#idk i’ve been thinking about how we interact with death in the paddling community a lot lately due to redacted tragic reasons and uh.

[moonshynecybin]

u rly have put a lot of things in context for me regarding marco simoncelli & the honest trauma vale was (and like probably still is) reckoning with & it’s made me totally reevaluate my take overall. I think I was maybe overlooking it a little bc like…the idea of not only watching one of your close friends die but right in front of you but also having to reckon with the fact you were directly involved is unfathomably horrific. I also wonder if he ever looks at Bezz & sees Simo bc I do a lot :(

the thing about vale is he very clearly wants people to remember sic and know that he misses/grieves for sic but he never wants (very understandably !!!!) to show publicly exactly how bad this whole deal hurt him, so he’s often not gonna get into the nitty-gritty sort of. this changed the way he interacts with his peers and the sport as a whole kind of thing, even though it absolutely did. undeniably so. so i can’t blame you for not realizing it bc i don’t really think he wants you to

[ourmrsreynolds]

stuff i read November 2019

Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance (2014) (Stormlight Archive #2) “I don’t want my life to change because I’ve become a lighteyes … I want the lives of people like me—like I am now—to change.” Kaladin Stormblessed, ACTUAL LOVE OF MY LIFE. Contrast: Dalinar whose “well you just have to be twice as good by distinguishing yourself in the position I gave you, that’s how you change the world” rhetoric makes my skin crawl. Nah it ain’t fam. Dalinar may be be a good person who has never personally mistreated a darkeyes, but that’s beside the point. He still benefits from a highly unequal, unjust arrangement that places him at the tippy top of the social, economic & political pyramid. And the parshmen at the bottom. If the next book isn’t 100% about Parshmen Rights I'm outta here. this book—well there were moments i was on my feet cheering, like that four-on-one-duel where Kaladin is the only one with the cojones to jump into the ring, and Adolin’s “bridgeboy” goes from a term of disparagement to a term of endearment. When we found out the Shardbearer whom Kaladin killed in Amaram’s service was Shallan’s brother that was WELL-PLAYED SIR that punch really landed. Renarin turning out to be a Radiant is a pretty harsh indictment of the overvaluation of martial prowess, and I liked that too, but on the whole I didn’t like this book as much as Book 1 because I wanted MOAR KALADIN.

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire (2019) “Nothing empire touches remains itself.” They say that science fiction is psychology and fantasy is sociology. If that’s true (and I don’t remember where I heard it) this book bucks that trend because it’s all in for both sci-fi (it’s a space opera!) and sociology. It’s been getting a lot of well-deserved buzz and I really enjoyed it. I do think it’s fair to point out it’s a story centered on whip-smart highly-educated bureaucrats and the imperial court they orbit; that the perspective of “ordinary” people is missing, and you feel the lack because in the course of the book there’s a revolution/coup?? But I mean, if you think about the Roman Empire (the author is a Byzantine scholar) the kinds of “barbarians” it attracted were always from the better-off stratum of “barbarian” society. I guess the chimney sweeps wouldn’t have been reading Catullus. Nothing empire touches remains itself.

Robert Galbraith, Lethal White (2018) (Cormoran Strike Mysteries #4) The unresolved tension between the leads is A+ 10/10 but I feel like the actual mystery plot is not resolved as elegantly as I expected from JK Rowling? She’s like, the queen of tight plotting and I didn’t think she’d just round up 7 suspects only to let 6 of them off the hook with an apologetic shrug of “whoops that was a red herring.” There’s a metric shitton of gratuitous bashing of socialists & other lefties, which didn’t even faze me. What bothered me was the novel’s unevenness. The portion of it that was dedicated to character work was phenomenal. Rowling’s always had a gift for invoking petty and/or aggrieved secondary characters and she absolutely nailed it here, plus the main characters experience extraordinary personal growth while still bearing the scars of their traumas. Yet tbh Chamber of Secrets is a better mystery novel and I say this as someone who ranks Chamber of Secrets dead last on my personal “HP books, ranked” listicle.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the body, and primitive accumulation (2004) Pluses of academic writing: you get to raid the ENDNOTES and BIBLIOGRAPHY for more texts devoted to your topic of interest. Minuses of academic writing: dense as hell, puts you to sleep. Praise be to Silvia Federici whose arguments are uncommonly lucid and contain almost no bloat, though the sections covering the New World are definitely weaker than the European sections, which is where Federici’s speciality lies. She argues that the witch hunts of the late Middle Ages were a political project, a campaign of terror designed to decimate the power of peasant women, sever them from their communities, and subjugate their reproductive capacities to doing USEFUL stuff like accumulating surplus for capitalists. The parallel between the enclosure of public commons and the enclosure of women’s bodies & labor power—all done with an eye towards private profit—is one that will haunt me for the rest of my life. What an absolutely staggering work of scholarship. So glad I sprung for the physical copy so I could annotate copiously.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1848) It’s been 20 years and I’m still salty about Jo/Laurie. This is the first time I’ve actually reread it cover-to-cover instead of just reimbibing the shippiest bits and I gotta say, props to Louisa May Alcott who is a much better writer than I recalled. Her treatment of the process and the craft of writing is also right on; the 1994 movie by contrast just has Jo climb up into the garret and don her writing hat and hey presto, a manuscript. What I’d forgotten was Alcott’s mastery of tone to skewer a character—I don’t wanna say she rivals Jane Austen in this department but she comes close. I had also forgotten how much of Part I in particular is just Jo repressing her desire to marry Beth and cart her off to a lesbian utopia bursting with grand pianos. My girl is dead set against any of her sisters marrying, insists she’ll man up herself in order to keep the family intact, and if you only read Part I you may well conclude she’s not wrong. Part II is painful because it’s where Alcott sinks my ship. Hate to say I can see why she does it?? It’s because Amy and Laurie have the most to learn from each other, and Alcott is all about GROWING and LEARNING as a person. You know what, the text doesn’t belong to Alcott. The text belongs to all of us, and I will proclaim Death of the Author from the rooftops. Jo and Laurie love each other without labels, they’re not “romantic” or “platonic,” they set no limits on that love.

Cat Sebastian, The Lawrence Browne Affair (2017) (Turner Series #2) You know why this mlm Regency was absolutely DELIGHTFUL? Because it’s literally kidfic. They bond over the kid, that’s the story. It’s not the whole story, I just mean the arrival of the kid kicks the plot into high gear, even if there isn’t undue focus on the kid as a character in his own right. God this book is so relatable: They both have the worst case of imposter syndrome. “Neither of us is normal but have we ever thought to question whether fitting in is good, or normality is desirable?” It’s that trope where “I’ve insinuated myself into your life under false pretenses and now I’ve gone and fallen in love with you, how do I make a clean breast of it,” meanwhile your romantic interest knows FULL WELL you’re a con artist and it doesn’t lessen their attachment in the slightest. Also relatable: Lawrence likes being alone, clings to routine because unscripted social interactions give him anxiety.

Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom (2004) (Saxon Stories #1) I marathoned all three seasons of the BBC/Netflix adaptation earlier this year and I gotta say, lead actor Alexander Dreymon and his combination of martial arts background and tenderness 100% makes the character. Whoever does the score for the show also knocked it out of the park. In comparison, the book falls flat. Uhtred comes off as merely bratty rather than deeply conflicted in his loyalties, which could be a function of his extreme youth—he’s 18 I think at the end of this installment. The Danish vs Saxon identity contest is less prominent here; he pretty much accepts he’s a Saxon. @Bernard Cornwell your English ass is showing. There isn’t a real tight three-act structure, the plot just sort of meanders along from one battle to another (which is a hallmark of Cornwell’s writing, and never bothered me in his Grail Quest trilogy which are some of my favorite books of all time, so idk why it seems like weak sauce here) . One thing that remains constant is that Uhtred becomes irrational when threatened with the loss of things or people he considers MINE. Uhtred: sees a random dog paddling along in the middle of a storm. Uhtred: IS THAT RAGNAR’S DOG. Lmao.

Brandon Sanderson Oathbringer (2017) (Stormlight Archive #3) I opened this book with some trepidation because it is Dalinar’s book, the way Book 1 was Kaladin’s book and Book 2 was Shallan’s. I mean, all the flashbacks belong to Dalinar. You can tell Brandon Sanderson built this world around Dalinar, that Dalinar is more foundational to this ‘verse than any other character. And I gotta hand it to him, when I put the book down there were actual tears in my eyes: “The ancient code of the Knights Radiant says ‘journey before destination.’ But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fall, he journey ends. That failure becomes our destination. To love to journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.” I think about when Kaladin took the first oath way back in Book 1, when we first heard “journey before destination,” and I say BRAVO SIR BRAVO. I think about how Gavilar’s assassination is this primordial scene we keep circling back to; with each new book we return to the scene of the crime with a different POV and we keep peeling back the layers and upending everything we thought we knew. Other things I am here for: Shallan referring to Kaladin internally as Brightlord Brooding Eyes (I’m still recovering from how Sanderson sank my Kaladin/Shallan ship). Kaladin running into his archnemesis & ex-bully and all he can think is “Adolin would never be caught dead in a coat three seasons out of date” lmao Kaladin x Adolin brOTP of the century. Ok but remember how I said while I was reading Book 2 “I hope Book 3 is 100% Rights for Parshmen”??? Well I called it didn’t I. Turns out humankind are the invaders—they literally rolled up from another planet which they had accidentally destroyed, they came as refugees and they proceeded to…enslave the indigenous parshmen. What. The fuck. Brandon Sanderson was born and raised in the USA, where the ideology of settler colonialism is fucking hegemonic. We are REALLY GOOD at conflating preemptive warfare with self-defense, dispossession with property rights enforcement. We tend to think of democratic self-rule as coextensive with coercive rule over alien subjects. Sanderson’s choice to dismiss out of hand the “would you give the land back to the parshmen” argument is troubling because it absolutely bolsters the settler colonial narrative that indigenous elimination is a necessary condition of settlers’ “freedom”. I realize that the parshmen are currently being led by Hitler but that’s a choice on Sanderson’s part. Giving us 95% human POVs is a choice. This is the story of humans reckoning with their blood-soaked history, not the story of parshmen throwing off their chains.