Beyond Selidor

One of the worst — of many — crimes committed by Russia during its fullscale invasion of Ukraine is the systematic abduction of Ukrainian children from occupied territories, endorsed and abetted at the highest levels of the Russian state. These children, most of whom have parents or guardians, are kidnapped and taken into Russia, where they are often renamed, adopted out to Russian families, and otherwise deliberately made as difficult as possible to identify and retrieve. There are tens of thousands of such children identified by the Ukrainian government as abducted, but the true figure is likely higher. Only a fraction of these have been safely returned home.

This Sunday, there is going to be a rally in London, organised by Ukraine Solidarity Campaign (a movement in which UK trade unions and other progressive organisations affiliate with equivalent Ukrainian organisations and groups; I'm a member through my own union), to highlight this particular issue, and advocate for more to be done to return these children home, and hold Russia accountable for this crime.

If you are able to attend, details of the rally are on the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign website. Please feel free to share this post widely.

I've been hoarding links over the past week — mainly via the same two sources, which are blogs of meaty-but-light-touch, longform criticism, pop cultural commentary, and book reviews — the kind of stuff that's what I most miss about the old-school, pre-social media internet, and which I was delighted to discover still exists, if not in quite the same volume or prevalence.

First up, two reviews specifically of Travis Baldree's Legends and Lattes and more broadly commenting on the 'cosy' SFF trend. I'm not sure I'd be quite so firm in my conclusions (sometimes, you just want to read gentle, low-stakes fiction, and that's okay), but I thought both made some interesting, and persuasive points. Review number one is by Liz Bourke, and review number two is by Wesley Osam.

Also by Osam, this post on extractive AI, and a review of Tone (Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno), which is another reminder that I really do need to read through Samatar's entire bibliography.

If any of you contributed to the Kyiv Independent's fundraiser for small local media outlets in Ukraine (in the wake of the US government's freezing of international aid; I posted about this a few months back), you might be interested to know the results of your contributions: there's an update on the Gofundme page outlining all the fantastic things the three organisations (in the frontline regions of Sumy, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv) have been able to achieve thanks to the donations.

I've also just really been appreciating Timothy Snyder's newsletter, which helps me continue to feel like I'm not losing my mind in this terrible, unmoored world, but I assume that anyone who vaguely shares my politics is already aware of it.

This grim anniversary has come around again: the third anniversary of the unjustified, horrific full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which (and I can’t believe I have to say this) was started by Russia, and for whose catastrophic effects Russia is solely responsible. Much of what I said in last year’s post is still true today (apart from the comments about the United States, which I now just replace with 😱 forever).

However, I want to add one more thing. Unfortunately, in much of Western Europe, there has been a major failure in communication regarding the very real consequences for us of the outcome of this war. Our people and governments supported Ukraine because Ukrainians were brave and tragic, and because Russia was in the wrong and committed atrocities — and these things are all true — but what really should have been hammered home is that Ukrainian survival and victory is in our own self interest. These past two weeks have shown clearly the very dangerous consequences for our own security if Ukraine is not given the tools it needs to prevail. We are less safe now than we were two weeks ago, and if Ukraine is forced into a ‘peace’ deal on the terms currently offered, we will be less safe then than we are currently. We need to confront these facts with honesty. And we need to write to our political representatives about this. We may not be able to persuade the US government from its current horrifying course, but we need at least to show our own governments that we recognise the gravity of the current situation.

Beyond that, my suggestions for other concrete actions in last year’s post are still good things to do. Go to rallies in support of Ukraine today (there is one in London in Trafalgar Square this evening; look up information for your own cities, as there are many other similar events taking place elsewhere).

( And, for accountability, here is what I did today )

We cannot afford to give up now.

It would be accurate to say that this week was entirely ( politics ).

Other than all that, it's been a fairly standard weekend for me: gym-ing, swimming, cooking, yoga-ing, and reading. My legs and hips are still sore from yesterday's two hours in the gym, my upper body is completely relaxed from this morning's 1km swim, and I'm trying to decide whether I can fit in a walk in between this afternoon's various activities.

Matthias and I took out a discounted three-month subscription to MUBI (a film streaming platform), and are trying to make the most of it by getting through as many films hosted there in the next months. Last night we watched The Substance, the Oscar-nominated film starring Demi Moore as an ageing celebrity TV fitness instructor (à la Jane Fonda) who, at risk of being booted off her TV show and replaced by a younger model, signs up for a dubious experimental treatment which creates a better (younger, more flawlessly — uncannily — beautiful) version of herself. This is something of a devil's bargain, with predictably horrifying results, as the alter-ego slowly takes over her life in a grotesquely extractive way. The film's commentary on ageing and female beauty (and in particular the disposable way Hollywood treats all actresses over thirty) is about as subtle as a hammer to the head, but its real strength — as befits a story all about the surface of things — is in its visual storytelling, and how much it is able to say with set, costuming and make-up, rather than words. Be warned that the film involves visceral gore and body horror throughout, and it's a lot.

In terms of books, I managed a reread of a childhood favourite trilogy (The Plum-Rain Scroll, The Dragon Stone, and The Peony Lantern by Ruth Manley, a children's fantasy adventure quest series using Japanese mythology and folklore in a similar manner, and with a similar storytelling style, to Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain series' use of Welsh mythology), and, on the recommendation of vriddy, Godkiller, the first in an epic fantasy trilogy by Hannah Kaner. This novel is set in a world in which gods are tangible, numerous, and weird, with complicated relationships with the human beings who worship (or fear) them, and dangerous consequences when they are not appeased. Unequal bargains are part and parcel of life. Into this complicated situation step our heroes: a traumatised (female) mercenary, and a retired knight, who are forced into an uneasy alliance to protect a twelve-year-old orphaned artistocratic girl who has somehow become unbreakably bound to a god of white lies. All are harbouring secrets, and all of these are slowly revealed over the course of the book, which takes the form of a dangerous road trip across a continent scarred by previous years of civil war. I enjoyed this a lot, and will be collecting the sequel from the local public library as soon as the person who's borrowed it returns it!

I've now picked up Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance: a massive, doorstopper of a book, but written in a chatty, inviting style that I would find patronising in some hands, but in Palmer's (having seen her speak in public, and knowing something of her pedagogical approach to the classes she teaches as an academic historian) feels authentic and genuine. If you want to get an idea of the style and content of the book, the most recent backlog of posts at her exurbe_feed blog will give you a very good idea.

Looking at the time, I think I will be able to go on that walk after all, before returning home to a smokey cup of tea, slow-cooking Indonesian curry for dinner, and a very long, slow, anxiety-focused yoga session. A good, balanced weekend: at least within the four walls of my house (and the less said about the chaos outside, the better).

This post is possibly going to be even more disjointed than usual, but it's been that kind of weekend. I've spent both yesterday and today in customary activities: two hours of classes at the gym, followed by vegetable shopping at the market with Matthias, and curry from the Tibetan stall for lunch, eaten huddled indoors at our favourite cafe/bar. All that pretty much covered Saturday morning, and after that we returned home, to thaw out in the living room, reading, watching biathlon, and just generally relaxing. Today, I walked out to the pool first thing in the morning (and felt vaguely surprised that it's still not fully light at 7.30am), swam my 1km, and returned home, shivering. We went out for a walk after lunch, picked up hot drinks from the coffee rig in the market, and browsed the bookshop on the way home, without buying anything. I've just finished an hour's slow, stretchy yoga class, and have opened Dreamwidth for the first time this weekend. I'm hoping to spend the next hour or so catching up with my reading page, and all the emailed newsletters I've received in the past couple of days. (To minimise my time on short-form, real-time social media, I subscribe to a lot of journalists, commentators, academics, food writers, authors and so on — and long form is my preference, in any case.)

The books I've read this week have been a mixed bag — two excellent, one decidedly mediocre.

The excellent books are on the surface very different, but in essence are doing similar things, approached in dissimilar ways. The first is New Yorkers (Craig Taylor), which is basically a series of vox pops with the titular residents of New York city, covering a broad sweep of humanity, and interwoven in interesting and illuminating ways. The author, who is Canadian, apparently did a similar book interviewing Londoners, but he said in the foreward that New Yorkers were much chattier and keen to get their views in print (he mentioned that frequently when interviewing subjects in public places like cafes, other people would overhear, interject, and become part of the conversation). I imagine that to a certain extent, given people's chattiness and interesting life stories, the book wrote itself.

The second excellent book is I Will Show You How It Was (Illia Ponomarenko), part military history, part memoir, covering Ukraine's post-independence recent history from the perspective of a thirtysomething journalist who had experienced it first-hand, the lead-up to the 2022 fullscale invasion, and the first few months of the war, from the partial encircling of Kyiv to the Ukrainian military's extraordinary, against-all-odds success in surviving that first blow and forcing the invading Russian army away from the vicinity of the capital (and indeed from all of the northern part of the country). Ponomarenko was the defence reporter for the Kyiv Independent English-language newspaper at the time of the fullscale invasion, and the war catapulted him (and the media outlet for which he worked) into the spotlight; his contacts in the military and prior experience embedding with them during the smaller-scale war in the Donbas region meant he was well-placed to understand what was going on both in the broader military sense, and at the level of individual units of soldiers. Although I was already well aware of this, the book makes it really clear how much of the success in those early, terrifying days was due to the good fortune of exactly the right figures being in positions of authority (both civilian and military) to meet the moment, making exactly the right choices under an incredible amount of strain, ordinary people (again both civilian and military) behaving with unbelievable courage, and a huge helping of sheer luck. But although the book involves a lot of discussion of battles, military tactics and so on, it's also a portrait of a city under siege, the resilience and defiance of its people, and the choices they made, individually and collectively, at a time of existential threat when there were no easy choices. Like Craig Taylor's book, it's a love letter to an extraordinary, complicated city, and the people who made it their home.

The third book I read this week was something of a letdown: Medici Heist (Caitlin Schneiderhan), which, as is probably obvious from the title, is an Ocean's Eleven-style heist novel set in Renaissance Florence. It's told from the multiple points of view of our rag-tag gang of thieves, who have hatched a plan to steal the indulgence money from the Catholic Church (whose pope, at the time, is a Medici). It's a fun idea, and on a plot level there's nothing wrong with the book, but I felt that this kind of story in novel form needed to give us a bit more than a collection of tropey clichéd backstories and personalities when it came to its cast of characters. I also didn't really feel that Schneiderhan made enough of Florence as a setting — I never really got much of a sense of the place, and it all just seemed like set dressing, for a story that could have taken place anywhere. As a film, it probably would work very well, but in a novel, I want more — and I was unsurprised when I turned to the final page, to discover in the acknowledgements that the author had previous worked as a scriptwriter, and had written the story as a film script first, before (for reasons not clarified) turning it into a novel instead.

One out of three books being somewhat disappointing isn't too bad, in my opinion (especially since I borrowed it from the library rather than paying for it), and beyond that, the weekend has been filled with nice things: fandomtrees reveals (I scored some Christmassy icons, and a little original fairy tale ficlet), lots of good cooking, and moody, atmospheric weather. We'll light the wood-burning stove after dinner, and sit underneath the string lights, closing out the weekend in cosiness.

It's been a long and difficult week, for various reasons, and I figured that since I need a boost of optimism, others might appreciate it as well. It's with that need to feel motivated and uplifted that I bring you this week's prompt:

Tell me about concrete actions you have taken today (or at least recently) that will have a tangibly good effect on other people's lives.

This could be at the level of an individual stranger, or your friends, family and colleagues, or bigger — actions to help your community, fellow citizens of your country, or people on the other side of the world. No action is too big or too small to be counted here: it simply needs to have been undertaken with the aim to make at least one other person's life better.

( Three concrete actions, undertaken today )

I will remind any citizens of the United States among my Dreamwidth circle of the existence of the thisfinecrew comm, whose sole purpose is to encourage these specific types of small scale, concrete actions in the US political context.

The title of this post is taken from the comments under a photo by rblemberg, in which Lemberg documents their letterpress project — a quote from Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny. (I strongly recommend Snyder's own writing in this regard: clear-eyed and realistic about the dangers posed by various fascist authoritarians around the world, practical in its suggestions to resist it.) Preemptive despair has been causing me increasing frustration over the past months and years, and in some ways my own shifts in political thinking have been in direct reaction to these frustrations — sparked as well by numerous global examples of people (as individuals and grassroots communities) with far less agency than I reacting to far worse situations than the political turmoil of flawed democracies with determined, persistent concrete action. It was this, more than anything, that convinced me that the antidote to despair (preemptive or otherwise) is action, no matter how small and no matter how many doubts one may privately be harbouring about its effectiveness. Look with clear eyes at the situation, recognise the limits of your own power, and then ask yourself: okay, but what can I do next?

(I also think it's a good idea to look beyond the borders of one's own country of residence, because it reinforces the fact that there is a continuum of difficulty when it comes to overcoming the threat posed by authoritarianism, and the easiest way to do it is at the ballot box, after which point it becomes increasingly dangerous and difficult.)

I'm fortunate to live in a country that has experienced something of a reprieve, but that doesn't mean we in Britain can just sit back and let the grown-ups take over. Voting every three-five years at an election is like the minimum 'rent' we pay for the privilege to live in a democracy, but democracy is like a muscle, which should be exercised more regularly than that with ongoing political engagement. thissterlingcrew is a good Dreamwidth comm to gather resources and outline specific concrete actions which citizens and/or residents of the UK can undertake in response to political developments in that country. Although we now have a Labour government, the comm will remain active, as this government is a starting point, and will no doubt need to be pushed in the right direction on many occasions.

thisfinecrew is the US politics sister comm to the above. I particularly appreciated this recent post there by petra, 'Things to do other than vote,' which takes a realistic and concrete approach to the risks currently facing the US, and offers practical suggestions in the face of those risks.

I have numerous posts about Russia's ongoing fullscale invasion of Ukraine, most with their own practical suggestions of concrete ways to help Ukraine survive and fight back until the victory. This is the most recent one.

On a smaller, and less global political scale, the recent allegations of rape and sexual coercion against Neil Gaiman (summarised in recent posts by snickfic here and muccamukk here and here) have left many people here on Dreamwidth and the wider fandom community appalled and outraged. One practical direction in which people may wish to channel their anger is by donating to any of the New Zealand-based non-profits providing resources for survivors of sexual assault gathered by chestnut_pod.

Please feel free to list in the comments any suggested concrete actions in relation to the political situation in your own country, or in response to other enraging or upsetting events. Do not despair in advance, and remember that the antidote to despair is action.

It's another grim, bitter, sobering anniversary: two years since the start of Russia's fullscale invasion of Ukraine (and just over ten years since Russia's annexation of Crimea and the start of the smaller-scale war in the eastern regions of the country). As I said this time last year, the invasion itself woke me up and burnt away everything that was unimportant, leaving me with a kind of searing focus and clarity, while the response of the Ukrainian people, government and military left me feeling humbled admiration. For me, this war (and its potential outcomes) is the clearest moral question: should a democratic country be allowed to chart its own political and diplomatic path and choose its own destiny, or should a violent, nuclear-armed, neighbouring dictatorship be allowed to destroy it and redraw internationally recognised borders by force?

( Cut for more context and suggestions of ways to help )

I don't ask or expect everyone to view Ukraine as I do, but I ask you to take a moment to consider which causes are important to you, and to undertake concrete action which will contribute to tangible outcomes for such causes. We cannot create change or end every injustice alone as individuals, but with thoughtful work, we can push back against the tide. That, I believe, is the 'rent' we pay for having the unearned good fortune of living in the (admittedly flawed) democracies to which Ukraine is fighting to join.

I'm just back from the pool, having done my final swim of 2023, it's getting close to the point where my friends and family in Australia start posting photos of fireworks, and the view from 2024, so let's do this.

In the spirit of breaking routines and habits that no longer serve me, this is going to be the last time I do this meme in its entirety. I think I've been using it as a year-end summary every year since I joined Livejournal in 2003, and I've been feeling for a while that many of its questions are more appropriate to a teenager, or an undergraduate student in their early twenties, and their answers don't really say anything fundamental about the shape of the year when the respondant is closer to forty than fifteen. Twenty years of this meme seemed like a good point to stop, and as of 2024, I'll cannibalise its questions and keep only the ones that I feel are relevant to my life.

( Questions and answers behind the cut )

Magpie-like, I've been gathering things up around the internet, and I'll scatter the latest handful here.

Via goodbyebird, video excerpts from a 2018 documentary about Ursula K. Le Guin are being serialised at LitHub, where you can sign up to be alerted to updates. The first video is about Le Guin's illegal abortion in the 1950s, with commentary from her two daughters.

I've had this essay by Farah Mendlesohn, 'Noel Streatfeild, Hiding the Queer in Plain Sight', saved in my tabs for months now. I found it very persuasive.

Abigail Nussbaum is a reviewer and cultural commentator with whose writing I don't always agree, but she does usually make me think, and she explains her own thinking in such a way that I can see how she's come to a certain conclusion. One of her recent pieces of writing with which I have no cause to disagree is her essay on the the stock science fictional character of the tech billionaire, and the real-world tech billionaires causing the rest of us so much trouble. I spotted this at exactly the right time, since I've just finally purged and deactivated my Twitter account due to the egregious behaviour of one such individual. (Given the fact that Twitter had basically become a ghost town — my feed over the past week was mainly taken up by a) Ukrainians retweeting abuse and disinformation in order to argue with it (representative sample: 'I can't wait to shake the hand of the Russian soldier who silences you forever'), b) my stepmother obsessively retweeting disinformation by the No campaign in the Voice referedum in order to argue with it, and c) serious British political journalists treating Sunak's latest attempt to stoke a culture war fighting against non-existent 'extremist' climate policies with far more attention and respect than it deserved — all I felt when I finally clicked that 'deactivate' button was overwhelming relief.)

And finally, there are seven days left to back a Kickstarter project to fund an anthology of Ukrainian speculative fiction. The anthology will be called Embroidered Worlds, and the stories in it will be translated into English. It's already attained baseline funding, so the book itself will go ahead, but there are a number of stretch goals outstanding and it would be good to at least reach some of these; as the project organisers note, the greater the funding, the more they will be able to spend on marketing the book when it gets published.