to suit your own needs. (And obviously groups in which some people want to eat, some only want coffee, some drink alcohol and some don't can all sit together without any weirdness.) As is often the case with these launch events, they'd possibly invited too many people, leading to some hiccoughs and problems, but I can see this is going to be a good addition to the food scene here and I really hope it succeeds because it's very much my kind of thing.

We finished up at the launch with just enough time to grab dinner and head down to the community theatre to watch Tár, a film about a (female, lesbian) orchestra conductor slowly self destructing as various revelations about her emotionally and sexually abusive behaviour come to light. Cate Blanchett is amazing in the lead role (I'd never have thought I'd find a nearly three-hour-long film about abuse from the perspective of the abuser compelling) and the film makes the sensible choice not to show the abuse, but rather her increasingly desperate attempts to deny it and escape its consequences, and the bonfire it makes of her life in the process. Viewed in a vaccuum, the film is fantastic, although some components of its wider context are troubling, and I think Hollywood in general has a hard time telling honest stories about the abusive behaviour of people it's decided are 'artistic geniuses.'

So that's what I've been up to, when I haven't been working, these past few days.