Steel Magnolias + Global Fest

Sep. 26th, 2025 02:01 pm
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[personal profile] osprey_archer
We've hit the busy season at work, so I haven't been posting much, but a student just canceled at the last minute and I have a couple of recent shows I want to write about!

1. The local Civic Theater put on Steel Magnolias. I've seen the movie (in a packed cinema full of women about twenty years older than I am; this must have been a formative film for a generation) and although I didn't love it, I was curious about the stage play because I heard that it all took place in one room, the hair-dresser's salon.

So of course when I had a chance to see the stage play I jumped at it, and of course Civic Theater was ALSO full of women about twenty years older than I am, because once again this film was apparently formative for a generation. I thought the first act dragged a bit, but overall I quite liked it. The single set and limited cast (you hear about but never see the men) heightens the emotion, I think. M'Lynn knocked it out of the park in the last act, and of course grumpy Eeyore-ish Ouiser is always a good time.

2. I also went to Global Fest, which is not a show per se but a festival with food booths, craft booths, a stage with mostly dance and singing shows, etc. When I was a kid we went every year (my mom helped with the food booths for years) and I always liked to hit up the bonsai room, watch the bobbin lace makers, stop in the pottery workshop... The pottery was not exactly global-themed, but the pottery workshop lived in the building where most of Global Fest took place, so why not?

In the intervening years, Global Fest has changed management, and I was distrait to discover that the only free attraction remaining is the stage show. Which is not negligible! Who doesn't love a lion dance! But there's no more bonsai room, no more craft demonstrations, no more pottery, just a bunch of booths selling stuff. I enjoy buying a pastry as much as the next person, but it felt like a lot of the soul had gone out of the event.
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
Nothing enlivens an afternoon like hearing from your primary care physician that actually last week you almost died, especially since it didn't feel like it at the time. Continued proof of life offered from the stoplights of rush hour. Have some links.



1. Transfixed by a dapper portrait of Yuan Meiyun, I discovered it is likely a still from her star-making, genderbending soft film 化身姑娘 (1936), apparently translated as Girl in Disguise or Tomboy. In the same decade, it would fit right into a repertory series with Viktor und Viktoria (1933) or Sylvia Scarlett (1936). To my absolute shock, it is jankily on YouTube. Subtitled it is not, but I really expected to have to wait for the 16 mm archival rediscovery.

2. Because I had occasion to recommend it this afternoon, Forrest Reid's Uncle Stephen (1931) does not seem to rate in the lineage of time-slip fantasies, but for its era it is the queerest I have encountered, the awakening sense of difference of its fifteen-year-old protagonist erotically and magically mediated by Hermes in his aspect as conductor of souls and charmer of sleep, dreams figuring in this novel with the same slipperiness of time and identity that can accidentally bring a secret self like a stranger out of an unknowing stratum of the past. It's all on the slant of ancient Greek mysticism and the pollen-stain of a branch of lilac brushed across a sleeper's mouth and a lot of thinking about the different ways of liking and then there's a kiss. It was written out of a dream of the author's and it reads like one, elliptical, liminal, a spell that can be broken at a touch. I have no idea of its ideal audience—fans of Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden (1958) and E. M. Forster's Maurice (1971)? I read it in the second year of the pandemic and kept forgetting to mention it. Whatever else, it is a novel about the queerness of time.

3. I am enjoying Phil Stong's State Fair (1932), but I really appreciated the letter from the author quoted mid-composition in the foreword: "I've finally got a novel coming in fine shape. I've done 10,000 words on it in three days and I get more enthusiastic every day . . . I hope I can hold up this time. I always write 10,000 swell words and then go to pieces."
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
The mail brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #84, containing my poem "The Burnt Layer." It's the one with the five-thousand-year-old sky axe and α Draconis; it is short and important to me. The flight issue is a powerhouse, showcasing the short fiction and poetry of Jeannelle M. Ferreira, Zary Fekete, Gretchen Tessmer, Francesca Forrest, and Patricia Russo among no-slouch others. I love the warping truss bridge and the birdflight of the covers courtesy of John and Flo Stanton. You can read a review, pick up a copy, submit work to the next issue and I recommend all three. This 'zine is a seasonal constant. It even feels autumnal at the right time of the year.

Wednesday Reading Meme

Sep. 24th, 2025 08:01 am
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[personal profile] osprey_archer
What I Just Finished Reading

The busy season has struck at work, so my reading has slowed down, but I’m still chugging along. I picked up Genzaburo Yoshino’s How Do You Live? (translated by Bruno Navasky) because I liked the cover, learned from the front cover flap that it’s one of Miyazaki’s favorite books, and therefore of course I had to read it. The novel was intended as a guidebook to ethics for Japanese schoolchildren, and I think would have blown my tiny mind if I read it at thirteen. I’ve missed the window for it to become a formative text for me, but I enjoyed it nonetheless, as a glimpse of a very different side of Japan in the 1930s. (Yoshino never mentions Japan’s wars of imperialist expansion, presumably because everything he would have liked to say would have gotten him thrown back in prison, where he had already languished for 18 months for his socialist beliefs.)

Mary Stolz’s Ferris Wheel, one of Stolz’s weaker books, as it ambles around without going anywhere. Our heroine Polly doesn’t get along with her little brother Rusty, is losing her best friend Kate because Kate is moving to California, meets a new girl who might be a friend but really seems like kind of a boring friend candidate… Good descriptions of life in Vermont, though.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve reached Part III of A Sand County Almanac. The first two parts are both close observations of places that Leopold knows well, and therefore perennially fascinating as well-considered firsthand observation always is. Part III is more about the Theory of Wilderness, which is less interesting to me, but I keep on keeping on.

What I Plan to Read Next

Despite my reservations about Ferris Wheel, I still plan to read the sequel Cider Days, just because the title sounds so perfectly autumnal.
sovay: (Otachi: Pacific Rim)
[personal profile] sovay
I got up far too early to talk about far too much of my health, but I have been shot in the shoulder and eaten a bagel with chopped liver, which is at least two things the current administration would not care for. I am cleared to travel at the end of the month.

Now that it's been dislodged into the forefront of my consciousness, the phenomenon of Pirates of the Caribbean feels like the one real time in my life I was part of a megafandom and mostly what happened was the rest of the planet suddenly concurred that tall ships and chanteys and sea-change were cool. I saw Dead Man's Chest (2006) with my family because Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) had been such an unexpected swashbuckling delight, but I saw At World's End (2007) at a packed multiplex with friends who had agreed in common with much of the audience to arrive wearing as much pirate regalia as we could muster from our wardrobes, which at that time in my life meant the one rust-colored eighteenth-century shirt and my hair tied back with a black ribbon, the gold rings in my ears being a fortuitously preexisting condition. Especially since I continued not to interact with the supermassive explosion of fic unless it originated with my friendlist, that may be the most clinically fannish thing I have done in my life. I have never looked forward to a sequel in theaters before or since. I got the salt-green seventeenth-century glass onion bottle out of that first summer, as if it had been conjured off the screen into the traditional antique shop window for me to fall in love with its crusted tide. In the dog days of the second, I finished the novelette its sand-swirled, barnacle-silted draught was part of the pearl-grit for. In the span of that year, my graduate career had conclusively foundered and left me washing around in the wreckage. It had not occurred to me previously, but in their own flawed and splashier, blockbuster fashion, those two films may have been as much of a lifeline as the sea they evoked. I didn't expect to share it with an entire internet, but I am not sure the experience hurt me any, even if it has never repeated since.

From reading about this message in a bottle, I learned not only about John Craighead George whose mother's books I grew up on, but his twin conservationists of uncles whom I had known nothing about, so all things considered it carried a great deal of information in its transit from Point Barrow to Shapinsay.
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[personal profile] sovay
The status of the yontif this year is that my mother and I made honeycakes, but it is autumn and the head of the year and we are still here, the important thing. A sweet year, a safe. L'shanah tovah, all.
sovay: (Sydney Carton)
[personal profile] sovay
I did not post it last night because I was so tired, but [personal profile] spatch took a proof of life when I was finally home which does indeed look much more like a person than my fluorescently washed out self-portrait of a couple of nights ago and amazingly more so than the traditional tubes-and-wires effigy of earlier in the week. It's peculiar to look back on. Concentrating to talk to doctors during that period worked well enough that I was asked more than once if I had a medical background and had to answer only in the sense of having had a lot of medical to deal with, but otherwise much of what I remember of the first few days involved drifting in and out of weird half-overheard half-sleep acutely punctuated by conversations or procedures. It was amazing to go back to sleep this morning after my medications without having to discuss them extensively with anyone.



[personal profile] fleurdelis41 seasonally sent me some cases of piracy tried at the Old Bailey, of which my favorites are the prosecutor no-show, the punch line of the stolen hats, and the dudes whose defense was having been very drunk at the time.
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
Home from six days in hospital with a plan designed not to land me back there any time soon, I have been passed into the care of Dr. Hestia, who is already carrying out her duties with enthusiastic ministrations of purr. I have washed my hair for the first time in a week. I have eaten food prepared by my family. I napped like a stone in the late afternoon, which I will have needed since my regimen for the foreseeable involves a schedule of medications I cannot let slide even when some of them require me to be awake at hours I have preferred my entire life to spend unconscious. My calendar is inevitably full of further maintenance, but I am truly looking forward to an increase in conversations that have nothing to do with the monitoring of my vitals. Mostly I am marrow-tired and vague with new chemistry and glad to be home in my own clothes and drinking water I don't have to ring anyone to bring me in bed. I was not expecting and delight in the gift of a plush harpy eagle that arrived while I was away.
sovay: (Otachi: Pacific Rim)
[personal profile] sovay
In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, I respectfully wish to submit that if I had just had scurvy, this whole week would have been much easier. Have a suspicious ghost crab, the Changelings' "Port Royale" (1998), and Tim Eriksen rocking out Bellamy's setting of Kipling's "Poor Honest Men" (2011). In keeping with the recent influx of Kevin McNally in the eighteenth century, when I get back to my stack of DVDs I could just rewatch Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006). For all the varied and undeniable flaws of those second two films, their sea-iconography has clung to me like dream-wrack for nearly twenty years and I wouldn't have a cycle of stories without them.
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[personal profile] sovay
This afternoon I voted Miss Jessel from Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) one of my favorite ghosts on film, a tall order but a true one. A masterstroke of sound design and suggestion, she's not spectral, she's uncanny: as real as the reflection she casts on the sunlit shiver of the lake, as motionless in the heat as the bulrushes she stands so far out among, she could be walking on water, though we will learn she drowned herself in it instead. Her slight, dark-dressed figure in long shot gives no impression of a threat, nor even any particular emotion such as hunger or melancholy that would make her apparition easier to read. Her incongruity becomes its own eeriness, the noonday drabness of her presence more frightening than its disappearance between one look and the next, which is after all only characteristic of her kind, though part of the film's chill is that really it has no such rules by which a haunting may be mapped and governed, only the inexplicable facts of things that should not be. Once we have heard that she grieved sleeplessly for her rough, flaunting lover until she died of him, the governess played like a doorway of possession by Deborah Kerr can hear her sobbing, a desolate, gulping, wretchedly echoing sound that when finally traced to the schoolroom has nothing to do with the still-faced, dry-eyed imprint of Miss Jessel at her desk and yet when the governess rushes to the empty chair and touches the slate left by her own earlier lesson, it is wet with tears. Without a parapsychological conversation in sight, it gives the effect of a ghost that has stained through time in all its layers, desynched to perpetuity. The parallel sightings of Peter Wyngarde's Peter Quint with his cock-strut and his bestial snarl of a smile, always smeared through sun-mist, night-glass, steam-sweat until he can cast his unfiltered shadow from a crumbling ring of statues at last have their own rude potency, as malignantly charged as one of the more explicitly libidinous legends of Hell House, but it is his ruined lover who looks as though you could never scrape her off the air, so soaked into this patch of reality that trying to part her from the grounds of Bly would be about as efficacious as trying to exorcise an ice age. Their voices whisper like tape loops on the candlelit stairs. The children are watching. The children are watching. The children are watching. Like the uncredited radiophonics of Daphne Oram that accompany her first, summer-humming manifestation, Miss Jessel or whatever has been left of her belongs to the weirdness of time just really starting to flower in British film and TV, more Nigel Kneale than Henry James or even Truman Capote and yet she fits as exactly into the sensibilities of the Victorian Gothic as she would into the bright horror of that lakeside to this day. She was one of three images left on film by the artist and director Clytie Jessop and I doubt you could get her off the print, either. This excellence brought to you by my watching backers at Patreon.

Wednesday Reading Meme

Sep. 17th, 2025 08:02 am
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[personal profile] osprey_archer
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I was so charmed by The Fairy Circus that I decided to see if the university archives had any of Lathrop’s other books, and indeed, they have The Colt from Moon Mountain... and the colt is a unicorn colt!!!!!!! Sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have spoiled that, I went into the archive not knowing and nearly squeaked with delight when I saw the cover, but as it IS on the cover it’s probably not a serious spoiler. Unicorn befriends farmgirl! Delightful.

The archive people know me, by the way. I was rooting through my purse for my ID and the desk clerk was like, “Don’t worry, I’ve seen you before.”

I also read Dick Francis’s Whip Hand, the sequel to Odds Against. In Odds Against, iron woobie Sid Halley had been forced out of his jockey career by a tragic accident that resulted in a horrifyingly deformed left hand, which led to him becoming a private investigator, which over the course of the book led to him losing said left hand entirely.

About three chapters into Whip Hand, the baddie trains a shotgun on Sid’s right hand at point-blank range and threatens to shoot it off. Sid endures in stoic (but deeply terrified) silence; I the reader screamed like a tea kettle. “IS HE GOING TO LOSE ONE APPENDAGE EACH BOOK?” I shrieked with horrified delight at this new horizon of whumpiness.

Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

Another quote from A Sand County Almanac: “Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”

What I Plan to Read Next

Jostein Gaarder’s The Solitaire Mystery! Which comes with a side mystery: Gaarder has published a number of books since the 1990s, most of which have indeed been translated into English, and yet most of them are not available through any of the various libraries to which I have access. Why not? Where are they? A mystery worthy of Gaarder himself.
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[personal profile] sovay
I just had my first opportunity to shower in four nights, even without washing my hair, so I just had the same opportunity to free-associate in the shower.

I have no explanation for why I was singing the blessedly abridged setting of Kipling's "The Ladies" (1896) that I learned from the singing of John Clements in Ships with Wings (1941) except that it's been in my head ever since it displaced Cordelia's Dad's "Delia" (1992).

As a person who does think all the time about the Roman Empire, I am incapable of not associating Rosemary Sutcliff's "The Girl I Kissed at Clusium" (1954) with Sydney Carter's "Take Me Back to Byker" (1963)—as performed by Donald Swann, the only way I have ever heard it—even though Sutcliff was obviously drawing on Kipling's "On the Great Wall" (1906) with her long march and songs that run in and out of fashion with the Legions and the common ancestor of all of them anyway is almost certainly "The Girl I Left Behind Me" (17th-whatever).

Somehow I remain less over the fact that Donald Swann was the first person to record Carter's "Lord of the Dance" (1964) than the fact that he did a song cycle of Middle-Earth (1967) and an opera of Perelandra (1964).

Oh, shoot, Swann would have made a great Campion. You register the horn-rims and immediately tune out the face behind them.

Ignoring the appealingly transitive properties of Wimsey, Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walter, I am not going to rewatch the episode of Granada Holmes starring Clive Francis, I am going to lie down before someone wakes me.

Afghanistan banana stand

Sep. 16th, 2025 10:59 pm
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[personal profile] sovay
When I heard tonight about Robert Redford, I did not think first of the immortal freeze-frame of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) or the righteous paranoia of All the President's Men (1976) or even the perfectly anachronistic jazz of The Sting (1973) where I almost certainly first saw him, effortlessly beautiful even before he shines up from street-level short cons to the spectacular wire of the title grift. I thought of The Hot Rock (1972), a freewheelingly dumb-assed caper film of which I am deeply fond in no small part because of Redford. Specifically, his casting makes it look at first like the inevitable Hollywood misrepresentation of its 1970 Donald E. Westlake source novel, a cool jazz glow-up of the canonically, lankily nondescript Dortmunder whose heists always look completely reasonable on paper and in practice like a Rube Goldberg machine whose springs just sprang off. Only as the setbacks of the plot mount past aggravation into absurdity approaching Dada, of which the attempt to sneak into a precinct house via helicopter must rate highly even before the crew land on the wrong roof and the siege-minded lieutenant mistakes their break-in for the revolution, does the audience realize that this Dortmunder has the face of a screen idol and the flop sweat of a shlimazl, a man whose charisma is not an asset when it makes people think he knows what he's doing. "I've got no choice," he says doggedly of the eponymous diamond which he did at least once successfully steal, whence all their troubles began. "I'm not superstitious and I don't believe in jinxes, but that stone's jinxed me and it won't let go. I've been damn near bitten, shot at, peed on, and robbed, and worse is going to happen before it's done. So I'm taking my stand. I'm going all the way. Either I get it, or it gets me." When he acquires an incipient ulcer at the top of the second act, who's surprised? He glumly chews antacids as one of his meticulously premeditated schemes trips over its own shoelaces yet again. It may be the only time Redford played so far against his stardom, but he makes such a gorgeous loser with that tousle of coin-gold hair and an ever more disbelieving look in the matinée blue of his eyes, the Zeppo of his quartet of thieves who only looks like the normal one and no slouch in a stack of character actors from Moses Gunn and Zero Mostel through Lee Wallace and even a bit-part Christopher Guest, not to mention George Segal by whom he is characteristically almost run into a chain-link fence, trying to collect him from his latest stint upstate in a hot car with too many accessories. "Not that you're not the best, but a layman might wonder why you're all the time in jail." Harry Bellaver figured in so many noirs of the '40's and '50's, why should he not have retired to run a dive bar on Amsterdam Avenue patronized by exactly the kind of never-the-luck lowlifes he might once have played? The photography by Ed Brown goes on the list of great snapshots of New York, the screenplay by William Goldman is motor-mouthed quotable, the score by Quincy Jones never sounds cooler than when the characters it accompanies are failing their wisdom checks at land speed. Watching it as part of a Peter Yates crime trilogy between Bullitt (1968) and The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) may induce whiplash. It may not be major Redford, but it is beloved Redford of mine, and worthwhile weirdness to watch in his memory. This stand brought to you by my jinxed backers at Patreon.

Newbery Books in Verse

Sep. 15th, 2025 12:59 pm
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[personal profile] osprey_archer
[personal profile] cyphomandra asked about Newbery novels in verse, and friends, I have THOUGHTS. I have OPINIONS. Or actually I have neither of those things, I just have FEELINGS, feelings first engendered decades ago when I first read Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust, which despite the lapse of time have yet to subside.

Out of the Dust won the Newbery Medal in 1998. It is about a girl named Billie Jo, so named because her dad really wanted a boy and apparently wanted his daughter to be reminded twenty times a day that she was a disappointment. It’s the Great Depression, and they live on a miserable Dust Bowl farm where Billie Jo’s only source of solace is playing her piano.

But then ONE DAY, someone leaves a can of kerosene on the stove. This kerosene catches fire, so Billie Jo grabs it with her bare hands to throw out the door! But she reaches the door just as her pregnant mother is about to enter, and thus accidentally hurls flaming kerosene all over her!

The mother dies a slow and agonizing death of her wounds. The baby IIRC is stillborn, but I can’t recall the details of this point because I was too busy obsessing over all the neighbors coming to Billie Jo’s dying mother’s bedside murmuring “Billie Jo threw the kerosene.”

Billie Jo’s mother is dead. Billie Jo can no longer play the piano because her hands are horribly scarred from the kerosene. Billie Jo jumps a train to get out of Oklahoma, presumably to escape to a place where no one knows “Billie Jo threw the kerosene.” But in the end she comes home, and there is I believe an attempt at a vaguely hopeful ending (Billie Jo is perhaps attempting to play the piano again?) but it is TOO LITTLE TOO LATE.

This was my first novel in verse. It was, I believe, also the Newbery’s first foray into novels in verse. (There are earlier collections of poetry, like A Visit to William Blake’s Inn and Joyful Noise, but a poetry collection is a different beast.) It has given me an abiding aversion to novels in verse, a prejudice that has proven ineradicable even though I loved Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again (Newbery Honor 2012) so much that I’ve read all of Lai’s other work, AND ALSO loved Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming (Newbery Honor 2015) so much that I’ve been making a game stab at reading all her work as well, although as she has published approximately 500 books I haven’t managed it yet.

As I contemplated this fact, I wondered woefully if I would never learn to let go of this prejudice. But then I started totting up the other Newbery novels in verse.

Once Out of the Dust opened the sluice gates, an inundation of Newbery verse novels followed. Well, okay, more of a trickle, but if you are averse to verse novels it feels like quite a lot.

2002: Marilyn Nelson, Carver: A Life in Poems, actually a biography and not a novel, but includes a particularly scarring poem about lynching.

2009: Margarita Engle’s The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom. You know how a lot of the earlier Newbery books were exciting adventure stories about the battle for freedom? This is not an exciting adventure story. This is a long, slow, bloody trek of misery to freedom.

2015. Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover. Dead father.

2018. Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down. Dead brother.

2020. Jasmine Warga’s Other Words for Home. Refugees. Actually not super depressing, though.

2022. Rajani LaRocca’s Red, White and Whole. Dead mother.

2025. Lesa Cline-Ransom One Big Open Sky. Dead father.

So actually I think the numbers are on my side here. Newbery novels in verse have a 70% chance of being miserable! It is right and proper that I approach them with crushing dread.

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