You're Tuned In To Radio Circa 1981

Just finished: A Sorceress Comes To Call by T. Kingfisher. I ended up really loving this one. Reading all these award-nominated books has been a fascinating experience tbh, because (with a few notable exceptions) it's all pretty high-quality, but it's just off enough from what I'd normally read that I get to speculate about where my taste deviates from other people's. Also, because this has the worst book cover I've seen in awhile—to be clear, I've seen three covers for this and they all suck—but imo is much better than the other things I've read by her so far.

Anyway, as to the actual content. This is a dark retelling of the Grimm Brothers' "Goose Girl," which I had never heard of before, and which is already quite dark, seeing as it features the severed head of a murdered horse. It actually doesn't have much to do with the original story beyond involving a horse, a flock of geese, and some unfortunate marriage proposals. But the fairy tale frame and vaguely Regency setting is one of its strengths—Kingfisher is free to do a lot of interesting character work within that structure.

Case in point: Hester. I mentioned that the story was about Cordelia and her mother Evangeline, the aforementioned sorceress, but Cordelia is really a decoy protagonist, and the heroine of the story is Hester, the sister of the man that Evangeline intends to marry. Hester is 51 with a bad knee and a cane and has refused marriage to the man she's loved for years because she values her independence. She plays cards with a group of other badass middle-aged ladies and takes zero shit. I love her. The story is really the story of solidarity between women, from Hester and her friends, to Cordelia pushing back in any way she can against her mother's abuse and expectations of marriage for her, to the maids and servants of the household. Also it has the right level of darkness for something like this—there was a genuine sense of peril that I haven't seen in a lot of the horror-adjacent works I've read lately.

Currently reading: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I think (unless the last book I have to read is amazing), this is going to end up being a Tchaikovsky-vs-Tchaikovsky decision for me with the Hugos. So far this one is edging out Service Model on concept alone, but I'm under halfway through, so we'll see. It's about a dissident scientist exiled to one of three newly discovered exoplanets, called Kiln. Earth is ruled by the Mandate, which believes in strict social control and scientific orthodoxy. Arton is an unreliable first-person narrator, so while he initially seems to have been exiled for following the scientific method to is logical conclusions, he quickly reveals that no, he was also a political revolutionary.

The journey from Earth to Kiln takes 30 years and is one-way for the prisoners sent to work there, which means that the Mandate is able to tightly control information about it—namely, that there are alien ruins on the planet, so not only does it have life, but it had at least at one point sentient life. Also, the life that they do find is Jeff Vandermeer-level fucked—each organism is made up of a bunch of other organisms that live in parasitic relationships, making taxonomy a nightmare. Arton occupies a difficult position where, as a biologist, he has a certain level of privilege amongst the prisoners and is exposed to less danger than most, but also he's linked up with the more revolutionary elements and has nothing to lose but a nasty death by rebelling.

Anyway, this is really cool and I'm into it.

Always remember that if they had the money to bomb Iran, they had the money for universal healthcare, affordable housing, USAID, even egg subsidies if y'all* were so hell-bent on cheap eggs that you'd elect a fascist.

( cut for some impolite thoughts )

* Not you, obviously. Or you wouldn't be reading my blog, which has beaten the "don't invade other countries" drum since the early 2000s when I started it.

The Electronic Intifada:
- Ceasefire Day 5: Bringing genocide perpetrators to justice
This is from the end of January but it’s still very interesting. The EI podcast is pretty insufferable (Nora Barrows-Friedman and Jon Elmer manage to be even more obsequious towards Hamas than Ali Abunimah, which is quite something) but it’s still quite informative. They bring on Dyab Abou Jahjah, co-founder of the Hind Rajab Foundation, to discuss the legal strategies that they will try to use to make IDF soldiers accountable abroad for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza. They have a three-pronged approach, one of which has already freaked out Israel and forced them to smuggle citizens out of the countries they were visiting so they could save face, but the other tactics have a longer time horizon and will probably challenge how far justice systems can go on these questions in many countries.

- My imprisonment in Switzerland, with Ali Abunimah
Abunimah went to Switzerland in January, after having managed to get the Schengen ban that Germany had stuck on him last year lifted. He entered the country with no problem, but then Switzerland retroactively revoked his entry, kidnapped him on the street, and then kept him imprisoned for a few days. He recounts the whole tale. He was treated relatively well other than the detention, but it's still a chilling event.

Tech Won't Save Us - How Cloud Giants Cement Their Power w/ Cecilia Rikap
The show’s own synopsis: “Paris Marx is joined by Cecilia Rikap to discuss the ways Amazon, Microsoft, and Google gain power from companies becoming dependent on their cloud services and how generative AI exacerbates that problem.” There are vertical and horizontal leverage opportunities for the cloud infrastructure and AI providers, and that includes Facebook to a certain degree as well, even though it’s not in the cloud business.


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#PodcastFriday is a tag where people recommend a particularly good episode from a podcast. The point of this tag is NOT to recommend entire podcasts--there are too many podcasts out there, and our queues are already too long, so don't do that. Let's just recommend the cream of the crop, the episodes that made you *brainsplode* or laugh like crazy. Copy this footer so people don't start recommending whole podcasts. :P

 Listen this is the best episode of a podcast you'll listen to all week. Maybe ever. In this podcast lies the seed of all other podcasts.

The Aurora-nominated podcast Wizards & Spaceships episode "The Ur-Pisode: The Queer Heart of The Epic of Gilgamesh, ft. Julian Gunn" is about the Epic of Gilgamesh (obviously), why it still matters after 4000 years, and most importantly, why Tablet XII is canon despite what homophobic translators have done with it over the past century or so. It's so good you guys. It makes me happy every time I listen to it. radiantfracture is just one of the most brilliant people I know and hearing him geek out about this is a delight you won't want to miss.

I am happy to report that Palestine is one of the most salient litmus tests on the dating apps these days. People with explicitly political profiles will obviously mention it, but amongst people who have profiles which otherwise just mention their personal interests, it's either explicitly named or referred to by 🍉. Conversely, though in numbers 10 times smaller, some people will mention not being of the watermelon persuasion.

 Just finished: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This one was really fun. I have three more Hugo nominees to read but so far this is on top. There's something weirdly quaint about it—it's a girl and her robot story, or rather, a robot and his girl story, these two absolute oddballs wandering a post-human wasteland on a quest for meaning, and I can read like a thousand stories with this concept and not get bored if the author pulls it off. Which I think Tchaikovsky does. IMO his stuff either floats your boat or it doesn't but I find him incredibly fun and humanist and this was a delight.

UpRising by Kelly Rose Pflug-Back (ed.). This is an ARC and I don't know when it's coming out, but when it does, you should read it. It's an anthology, mostly poetry, about mad pride/mad liberation and most of the writing is stunning. It's dark stuff—besides the mental illness, there's addiction, homelessness, police brutality, and so on—but written with unbridled passion and compassion. Interestingly enough, there's a story by A.G.A. Wilmot in it (the author of Withered, which I went on a big rant about last week). As with that book, the protagonist is asexual and has an eating disorder but there's nothing cozy about the story and it was actually one of the highlights for me.

How To Write a Fantasy Battle by Suzannah Rowntree. Another ARC, this is a short little book that is exactly what it says on the package. For reasons, this is pretty relevant to my interests right now, though it focuses more on medieval-style warfare than, say, urban guerrilla fighting but with wizards. That said, it is an accessible walk through the big concepts that apply to a number of different settings, using examples from the Crusades to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Super useful, well-written, and even entertaining.

Currently reading: A Sorceress Comes To Call by T. Kingfisher. I just started this one. It's about a girl named Cordelia who grows up with a, shall we say overbearing?? mother. Who is able to make her "obedient"—basically paralyzed, mute, and silent at will. She's not allowed to close her door, and her only joy in life is riding her horse, which her mother approves of because it'll help her get a suitor. She befriends a girl in town who also likes riding. That's about as far as I've gotten. Very creepy so far, though, I'm intrigued.

Chester Brown’s Paying For It, his autobiographical account of being a john, is a bit of a Canadian comics classic, and I had wanted to read it for a while. Sook-Yin Lee (former VJ, eclectic Canadian artist/personality), who was his girlfriend at the beginning of the book and has remained an indefatigable supporter, decided to bring the comic to the screen. The film came out this spring, and I wanted to read the comic before seeing it. Finally it came through the holds queue recently.

( it's long, sorry )

Oh yeah and I think I forgot to write, regarding romantic relationships, that Brown doesn't address polyamory at all. Not surprising, but his thing about marriage being a liberty-infringing contract is blown up by ENM. Anyway...

Standard disclaimer: I am not involved in any of this. Discussions of protest tactics are purely speculative; this is not legal advice, and if you commit an actual crime, don't post about it.
 
Courtesy of a friend who may identify themselves if they choose (thank you!) I read this article in Mother Jones about the No Sleep For ICE movement and can't help constrasting it with the #NoKings protest. Not that I'd want to disparage the latter—I think it's awesome that people did it!—but the former is an example of the kinds of tactics that we increasingly need to see.

I have a number of issues with protest marches, especially in North America. We on the left tend towards reification of historical protest movements without ever analyzing what made them effective (or not). A good example locally is the Days of Action, a series of rolling one-day strikes against the extremist right-wing government of Mike Harris in 1996. These were a resounding failure. Mike Harris and his regime steamrolled over the labour movement in Ontario, which never recovered, and despite being directly responsible for a number of deaths, continues to enrich himself by running gulags for seniors. However, these protests were loud, colourful, and most importantly, made people feel like they were Doing Something. Again—it's important to make people feel like they are Doing Something, that is how movements get built. But when a new far-right regime was elected in Ontario, the entire strategy of the labour movement pivoted to re-enact a protest movement that had been an abject failure, and so we lost again, repeatedly and even harder. 

I had the same issue with Occupy, where what had been a successful tactic in Egypt and New York was exported around the world, without regard to local conditions. It resulted in one baffling morning spent wandering the Toronto encampment, where a lone speaker used the People's Mic to communicate with five comrades. The aesthetics of protest triumphed over the old-fashioned idea that protest ought to accomplish something.

Now we are seeing LARPing of the kind of mass demos that have been happening since the 1960s, most of them failures, as the authorities are quite competent in curtailing this kind of activism, either by assassinating political opponents, kettling demonstrators, or conducting mass surveillance to be used in future disappearances. The great success of #NoKings is the theoretical embarrassment for Trump of seeing his own sad, empty birthday parade dwarfed by crowds in nearly every American city and town. To be clear—this is a success, as Trump cares a great deal about crowd numbers. But this is a regime immune to reality and shame, and entirely capable of generating AI slop to convince the death cult members that what they saw with their own eyes wasn't true.

Which is to say: It's good, it's useful, but now the tactics need to change.

To contrast, No Sleep is very targeted in its strategy and goals. Let's be clear: Every employee of ICE is a human trafficker. They should not be allowed to return to their homes and communities after a day's work, because that day's work is Nazi shit. Targeting them where they live and sleep is critical. It reminds us that these are not normal people who are doing a job, but instruments of a police state who are conducting activities that are unreservedly evil and socially unacceptable. It is a reminder both to them and anyone who cooperates with the Trump regime that, in fact, "just following orders" is famously not a defence at the Hague. Most importantly, though, it introduces friction between the regime's aims and its outcomes, rendering it less effective in kidnapping and disappearing people.

I think we are all thinking: "I am exhausted. I can't fight everything all at once. Where are my energies best spent?" At least, I'm thinking that. This is deliberate; this is flooding the zone, making the laundry list of bad things come so fast and furious that opponents don't have time to recover from one fight before we're thrown into another. It's very tempting to get enmeshed in weekend street demos—for one thing, for those of us who work, they can be done on the weekend—but I would encourage everyone to participate in them with an eye to what they're useful for and what they're not useful for. Remember that surveillance will be gathered on you no matter how careful you are. If you or your comrades get arrested, movement resources will need to be directed towards your defence (and you will be dragged through hell because even if you did nothing wrong, the point of charges is to destroy your employment, finances, and relationships). Stay on the lookout for smaller, more agile actions that can add friction, rather than big showy events. Don't get caught up in violence vs. nonviolence discourse, or crowd numbers.

The answer to "where are my energies best spent" is always, "whatever you can do," which for me tends to be above-ground, legal actions on the weekends. This has different significance locally because our supposedly socialist mayor who used to go to protests passed a protest ban, so imo all protest energies in Toronto ought to at least focus a little on breaking this ban so that we can all get our Charter rights back. But this may not be the conditions where you are.

Also stop using the Hey Ho chant. It reminds me of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves but instead of marching over a log, they're walking headfirst into a police baton.

It thinks I might want to go date in the suburbs. Or even the greater Toronto area. What's wrong with this app. It even asked me if I own a car and said no. I can't go there, and the people are scary.

Mike Duncan has finished telling his Martian Revolution volume. sabotabby I don't know if you listened to his interview on It Could Happen Here, but if you were worried about events in your writing happening in real life before publishing your story, imagine publishing a weekly speculative historical fiction podcast where events in real life catch up with your narrative week by week... :P

Duncan has switched to Patreon as his publishing platform, and now there is a discussion thread where he mingles with listeners/fans. He revealed that he was thinking about writing this Martian Revolution fiction throughout the 10 years he spent doing the Revolutions podcast. So that kind of explains why he was able to write the damn thing week by week as he did, (I mean he did plan the big lines of it ahead of time) but holy cow. That was a magnificent story, especially if you have been a listener of the podcast, or if you have good revolutionary history knowledge in general, because you can pick up many references to other revolutions, and I probably didn't even catch two thirds of them. But there was a LOT of the Russian Revolution infused in this story.

For all of you holdouts who haven't ever listened to the podcast, just listen to one episode per week... Start at 3.1 as even Duncan himself recommends, and even though the French Revolution is too many damn episodes, it's worth stretching the pleasure over time. I think I was consuming about 2-3 episodes a week for a long time, so I only caught up to its weekly release a year or two ago, in the middle of his 10th volume (the Russian Revolution) and I was also catching up on his seven years of History of Rome as well, though I did not pay as much attention to that one.

Maybe I should start a Révolution Weeklé, like Whale Weekly, to get more people to tackle it... *cough*

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A friend is planning on starting a Capital vol. 1 reading group, and he asked me if I would read it in French so I could provide a different perspective... Weee! (I first turned him down because I think in English these days, but Marx personally supervised the French translation, rewrote some bits of it, and eventually told Russian translators that they should use the French translation rather than the original German to base their own translation on! So I will read it in French after all.

David Harvey has a course (a recording of which I have as a podcast) teaching Capital... In an interview, he was discussing how he has taught Capital for like 30 years, but not always at the same school, and even in the same school, the cohort of students he would get would change in terms of personal interests and areas of study, so every time he has taught the course, students have been picking up on different parts of the book and/or had different perspectives to bring to it. Imagine how interesting that must be.

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After listening to 10 years of podcasting on 10 different Revolutions, I do wonder though why revolutionaries (and many of their arm-chair wannabes) still focus so much on Marx. I mean I understand that he's a phenomenal writer and the finest analyst of capitalism and all that, but in the end, revolutions, even the Russian one, didn't quite happen because of a good grasp of Marxist theory. Marx /followed/ the French revolution, the mother of all the other modern ones. The Cuban Revolution didn't have much of a Marxist character until the U.S. started opposing Castro and forced them in the hands of the Soviets, along with Ché's own inclinations. I mean the end of the Cold War means that there's a lot fewer people focusing on Marx today, but he's still a big deal in many university revolutionary/activist circles, one of which I am somewhat adjacent to thanks to F.

I dunno, why not make yourself more anxious this week. It Could Happen Here has the ability to send James Stout, an experienced war journalist, to LA to cover the uprising against ICE kidnappings. There's a lot of coverage in today's episode, which I'm currently listening to, but for detailed reporting, listen to "On the Ground in LA."

The scale of the so-called riots will surprise you—they surprised me, and I've been to LA. It's a very big city and unlike during the wildfires, very little of it is actually on fire. The uprisings, which are direct responses to people's families, neighbours, and colleagues being kidnapped by an out-of-control paramilitary organization, are actually only a few thousand people. Which is not to denigrate the bravery of those people—quite the opposite!—but to poke holes in the regime's propaganda.

P.S. If you are going to a protest this weekend, please ignore that "non-violent wave" thing and other similar memes going around. It is an op. If violence erupts and you do not want to be involved, don't sit down. Get out of there. I do not want to see a generation of young protestors with traumatic brain injuries, please. Also avoid bridges (don't let yourself get kettled or arrested en masse), and if you get teargassed, use water, not milk or anything else. Stay safe, I love you.

On the Nose - What Ta-Nehisi Coates Saw
What Now? with Trevor Noah - Have We Missed The Message? with Ta-Nehisi Coates

Two Ta-Nehisi Coates interviews on his book The Message: One with Peter Beinart, and one with Trevor Noah. One more focused on Israel as a political site of struggle in the USA, the other more on Blackness. The discussion on the exchange between Africans and African-Americans on Black identity is particularly interesting, esp. with these two guys having the conversation. It's such a pleasure listening to Coates and hear his thoughts pop in your head. If you just want to listen to one interview, listen to the Trevor Noah one, but there is little overlap.

So I'm catching up to Andor Season 2, and listened to It Could Happen Here's Andor s02e1-3 review episode. Totally worth it! The bit about the Nazi simulacrum was quite a revelation, and the discussion about leftist infighting was amusing.

sabotabby and a former LJer whose old alias I forget brought to my attention, from a Variety interview, that Diego Luna used to volunteer for the Zapatistas. As side notes, Denise Gough is a full-blown supporter of Palestine, and Tony Gilroy a listener of the Revolutions podcast, so this is a pretty awesome crew.

The only huge letdown is that Luna reveals that he talked Tony Gilroy down from doing 5 seasons to 2. What a fool.