#it's boring. it's short. it feels convoluted in part because of the stark difference between the single and other songs on the album

[linfernomio]

.

[dillydedalus]

what i read in july

THAT’S MORE LIKE IT aka i’m finally out of the (relative) reading slump for good & my bro james joyce was there

men explain things to me, rebecca solnit the original mansplaining essay is great, and still scarily relevant; the others in this collection (most on feminist issues) are also quite good; some aspects are a bit dated & problematic so be aware of that. 2.5/5

erschlagt die armen!, shumona sinha (tr. from french, not available in english) short but very impactful novella about a young french woman, originally from india, who works as an interpreter in the asylum system and becomes more & more broken by this system of inhumane bureaucracy and suffering, until she snaps and hits a migrant over the head with a wine bottle. full of alienation and misery and beautiful but disturbing language - the title translates to ‘beat the poor to death’ so like. yeah. 3.5/5

fire & blood: a history of the targaryen family I, george r r martin look, it’s a 700-page-long fake history book about a fictional ruling dynasty in a fictional world, and i’m just That Obsessed & Desperate about asoiaf (and i don’t even care about the targs That Much). anyway, now i know more about the targs than any ruling family from, you know, real history, which is like, whatever. this is pretty enjoyable if you are That Obsessed, although i will say that some bits are much better than others (there are some dry dull years even in everyone’s fav overly dramatic dragon-riding incest-loving family) and the misogyny really is. a lot. too much. way too much. BUT i did really like Good Best Queen Alysanne (her husband king joe harris is alright too i guess) and i found my new westerosi otp, cregan stark/aly blackwood, who both have Big Dick Energy off the fucking charts. 3.5/5 (+0.5 points for cregan and aly’s combined BDE)

the old drift, namwali serpell hugely ambitious sprawling postcolonial nation-building novel about zambia, told thru three generations of three families, as well as a chorus of mosquitoes (consistently the best & smartest parts). there is A LOT going on, in terms of characters, of plot points, of references to history (the zambian space programme) and literature (finally my knowledge of heart of darkness paid off) and thematically, and honestly it was a bit too much, a bit too tangled & fragmented & drifty, and in the end i probably admire this book more than i liked it, but serpell’s writing is incredibly smart and funny and full of electrical sparks 3.5/5

a severed head, iris murdoch the original love dodecahedron (not that i counted). iris murdoch is fucking WILD and i love her for it. this is a strange darkly funny little farce about some rich well-educated londoners and their bizarre & rather convoluted love lives. not as grandiosely wild as the sea the sea, but fun nevertheless. 3/5

midnight in chernobyl, adam higginbotham jumping on the hype bandwagon caused by the hbo series (very weird to call the current fascination with chernobyl a hype bandwagon but you know). interesting & well-written & accessible (tho the science is still totally beyond me) & gets you to care about the people involved. lots of human failure, lots of human greatness, set against the background of the almost eldritch threat of radioactivity (look up the elephant foot & see if you don’t get chills), and acute radiation syndrome which is THE MOST TERRIFYING THING ON EARTH . 3.5/5

normal people, sally rooney honestly this is incredibly engrossing & absorbing once you get used to how rooney completely ignores ‘show don’t tell’ (it works!), i pretty much read the whole thing in one slow workday (boss makes a dollar, i make a dime so i read books on my phone on company time, also i genuinely had nothing to do). i also think rooney is really good at precisely capturing the ~millenial experience in a way that feels very true, especially the transition from school to uni. BUT i really disliked the ending, the book never engages with the political themes it introduces (esp. class and gender) as deeply as it could and the bdsm stuff never really gets TIED UP LOL. so overall idk: 3.5/5

störfall: nachrichten eines tages, christa wolf quiet reflective undramatic little book narrated by a woman waiting to hear about the outcome of her brother’s brain surgery on the day of the catastrophe at chernobyl - throughout the day she puts down her thoughts about her brother and the events unfolding at chernobyl, as well as the double uncertainty she is trying to cope with. really interesting to read such an immediate reaction to chernobyl (the book came out less than a year after chernobyl). 2.5/5

the man in the high castle, philip k dick it was fine? quick & entertaining alternative history where the axis powers win the war, some interesting bits of worldbuilding (like the draining of the mediterranean which was apparently a real idea in the early 20th century?) but overall it’s just felt a bit disjointed & unsatisfying to me. 2.5/5

fugitive pieces, anne michaels very poetic & thoughtful novel about the holocaust, grief, remembrance & the difference between history and memory, intergenerational trauma, love, geology and the weather. i’m not sure how much this comes together as a novel, but it is absolutely beautifully written (the author is a poet as well) and very affective. 3.5/5

american innovations, rivka galchen short collection of bizarre & often funny short stories about neurotic women whose furniture flies away, or who grow an extra breast, or who are maybe too occupied with financial details. very vague & very precise at once, which seems to be the thing with these sort of collections. 3/5

fool’s assassin (fitz & the fool #1), robin hobb YAASS i’m back in the realm of the elderlings!!! i thought this was one of the weaker installments in the series - i still enjoyed it a lot, and Feelings were had, but it just doesn’t quite fit together pacing-wise & some of the characterisation struck me as off (can i get some nuance for shun & lant please?) and tbh fitz is at peak Selfcentred Dumbass Levels & it drove me up the fucking wall. molly, nettle & bee deserve better. still, completely HYPE for the rest of the trilogy. 3.5/5

JAMES JOYCE JULY

note: i decided not to read dubliners bc it’s my least fav of joyce’s major works & too bleak & repetitive for my mood right now AND while i planned not to reread finnegans wake bc……. it’s finnegans wake…. i kinda do want to read it now (but i also. really don’t.) so idk yet.

a portrait of the artist as a young man, james joyce y’all. i read this book at least once a year between the ages of 15 and 19, it’s beyond formative, it is burnt into my brain, and reading it now several years later it is still everything, soaring and searing (that searing clarity of truth, thanks burgess) and poetic and dirty, and stephen is baby, and a pretentious self-important little prick and i love him & i am him (or was him as only a pretentious self-important teenage girl reading joyce can be him - because this truly is a book that should be read in your late teens when you feel everything as intensely and world-endingly and severely as my boy stephen does and every new experience feels like the world changing). anyway i love this book & i love stephen dedalus, bird-like, hawk-like, knife-blade, aloof, alienated, severe and stern, a poet-priest-prophet if he could ever get over himself, baby baby baby. 5/5

exiles, james joyce well. there’s a reason joyce is known as a novelist. this is….. a failed experiment, maybe. a fairly boring play about an adulterous love-square and uh… love beyond morality and possession maybe??? about how much it would suck for joyce to return to ireland??? and tbh it’s not terribly interesting. 2/5

travesties, tom stoppard a wild funny irreverent & smart antic comedy inspired by the fact that during ww1, james joyce, lenin, and dadaist tristan tzara were all in neutral zurich, more or less simultaneously; they probably never met, but in this play they do, as dadaist poetry, socialist art critique, and a james joyce high on his own genius & in desperate need of some cash while writing ulysses, AND the importance of being earnest (joyce is putting on a production of it) all collide in the memories of henry carr, who played algernon & later sued joyce over money (tru facts). not my fav stoppard (that’s arcadia) but it’s funny & fizzy & smart & combines many many things that i love. 4/5 

ulysses, james joyce look i’m not really going to tell y’all anything new about ulysses, but it really has everything, it’s warm & human(e) & cerebral & difficult & funny & sad & healing & i always get a lot out of it even tho there’s bits (a lot of them) i’ll never wrap my head around. ultimate affirmation of humanity or whatever. also stephen dedalus is baby. 5/5

dedalus, chris mccabe the fact that this book (sequel to ulysses about what stephen dedalus might have done the next day) exists and was published ON MY BIRTHDAY is proof that the universe loves me. 

anyway this is very very good, very very clever, extremely good at stephen (less good at bloom but his parts are still good), engages w/ ulysses, portrait & hamlet (& others) very cleverly & does some cool meta and experimental shit. y’all it has stephen talking to a contemporary therapist about how he’s stuck in joyce’s text which is all about joyce & very little about whoever stephen is when he’s not joyce’s alter ego/affectionate but slightly amused look at younger self and ithaca is an interview w/ the author about how his relationship to his dad influenced his response to ulysses and I’M INTO IT. the oxen of the sun chapter replaces the whole ‘gestation of english prose’ w/ just slightly rewriting the first pages of about 10 novels published between ulysses and now & it does lolita w/ “bloom, thorn of stephen’s sleep, light in his eyes. his sire, his son’ and i lit. screamed. anyway i don’t want to give this 5 stars (yet) bc i think some of the experimental stuff ended up a bit gimmicky & didn’t add that much to the text but fuck. that’s my boy & i want to reread it right now. 4.5/5 ALSO it’s a crime no literary weirdo woman has written ‘a portrait of the artist’s sister’ about delia ‘dilly’ dedalus, shadow of stephen’s mind, quick far & daring, teaching herself french from a 3rd hand primer while her father drinks the nonexistent family fortune away and her older brother is getting drunk on a beach & starting fights w/ soldiers bc he’s a smartarse

[dontcallmecarrie]

Maybe it’s too early to ask, but I was wondering about what would happen if Maria managed to win against the Winter Soldier? Specifically, how would Howard react to the realization that he doesn’t know his wife (or son) at all?

So, this is entering kinda spoilery territory if you haven’t read the outline [it’s under both my LTTR and fic ideas tag, if you’re don’t mind said spoilers], but I will say that Howard’s survival was never in the cards, and neither is his finding out until the cold and bitter end. 

Also, this can be interpreted in various ways, thus the cut because I get rambly and you guys get multiple shatterpoints because there’s so many what-ifs to play with. Heads up for major spoilers, too, for the main AU, and at this rate I might end up playing with some of said shatterpoints too. 

Howard’s reaction to the reveal:

I kinda touched on it in his POV, but suffice it is to say that between his distancing himself from his family, alcoholism, and his lack of relationship with his son, Howard’s not exactly read in on the situation. Like, sure, he’s aware that his wife is from a small town somewhere in the Southwest, and she passed her tolerance for insanely hot food onto their son, but that’s about it. 

He was slightly curious about it a while back, but between his own demons and it sounding like some backwater place that’s probably nothing more than a corner store and a handful of buildings, well, he’s never really looked into it. Especially when he could be looking for Steve instead.

If you’re willing to deal with spoilers, then I will say that was more stunned by his wife showing her true colors than the discovery of the Winter Soldier. 

Because assassins, okay, comes with the territory, he’d known the risks that came with founding a Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency, plus makes sense that they’d go after one of the top weapons makers in the country. Sure, he was still not expecting to go out via an assassin who he recognized, but still.

On the other hand, he was not expecting his wife to throw a fireball singlehandedly. At all. And where the fuck did that machete even come from?! 

Howard knew his wife wasn’t like a normal civilian, not when she was all-but-running his company’s PR department with an efficiency that Peggy had commented on, not when she’d taken down that mugger the second time they’d met, but…he’d thought she was a civilian. He’d spent decades with her, had argued when it’d come up, thinking she was normal. 

So when Maria shoots him an apologetic look but continues fighting, continues doing her level best to give their attacker hell even if she’s pinned by the wreckage of the car, even if she’s already bleeding out as is, Howard’s in shock.

 The rug hasn’t been pulled out from under his feet, it turns out that rug didn’t even exist, and he doesn’t know what to do because suddenly he’s remembering how she’d reacted during dinners, reassessing every time she’d warmly hugged their son, and he’s coming up short. He sees the way she’s baring her teeth at the slowly oncoming assassin, and can’t help but make parallels to her smile, and the ease she’s commanding the shadows tells him more than words could ever say, and Howard just….can’t.

[If the Winter Soldier hadn’t killed him, he might just have died of a heart attack instead, is what I’m saying.]

Again, it was never in the cards for him to survive, when I started playing with this AU. 

However, if he had, they would’ve had a...talk, afterwards, which may or may not have devolved into a fight. 

If things had gone anther way and he’d reacted badly, and essentially rejected Maria:

 she would’ve packed up and taken her son, a change of clothes, and headed to Night Vale. Jarvis, of course, already had his own suitcase packed when he heard the raised voices. [The captured Winter Soldier also might or might not be tagging along, too.]

Of course, this one’s incredibly AU and we’d never see canon, since Howard’s paranoia would’ve skyrocketed after the double-reveal of both Maria’s more dangerous side and the Winter Soldier, which would’ve then led to HYDRA being discovered and eradicated. 

Especially since he’s diving into his work because there’s no one to go home to anymore, and he doesn’t know the first place to look because there’s no mention of Night Vale in any official registers and it’s like Maria and the rest just became ghosts. Part of him really regrets that fight, regrets how he’d treated his wife, the woman who saved his life, and another part of him hates her for taking his son from him [even if they’d never connected and how he’s wondering just what secrets Tony had] but he doesn’t know what to do anymore.

Steve would’ve been found and woken up to a Howard who was far older, hardened, and bitter than he last found him, and Stark Industries would’ve still been making weapons. 

Meanwhile, back in Night Vale, Maria and Tony and Jarvis are settling in just fine, and the Winter Soldier’s learning how to be human again in a place that by all rights should’ve been nothing less than re-traumatizing but is instead exactly what he needed. 

All in all, they’re kicking ass and taking names. 

Both literally and figuratively, because everyone in town knows Maria Carbonell and she doesn’t correct them on her last name [she’s pretty sure that last fight counts as a divorce, anyway, because Shit Went Down], Tony doesn’t either, and the Winter Soldier oscillates through various names as he’s figuring himself out, including Rami, Yakov, and Zosimos. 

They don’t really want to leave town, but when Thanos rocks up to try taking on Earth, the Carbonell household mobilizes. 

The Terror of the Time of Knives, plus a Tony who’s had even more exposure to Night Vale weirdness, plus a ready source of Librarians and a Woman From Italy, means the poor Mad Titan doesn’t stand a chance.

…then again, this might as well be another shatter point. uh-oh.

If Howard took it relatively well:

Yes, they still get in a fight. 

However, there’s also a lot of soul-searching going on, and Jarvis ends up making several liters of tea because the talk afterwards takes hours and the poor man is hearing his wife and son talk about all the assassinations attempts and kidnappings they’ve thwarted, and turns out he had nothing to worry about on that front. 

Tony and Howard’s relationship slowly goes from ‘hi, provider of y chromosome!’ to ‘you care about me? sounds fake but okay. at least mom’s happy now’ because Howard’s relearning everything he thought he knew about his son and it is a trip. 

Part of Howard’s horrified to realize the only reason Tony cares about him is because of Maria, and, on top of that, honestly thinks Howard doesn’t care for him. The rest of him is full of Regrets because how the fuck did he miss this?! 

Tony, for his part, is kinda indifferent. Sure, the guy who made a token appearance in his life is acting weird, but he’d get over it, right? 

Jarvis is in the back, debating about downing an aspirin or something for the headache he’s getting from the spectacle.

HYDRA gets found a lot earlier, especially since Maria’s degree in Communications is a bit of a misnomer and interrogating the captured Winter Soldier leads to a lot of shit going down very fast. 

Steve wakes up to a bored-looking but strangely familiar young man looking down at him and saying “hey your son’s awake” at—is that Howard? And…was he dead? Because there’s no way Bucky could be there swatting him on the arm, what was going on?

aka Steve’s introduction to the world is via the Stark-Carbonell household. 

also, Tony’s skewed idea of things means he honestly thinks Howard considers Steve his son, and Howard has yet to disprove him because the way he’s acting is only giving him more proof. Family showed their love in different ways, after all, and Howard’s constantly searching for Steve got interpreted accordingly.

Howard, meanwhile, is headdesking in the back because how the fuck did things get so convoluted? Where’d the signals get crossed?

Tony doesn’t resent Steve, because he doesn’t really care for Howard. 

Things happen, time passes, and miscommunication and headaches abound. 

Steve’s idea of the modern world gets pretty warped because he’s not leaving Bucky, and Bucky’s part of the household now too.

Thanos rocks up. It doesn’t end well. 

For Thanos, I mean.

As for if Maria had won:

Howard still died, seeing as you now have two shatterpoints where he didn’t. 

So, Maria wins, ever-so-narrowly, because she’s the Terror of the Time of Knives and she’s taken on assassins since she was a teenager. 

However, she’s also furious, and grieving, because she won but her husband was dead. And sure, they’d had their rough moments, had fought time and time again, but she’d caught the look of shock and betrayal on Howard’s face, and she’d been so, so close to him but hadn’t been able to protect him, what sort of wife was she? 

And what was she going to do now? Howard was dead, it was just her now, left to run the company and manage his affairs and everything. There’s so much that needs to be done, and she can’t just leave it all to Tony, he’s not even of age yet!

Tony, for his part, feels slightly guilty in how little his father’s death hurt. Because his mom was hurting, but…he never really knew the man, and his death doesn’t really impact him?

Like, when he’d gotten the phone call about the car accident, all he’d cared about was that his mother was alive and everything else had been secondary. 

So, Howard’s dead, and she’s managed to capture the assassin, but that’s not everything she needs to worry about now. Suddenly Maria’s scrambling to keep everything together, keep everything running smoothly, and she’s happy she trained the PR department well because right now there’s blood in the water.

After all, Howard Stark’s trophy wife is now the owner of the company, should be easy pickings, right? 

The discovery that no, actually, Maria Stark was as formidable as her husband in the board room was a nasty shock to many of their competitors [even if the company took an unexpected turn at times].

Not just there, either—because someone wanted her husband dead, and succeeded, so Maria Stark née Carbonell is on the warpath because she failed once at protecting her family, like hell she’s about to do it again.

aka HYDRA burns in short order, and Obadiah Stane vanishes mysteriously because this is supposed to be a happier AU

Tony’s working on his second doctorate and helping the man currently calling himself Yakov and laughing at everyone who’s shocked by how competent his mom is. 

Time passes, Tony takes up the reins under less pressure than he was under in canon. Maria finally takes her vacation, and Tony becomes the Merchant of Death. 

aka the world discovers he actually takes after his mother, and goes “oh shit”

In all universes, however, Thanos arrives and regrets trying for the Earth in short order. [Turns out that invading a place that’s been gearing up for a Blood-Space War does not end well.]