#Orwell’s Roses

[luxe-pauvre]

Most of writing is thinking, not typing, and thinking is sometimes best done while doing something else that engages part of you. Walking or cooking or labouring on simple or repetitive tasks can also be a way to leave the work behind so you can come back to it fresh or find unexpected points of entry into it.

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses

[sunbites]

reading orwell’s roses and everytime i see his name a voice in my head screams jorjor well

[cup-and-chaucer]

My Month in Books: November 2022

1. Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit: This book is the definition of a book where the parts were greater than its sum. Rambling, meandering, and so well-written that I wanted to throttle her for it being so badly organized. I saw a GR review that put it perfect: “So exceptional on a line level that it’s easy to ignore that you don’t actually retain anything from it.” Some sections were fascinating, like on the modern Colombian rose market, and the parts about George Orwell himself were really fascinating. But just onerous to slog through—she did agree with me about the sensuality of 1984 so I guess it’s a five star read, regardless.

2. Deathless by Cathrynne M Valente: A misunderstood book, I think. Very memorable, beautifully written, wild as fuck. If you have a passion for interwar history, extended metaphors, criticisms of totalitarian communism, BDSM, and fairytales…this might be the book for you?

3. I Was Better Last Night by Harvey Fierstein: I enjoyed this! Particularly the earliest sections about the experimental theatre and off-off-Broadway movements which I really had no idea about. What really struck me about this book is a. how much failure is inherent in art and being a successful artist (it’s a lesson that I know but it always is a good reminder) and b. how much AIDS shaped the art of the 80s (again something I knew but it hit different in Harvey’s description). I just loved the audio of this.

4. Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman: I listened to this on audio and Neil Gaiman is now the only fiction author allowed to read his own books. Everyone else go sit down.

I loved this loved this loved this. I’ve been wanting to really educated myself on Norse mythology for awhile and this was presented in such an accessible way. I really am at my happiest reading myth collections. The thing that I learned was how much symbolic overlap between Norse mythology and Christianity; how many woven threads. I have no idea how much this is related to the timing that the Prose Edda was written (I think post-Christianity and I know that heavily influenced how they were written). I’ve had the book Children of Elm and Ash sitting on my bookshelf for, like, five years and I need to sink my teeth into it now.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

On this episode of the podcast, Ariel chats with Dr Tanis MacDonald about her upcoming course in winter 2025 on hopepunk. What exactly is so punk about this kind of hope? Can hopepunk even be said to be a genre in its own right, or is it an aesthetic or lens that we can use to think through just why the characters are deciding to have hope in bleak situations?

Tune in for recommendations of hopepunk novels (and poetry!), ruminations on political hope, the centrality of relationships and radical empathy to these stories, and more. Plus some academic theories informing the formulations of hope, of course.

Links:

Tanis MacDonald | Author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female

Watershed Writers with Tanis MacDonald | Podcast on Spotify

Hopepunk, explained: the storytelling trend that weaponizes optimism | Vox

Companion Species Manifesto

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

S2.9 Reframing Narratives With Ecocriticism, With Dr Jenny Kerber

[therandomtoad]

I just want to take a moment to appreciate the talents of Cathrine O'Hara. The woman was a crucial part of my childhood and I barely noticed-

[eggbagelz]

orwell zonerunner days look tee hee......... his jacket [ic it isnt obvious] is a sort of like. modified bullfighter jacket [the epaulets say die bravely and live furiously respectively]

[homenumrevelio-rpg]

Despliegue de amor durante la Re-inauguración del Conniving Serpents en San Valentin, 2026

Después de tantos meses oscuros en el Callejón Diagon, finalmente desde el 12 de febrero los locales cerrados comienzan a reabrir, pero es el sábado cuando la vida llega al Callejón. El Conniving, con motivo de San Valentín, levanta una gran fiesta con música en vivo, de la mano de Eagan Couglhan, un artista que lleva creciendo como la espuma desde que se descubrió su parentezco con el gran señor Couglhan.

La publicidad inicia desde el 1 de febrero con afiches en el Callejón Diagon y otros callejones y pueblos mágicos concurridos.

Luces colgantes desde el techo en tonos rojos; corazones que caen en lluvia y desaparecen; y en el medio de la pista, un árbol de sobres donde todos pueden escribir cartas de amor que no serán leídas pero que, a media noche, retazos de ellas aparecían en el techo, en eco de amores silenciosos.

Los co-propietarios, Albus Potter y Gaïa Greengrass.

En orden: Rose Weasley, Marlene Carter, Lucy Weasley, Blodwyn Rowle, Daisy Orwell, Charlie Longbottom, Miles Davies, Matthew Shirley, Charity Loxias, Opal Diggory.

[pixeldolly]

Walden BACC

It had been a long and difficult birth. 

Eleanor was utterly drained, not to mention still sore, but cradling her baby to her chest restored and soothed her, reminding her that all the effort had been worth it. So tiny, so fragile!

Her baby girl.

Her daughter, Rose.

Hello, Rose, she thought affectionately. Welcome to the world, little one.

By her bedside, Oliver watched in silent awe. He had a daughter! He’d never thought that a guy like him would ever find someone, let alone become a father! 

Although he’d been preparing for this moment for the last 9 months, it felt surreal. 

Eleanor: “Isn’t she perfect?”

She looked happy, in spite of the way her eyes were heavy-lidded with exhaustion in the aftermath of her ordeal. She would need time to recover, but Tess had assured them both that she was healthy and so was the baby.

Oliver: “She’s...wow! Can...can I hold her?”

Tess smiled contentedly and wished her friends the best in their new lives as parents. This was her favourite part - seeing families come together to welcome their newest member.

Could she be blamed for yearning for it as well?

No! She would not risk Hayden, nor a potential baby by mixing in her tainted blood!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

from Orwell's Roses: In Mexico, roses have a particular significance as the flower that cascaded forth from Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin’s coarse-woven cloak on December 12, 1531, only a decade after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire. The legend relates a radiant young woman had appeared to this indigenous man near what is now Mexico City, identified herself as the Virgin Mary, and commanded that they build her a shrine. When the Spanish bishop of Mexico demanded proof, the Virgin caused the hilltop named Tepayac to bloom with out-of-season flowers—a variety of flowers in some accounts, non-native roses in the most common version—for Juan Diego to use in his quest to be believed. He returned to the bishop, the roses tumbled forth, and the inside of his cloak was revealed to bear her image, as if the roses themselves had drawn her or become her. The cloak with its image of a dark woman cloaked in a robe scattered with stars and standing atop a crescent moon still hangs in the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe at the foot of Tepayac.

The Virgin of Guadalupe is sometimes regarded as an Aztec goddess reappearing in Christian guise, and she spoke Juan Diego’s language to him, Nahuatl. In D.A. Brading’s history of the origins and evolution of the image and its worship, he notes that “when Mary commanded Juan Diego to gather flowers, she rooted the Christian gospel deep within the soil of Aztec culture, since for the Indians flowers were both the equivalent of spiritual songs and by extension, symbols of divine life.” The largest Catholic pilgrimage in the world is to that shrine complex on the Virgin of Guadalupe’s feast-day, December 12, and year-round the shrine is piled high with offerings of roses.

[Thank you Rebecca Solnit]

[olivia-calidamn]

found this on facebook. imagine being a fucking coward

[demi-raven]

(Reposting my pinned post, the way it looked in early April 2023. This way, I can keep deleting and editing in the pinned version and still keep a memory of what it looked like.)

[luxe-pauvre]

Orwell wrote in 1944, “The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future,” a framework that would morph into Big Brother’s “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” The attack on truth and language makes the atrocities possible. If you can erase what has happened, silence the witnesses, convince people of the merit of supporting a lie, if you can terrorise people into silence, obedience, lies, if you can make the task of determining what is true so impossible or dangerous they stop trying, you can perpetuate your crimes. The first victim of war is truth, goes the old saying, and a perpetual war against truth undergirds all authoritarianisms from the domestic to the global. After all, authoritarianism is itself, like eugenics, a kind of elitism premised on the idea that power should be distributed unequally.

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses

[vampiresuns]

it has to be some kind of lesson to integrate into this new year to finish a book about one of my worst favoured authors (Orwell), and not only have the book fuck so goddamn hard but it also being so excellently written and overall delicious to read

[wherekizzialives]

July Reads

You can tell that I took a week off from writing and had a couple of days completely to myself in July since I’ve managed to finish 10 books this month. All of them have been interesting, some of them completely upended me in the best of ways, and a few left me better than they found me. As of today I only have two books left to read for the History Girl Summer challenge I’m participating in over…

[annacswenson]

« to garden is to make whole again what has been shattered » —Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ian McDonald's "The Wilding"

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

Ian McDonald is one of those absurdly brilliant novelists that just leave me wondering the actual fuck he manages it. How does he cover so much ground, think up so many compelling characters, find so many gracenotes, conjure up so many complicated emotions?

McDonald burst on the scene in the late 1980s, with the 1988 novel Desolation Road and then his 1989 Out On Blue Six, a slick, stylized cyberpunk-meets-Orwell tale that overflowed with beautiful prose, technomysticism, and sly jokes that hid sneaky truths that hid even more sly jokes:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/01/20/out-on-blue-six-ian-mcdonalds-brilliant-novel-is-back/

By my count, McDonald has now published twenty books – mostly novels, but a couple short story collections (and the most amazingly demented, Tom-Waits-inflected teddybear murder comic imaginable, 1994's Kling Klang Klatch):

https://irishcomics.fandom.com/wiki/Kling_Klang_Klatch

McDonald's work is truly globespanning. While he's made his mark on the Martian soil, and overtaken the moon with the Luna trilogy (his definitive rebuttal to Heinlein's Moon Is a Harsh Mistress) he is widely adored and much-awarded for the glittering, futuristic versions of Brazil (Brasyl), Tanzania (the Chaga series), and India (River of Gods).

Indeed, McDonald's imagination has roamed so far over the Earth and the solar system that it's possible to overlook his fantastic reimaginings of Ireland, the land where he was raised. There's his Philip K Dick Award-winning 1991 novel King of Morning, Queen of Day, a swirling, mythopoeic novel of Celtic mysticism:

https://www.baen.com/king-of-morning-queen-of-day.html

And then there's 1992's Hearts, Hands and Voices, which is lowkey one of the best novels I have ever, ever read – a scorching science fictional allegory for The Troubles, but with the gnarliest biotech weirdness you can possibly imagine:

https://archive.org/details/heartshandsvoice0000ianm/mode/2up

McDonald's books cover so much goddamned ground, but one feature they all share is a prose styling wherein every sentence is at least 20% poetry, a fraction that somehow, impossibly, rises to as much as 150% in certain especially shiny passages.

Like this passage, which opens The Wilding, McDonald's new horror novel that marks his first return to Ireland since 1992:

Autumn lay on the great bog in silvers and tans, late purples and duns.

The sun rose above the tall ash saplings and feral sycamore. It called the birds into full voice. Stabbing shrills, tumbles of notes, the flutes of dove-call, frantic ticking hisses, song upon song. In hedgerows and copses, among the pale foliage of the birches, in the weave of deep willow and the bramble fastnesses, each bird called and was heard. In this season the peatland held the day's warmth through the night and on the bright, clear mornings rivers of mist formed, filling the subtle hollow places in the exposed cuttings, the bogs and fields. High sun would dispel it but at this hour half of Lough Carrow lay mist-bound. Each blade of grass hung heavy with dew, the clumps of sedges were already browning, the bracken curling and crisping.

A pair of horns lifted above the willow scrub and out-grown ash hedges of the Wilding. Polished tips caught the low sun and kindled as bright and keen as spears.

https://www.gollancz.co.uk/titles/ian-mcdonald/the-wilding/9781399611503/

Oof.

I would drop everything to read Ian McDonald's grocery lists but after that opening, I wasn't going to put this one down, and I didn't, reading the whole thing on yesterday's flight home from my gigs in Atlanta this week.

The Wilding is (I'm pretty sure?) McDonald's first horror novel, and it's fucking terrifying. It's set in a rural Irish peat bog that has been acquired by a conservation authority that is rewilding it after a century of industrial peat mining that stripped it back nearly to the bedrock. This rewilding process has been greatly accelerated by the covid lockdowns, which reduced the human footprint in the conservation area to nearly zero.

The story's protagonist is Lisa, a hard-case Dubliner who came to the bog to do community service after a career as a crime syndicate driver for hire, a woman who never met a car she couldn't boost and pilot in or out of any tight situation. After years in the bog, she's ready to start a new life, studying Yeats at university, indulging a late-discovered love of poetry that has as much to do with her redemption as her years in the wild.

Lisa's last duty before she leaves the bog and goes home to Dublin is leading a school group on a wild campout in one of the bog's deep clearings. It's a routine assignment, and while it's not her favorite duty, it's also not a serious hardship.

But as the group hikes out to the campsite, one of her fellow guides is killed, without warning, by a mysterious beast that moves so quickly they can barely make out its monstrous form. Thus begins a tense, mysterious, spooky as hell story of survival in a haunted woods, written in the kind of poesy that has defined McDonald's career, and which – when deployed in service of terror – has the power to raise literal goosebumps.

There's a lot of fantasy that deals with Celtic mythology, including McDonald's own King of Morning, Queen of Day, but the vibe of that stuff tends to the heroic and romantic – sure, there's the odd banshee, but in the main, it's mischievous wee people, pookas, and leprechauns. More fey than fear.

But Irish mythology in its raw form is terrifying. The monsters of Irish storytelling are grotesque, mean, remorseless, and come in every shape and size. Some authors have done well by going back to the bestiary for the deep cuts. When I was a kid, I must have read John Coyne's Hobgoblin fifty times (mostly because it was about D&D, which I was obsessed with). I haven't read this one since I was about 12, and I have no idea if it'd hold up today, but it left me with a deep appreciation of the spooky multifariousness of monsters who dwell in Ireland's bogs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobgoblin_(novel)

The Wilding is a suspense novel, which means there's no way to really sum up the plot without spoiling a lot of the affect, but suffice to say that McDonald brings large swathes of deep Irish lore to the surface, and it had me reading as fast as I could and wanting to put the book down and hide.

What a writer McDonald is! The fact that this is the same guy who wrote last year's stunning secret-history/solarpunk/uncategorizable wonder that was Hopeland beggars belief:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/30/electromancy/#the-grace

Read you some Ian McDonald novels, is what I'm trying to say. This one is only available in the UK, if that's not where you are, consider mail-ordering it. Looks like they've got stock at Forbidden Planet for £19 plus £18 shipping to the US. Worth every penny:

https://forbiddenplanet.com/424306-the-wilding-hardcover/

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/25/bogman/#erin-go-aaaaaaargh