Chestnut_pod

Tiny book post

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 06:33:31 GMT

Mostly making this post so I can say "thank you" to the kind anonymous individual who gifted me 6 months of paid DW time. Maybe you are a generalized good Samaritan, or maybe you meant to give me a gift to lift the heart, but either way, it did: thanks.

The Draw of the Sea, by Wyl Menmuir

A series of essays about the Cornish coastline and sea, ranging from personal/memoiristic topics, through something like science journalism, to potted histories of e.g. smuggling. Often evocative and informative about some aspects of the Cornish conservation movement, but missing that spark that makes the top tier of nature writing.

We Breed Lions: Confronting Canada's Troubled Hockey Culture, by Rick Westhead

Troubling indeed. A wide-ranging, historically informed overview of Canadian semi-pro youth hockey and its many, many problems, especially its tendency to produce totally consequence-free misogynists and sexual abusers. Grim as hell from start to finish, but I was impressed by Westhead’s mix of persistence, meticulousness, and sympathy.

The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women, ed., trans., and intro by Dick Davis

What it says! I really appreciated the introductory material by Dick Davis, which gave me the context I needed to begin to appreciate his selection of Persian women’s poetry from the 10th century to the present day. Davis also translated these poems, most of them for the first time, which is a major undertaking. I know (mostly from Mimi Khalvati) the intricacy of Persian classical poetry’s formal requirements, and Davis chose to try to preserve that in meter and rhyme, but I couldn’t help but feel that the way that comes across in English is significantly more lighthearted and blunt than what I could grasp of the intended tone of some of the poems. However, I enjoyed the process of discovery and really enjoyed a lot of the 20th century writers introduced towards the end. There’s also an audiobook version! All poetry benefits from being read aloud.

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Artistic apotheosis, aka Royal Ballet Giselle, Nuñez/Bracewell, 02/14/2026

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 04:18:24 GMT

I wasn’t sure how I would be affected by seeing Marianela Nuñez dance the title role in Giselle. Would I start crying at the first strain of overture, vibrate out of my seat, tunnel-vision on the stage, or what? As it turned out, I just became quietly, completely rapt, from start until much-too-soon finish.

( Read more... )

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How to Like Ballet, Part 4

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 18:21:30 GMT

This is the fourth and final part of my four-part ~series~ about how to get started as a ballet fan! (I, II, III, IV.) In part one, I summarized the lay of the land and all the different ways you can see different kinds of ballet. In part two, I proposed three different “ways in” for a curious beginner. In part three, I provided recommendations for how to pick a ballet in alignment with your tastes. Now, finally, I will give a few pointers on how to watch ballet from the audience.

This was by far the most difficult post to write. When people ask me, “How do I enjoy ballet?” I get the sense that they’re really asking me something along the lines of, “How do I look at a painting and make sure I think it’s beautiful?” That’s an unanswerably subjective question! Meanwhile, the usual answers balletomanes give to that question are really less about appreciating beauty and more about assessing technique: what’s easy but looks difficult, what’s difficult but looks easy, what is acceptable vs sublime turnout or extension, how can you tell if a pirouette is centered or a partner strong. That’s interesting, but not really helpful for someone who just wants to figure out the equivalent of how to “get” Rothko.

However, more helpfully, I think that fundamental question is also an expression of a kind of alienation: a reaction to the very personal, embodied experience of dance suddenly being externalized and presented as visual art. (Visual art with cultural baggage, at that.) Alienation, I can work with! With that in mind, I came up with a hopefully helpful list of how to look at ballet in such a way as to break down the proscenium a little and open yourself up to finding beauty.

Techniques for Looking

One of the things I’ve head from people with difficult with ballet is overwhelm. Often, there is a lot going on onstage: multiple dancers, elaborate sets and costumes, the score over all of it. My first tip is: Don’t try to pay attention to everything at once. Give bursts of your attention to individual aspects, or lock in on one aspect for longer stretches. Focus your eyes differently. Unfocus them to take in the whole stage, covered in large-scale patterns made by many dancers. Focus closely on one particular dancer, whether the star or someone who catches your eye in the corps. Pick a favorite for an arbitrary reason, and follow that dancer around. Take a moment to appreciate the detail on a costume or an element of the set. Focus on a dancer’s feet, then on their arms, then on their face. Try to enjoy what you’re looking at in that moment, without regretting what you’re missing.

With luck, you actually won’t miss much, because ballet benefits from structured patterns and repetition. Knowing that, in classical ballet, steps and short sequences often repeat in threes can help reduce your anxiety that you might “miss something,” and give you a chance to absorb nuances in the repetitions that you missed the first time around. I think there’s something innately satisfying about things that repeat, so pay attention to things that happen again and again. Many corps-heavy pieces have canons, where, similarly to in music, different groups of dancers will perform the same or similar steps in sequence at slightly different times. Steps will also repeat across time: choreographic leitmotifs you can learn to recognize and pick out as being relevant to characterization, or just cool to spot. Small, repeated gestures often reveal a character’s thoughts.

Appreciate contrast. Contrast provides visual interest and tension. Ballet is very dualistic. One mainstay of balletic technique visible in individual dancers is the juxtaposition between a soft, flowing, rounded upper body and sharp, quick, angular legs. Appreciate how the dancer’s body contains both these qualities at once. A dancer may also take risks with depicting extreme emotionality, but remain safely in control of their body. There is also contrast between dancers: in paired dances, see how the two dancers’ contrasting body positions create new shapes they could not make individually. One character onstage may demonstrate a movement quality different from the other dancers, like the flitting Firebird among the writhing monsters, or a regal Queen Hermione nobly en pointe among the flat-footed courtiers. Dancers may contrast with the set around them. Take in the ghostliness of white dresses against black backgrounds, or the brilliance of a tutu against a plain backdrop. Finally, the choreography will likely expand and contract along with the music, like breaths, moving between moments of effusion and moments of withdrawal or quietude. See if you can fit yourself to that breath-like rhythm.

Along the lines of contrasting positions in pair dances, think about the dance as extending beyond the bodies of the dancers to form impressions of lines and shapes. An excellent example is the arabesque: a dancer standing on one leg with another leg raised at 90˚ behind them does not look like ࿓, but the space around them does. The arabesque is to be found by tracing around the dancer from their pendant head, up and over the slope of the back, and out along the extended leg into space. At the same time, lifting the leg to arabesque or even farther describes a quarter circle and then a half moon in the air. An outstretched arm throws a long line across the stage. A partner balancing a ballerina helps create a diagonal that crosses both their bodies and reaches for the rafters. A dancer approaches a step, “lengthens” through it, and comes softly out of it, “flowing through” almost a preexisting mold hovering in the air where their body was.

That sense of flow also has to do with appreciating musicality and phrasing. How does the dancer’s body relate to the music? One easy thing to notice is how the dancer is accenting the beats of the music with their body. Are they on the beat, ahead of the beat, or behind the beat? Being right on the beat is punchy and exciting, a dancer ahead of the beat is creating the music as they dance, and a dancer behind the beat is being controlled and conducted by the music. This, too, is a place to look for contrast in the form of counterpoint. The dancer may be resisting the music, creating moments of surprise, or following it, creating a sense of ease, satisfaction — or dread, if the music is right. Different parts of their body (or of the corps of multiple dancers) might be emphasizing different instrumental lines in the music, say the woodwinds with their soft arms and the rhythmic strings with their quick feet. Some dance strives for unison with the music, and it is beautiful when it happens, so try to notice it.

Like in a play, everything onstage happens for a reason. Some dance postmodernly rejects any attempts at meaning, but most dance, even abstract dance, at least gestures at theme. Many steps and movements are metaphorical or symbolic. Let your imagination run free. Is the circle of dancers or the individual’s spin a reference to cycles, such as of the seasons, the hours, or enchantments? Are the lifts representative of trust between partners, or symbolic elevation of one above the other? Steps can reveal emotional truth through this symbolism. Is that pattern of dancers doing the same step in unison like a broken mirror, or a flower unfurling? Often this is intentional, but if you think that a leap looks like a plane taking off, and you like that image, stick with it and see what other connections come to you.

I will say, if there is mime, do learn the mime. There is a fairly small repertoire of accepted mime motions, and it is best to know what they mean, because it literally tells the story. Here's a video explaining some basic ballet mime.

Apart from mime and metaphors, much ballet goes in for actual illusions. Do your best to believe in the illusions. The drifting tulle skirts, long extensions, and deep pliés in Romantic ballet really are there to make you believe the Wilis, sylphs, and nymphs are floating above the ground. The Swan Lake arms are really there to make you believe the ballerinas fly on their beating wings. Give yourself over to the impressions. For floating illusions, there’s something about how dancers contact the floor that really makes them work; try to believe in the space between their feet and the boards. Maybe even unfocus your eyes a little, or look away from the feet. Keep in mind those extended shapes, shapes around the body, and flows of energy — where can the interaction between the dancer and the scenario trick your eyes? The more you give yourself over to them, the more magical they are.

Similarly, pay attention to the dancers’ faces and eye-lines. Where are they looking? Gazes can create a long line of energy beyond their physical body. Matching gazes can emphasize solidarity in a corps, while disjuncture emphasizes disunity between a couple. Downcast eyes shrink a dancer’s presence, while breaking the proscenium barrier makes them suddenly almost frightening, or funny. The eyes are where you connect with the humanity of dance and where character becomes emotionally real.

Beyond the gaze, look for the community. Some choreographers, like Jerome Robbins, excel at creating a sense of loving togetherness on stage, but even the most formalistic gridded corps dances provide a sense of deep solidarity. Appreciate the way the dancers exchange energy among them through touch, through the intersection of those extra-physical lines and shapes, through their gazes, and through sharing space and steps. Become part of that community as you watch.

Some Examples

A danseur raises a ballerina above his head in time with the swell of the orchestra. The music and the upward motion blend. The two dancers combine their lines to form a shape like a Y. The angles of the ballerina’s upwardly pointed arms and legs imply lines all the way up through the air around her, creating visual lift bigger than their bodies alone and dividing the proscenium space. Perhaps some small motions of her hands and wrists accentuate the ornamental trills that ride above the main thrust of the music, which was recognized by the hoist. The ballerina is physically above her danseur; is she also being positioned as emotionally, morally, or spiritually above him? Or is this a sign that her partner supports her and lifts her up, as romantic love is supposed to do? Is this a ballet where she is literally flying?

A group of corps women in long white dresses, stark against the dark set, move smoothly on trembling pointes from a grid into a circle, which rotates. The step they’re performing, the bourrée, together with their long skirts drifting in their wake, hides the motion of their feet and makes them appear to be floating, inhuman and airy. The sound of their hard pointe shoes on the floor actually adds a kind of drone note to the orchestration, mildly unsettling. The rigidity of the grid gives way to the endless softness of a circle. The circle, however, also spins without end, for a sense of inexorability or eternity. The dancers do not look towards the audience, emphasizing their otherworldliness and disconnection from us, but their identical motions make clear their solidarity with one another.

A danseur jumps incredibly high, does switch-splits in the air, and lands on one knee, tossing in a backbend so deep his head almost touches the floor. He’s wearing a golden mesh crop top. Just enjoy it. Sometimes, awesome acrobatics are awesome acrobatics.

The short takeaways:

Watch dance actively.
Shift your attention between large-scale patterns and individual details.
Enjoy what you do see, and don’t stress about what you might be missing.
Appreciate the tension and resolution of ballet’s simultaneous tendency towards contrast and repetition.
Maintain awareness of the relationship between dancers and the music.
Be open to metaphorical or symbolic understandings of movement, and to illusion.
Understand the dance as transcending the limits of the dancers’ bodies, visually and socially.
Cool tricks are cool.

The more frequently you watch ballet, the more you will master these skills. You will also begin to gain the knowledge you need to be interested in ballet, as well as aesthetically compelled by it. There is so much more that I could have talked about from “the next level up” — what choreography can do for “texture” by using steps at different heights, the emotional minutiae of epaulment and arm carriage, the mastery revealed by precise motions and weight placement, the delight of comparing different casts — and all that is also available to the casual watcher who learns to love to watch. As with all art, the more you can give to it, the more it will meet you in the middle.

I love ballet, and I hope this series can give some people a way in that they otherwise wouldn’t have taken. I hope it might also inspire some people, even those who decide ballet isn’t for them after all, to try out some other forms of dance, or to look at other physical arts, like theater, in a different way. If you do take my advice and try out some ballet, let me know! I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

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How to Like Ballet, Part 3

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 16:29:37 GMT

This is the third part of my three-part ~series~ (I, II, III, IV) about how to get started as a ballet fan! In part one, I summarized the lay of the land and all the different ways you can see different kinds of ballet. In part two, I proposed three different “ways in” for a curious beginner. Now, I am providing recommendations for how to set yourself up for success as a ballet viewer: picking a ballet to watch live and enjoy!

First, a few quick reminders about ballet:

Ballet encompasses many different styles, themes, and approaches.
It shouldn’t be shockingly expensive to see a show, and there are ways to actually make it relatively cheap.
Ballet rewards thought, and it also rewards, “Omg so cool.”

So. Perhaps you have a local company which has a traditional repertory season with a handful of ballets per year, or maybe you live near a university or performing arts center which has touring companies cycle through. Maybe you’re planning some travel, and want to pick a time where you can see a show. What should you watch?

Step 1: What Music Do You Like?

Good music elevates already-excellent choreography to celestial levels, and bad music can bring even exceptional dancing down with a thud. Thus, for a new person, making sure that the score of your first ballet is something you find pleasant is perhaps the most important guarantor of an enjoyable experience. It’s also insurance: Even if the dancing is a dud, you want to be able to say to yourself at curtain-close, “Well, at least a live orchestra played me some great music!”

Season notices will always include the composer and music alongside the title and choreographer, so except for the very newest commissioned scores, you will always be able to know the music ahead of time. Definitely look this up alongside plot synopses before choosing.

Not all ballet music is “classical music.” (In fact, in the strictest sense, almost no ballet music is Classical™; the invention of the modern art form coincides with the Romantic movement in Western Classical music.) Most ballet music is instrumental, from a variety of time periods right up to the present. Instrumental music is more likely to be played live by an orchestra and/or soloist, which I feel enriches the experience. However, not all ballet scores are strictly instrumental; some are lyrical (bel canto or pop), and some contemporary ballets have avant-garde soundscapes instead of music per se. This is another area where ballet is very diverse, and if you are willing to wait, Your Jam will eventually arrive, whether that’s Chopin, Bernstein, industrial house, RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan, or Rhiannon Giddens.

In general, “the classics” will have Romantic-era purpose-made scores. Neoclassical ballets are strongly associated with repurposed classical music (in the general sense). Contemporary ballets are wildcards where you are likely to find “pop” music of the last hundred years or so, but also spoken word about Dolly the sheep or modern harpsichord compositions. I will explain these category terms in a moment.

If you’re invested less in tailoring to your exact tastes, but just want The Ultimate Ballet Experience, there are scores which are considered to be “the best” on a purely musical level. These are the purpose-written scores by Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and, first and foremost, Tchaikovsky. They are all extremely good!

So, first step: pick a ballet with music you like, or at least vet your choice based on its music.

Step 2: Narrative or Non-Narrative?

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of ballets*: those which tell a story, and those which do not. Both happily coexist in the ballet ecosystem and have done for a long time, so there is much to choose from in each camp.

Ballets vary along another axis as well. Both narrative and non-narrative ballets have choreography which is either classical (using traditional ballet steps) or contemporary (using exaggerated, extreme, and more cross-pollinated steps based on ballet but not strictly restrained to the “canon” of positions and potentially incorporating movements from other forms of dance). In the middle is a compromise style known as neoclassical, which are ballets made in the 20th century or later using mostly classical ballet steps, but with more freedom of expression and more ways of linking the steps together.

*(There is another term in common use, “abstract ballet,” which is helpful once you get the gist, but it’s a fuzzy concept. “Abstract” almost always means non-narrative when describing an entire piece, but people may also use it to describe a non-narrative part of an overall-narrative ballet, like a corps dance which is there as a showpiece and doesn’t move the plot forward. It often connotes a more contemporary or at least neoclassical choreographic style, but again, someone might talk about “abstract elements” in very classical ballets like Sleeping Beauty.)

In short, there is a kind of matrix, which I had fun making: Ballet-Type Quadrants

If you need a plot and characters to hook into your media, choose a narrative ballet. If you are more into the pure artistry of dance as a visual medium, select a non-narrative ballet. If you love precision and Vitruvian elegance, go for a classical piece, but if you are more compelled by sinuous, muscular motion, choose contemporary ballets. If you want a little of everything, find a neoclassical ballet.

Step 3: Evening-Length or Mixed Bill?

All of these types of ballet will come in various lengths. Ballets are grouped into three primary length categories:

“Evening-length” or “full-length” ballets, which run 90 minutes to 3 hours;
“One-act” ballets which are usually 20-40 minutes long; and
Short or “gala” pieces which can be as short as a minute or two.

“Evening-length” ballets, as the name suggests, will be the only thing on the bill, with at least one, but possibly as many as three, intermissions between acts. “One-acts” will be presented in mixed bills, meaning two, three, or sometimes four unrelated ballets strung together, usually with intermissions between each separate piece. Then you will see gala fare at, obviously, galas, but also dance festivals or special occasions like season openers. These may stage many, even upwards of a dozen, short pieces one after the other as a showcase. No matter what, the total time spent in the theater will be in that 90-minute to 3-hour range.

If you feel sure of your choice, pick an evening-length ballet! I will say, those three-hour beasts can be taxing even for experienced ballet-goers. They tend not to be particularly well-edited, and though they’re almost alway narrative ballets, they will have long stretches of “pure” dance that aren’t plot-relevant. However, I adore a two-act ballet, as they allow for both continuity and contrast within the same piece, while being a comfortable length.

If you want to try some of everything to see what you like, mixed bills are great! Love a good triple bill in particular. Some are interrelated —works by the same choreographer, or to the same composer, or all about a specific theme, etc. — but others are true grab-bags. You can get a sense of different styles and choreographers from a mixed bill, without making a huge commitment to any one. This is also likely to be the cheapest option.

If you want to turbo-charge that experience, find a festival or gala near you. Companies often hold season-opening or year-end galas, and big festivals and “___ & Friends” benefits happen all over. These tend to be more expensive and also more uneven. But you sure do see a lot!

Step 3b: You Just Pick for Me!

Classical narrative: Giselle

Classical non-narrative: Les Sylphides

Neoclassical narrative: Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella or Kenneth Macmillan’s Romeo and Juliet

Neoclassical non-narrative: Jerome Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering or George Balanchine’s Serenade

Contemporary narrative: Cathy Marston’s The Cellist or Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Broken Wings

Contemporary non-narrative: Twyla Tharp or Alonso King

I really meant just pick one: Giselle

“What, not Swan Lake?” — If you want the sublime, the basically fine, and the ugly of classical ballet all in one definitive, iconic, 3-hour slug, then sure, Swan Lake. I just think that it’s actually kind of jumping in the deep end in terms of length, style, mime-intensiveness, unexpected Soviet bowdlerizations, and number of plotless divertissements. If you want A Classic™ for your first, try Giselle instead.

"What, not The Nutcracker?" - Genuinely, this is one of the great scores, but it's never been choreographed to match. There's just enough plot to be frustrating, but not enough to carry a novice through the whole thing. Depending on how hidebound your local is, it might be unpleasantly racist. It's going to be probably the most expensive ticket of the year. Also, if you're only going to see one, maybe pick one where adult professionals are dancing the whole thing!

Step 4: Preparing for Your Visit

So you have chosen your ballet: congratulations! Now you want to actually buy a ticket.

First, a few quick reminders from the first post. If I were going to see a top-tier company perform a well-known classic with a live orchestra, I might pay as much as $200 USD for a ticket. I would not pay that much money in any other circumstance, and I probably wouldn’t pay that much if this were my first ballet ever. No matter where you are, you should be able to get acceptable seats for between $40 and $80 USD, and rush tickets or tickets through discount programs can go for half that.

What’s an acceptable seat? In ballet it doesn’t matter as much to be close to the stage, because you don’t have to hear anyone or see faces clearly. In fact, you want to be looking straight at or down on the dancers, rather than up to them, with a clear view of any upstage action and the dancers’ feet, so your main concern should actually be sitting far enough back and avoiding obstruction from the lip of the stage. The middle row of the orchestra section and behind is best. What does matter is being central, because most ballet formations are designed for best effect when viewed head-on. So, if given a choice between a high balcony/dead center seat, or a mid-orchestra/off-center seat, I would always choose the balcony. Centrality over proximity every time.

So buy your reasonably priced ticket for a seat along the theater’s center axis. Then, make your immediate preparations.

Do a little pre-show research. There’s no such thing as “spoilers” for narrative ballet; you will appreciate being well-informed of the libretto ahead of time. Even for non-narrative ballets, being informed of the context, themes, and aims helps you stay focused and find a "way in." YouTube is excellent for this.

Learn clapping etiquette. It’s easy: clap for the orchestra at the beginning, at the end of acts, and whenever the dancers bow to the audience. If someone is doing a Level-500 Cool Trick Step, clap if the spirit moves you, but maybe wait for others and don’t just randomly cheer/whistle like at a pop concert. Regardless, nobody is going to be mean to you like at a classical music concert if you mis-clap.

Dress up if you want, but no sweat. I recommend dressing at least a bit fancy, because you will feel more at-home and you want to live up to the little girls in their princess dresses, but seriously, the company wants your money, not your nicest tux. Don’t wear a hat, a tall hairdo, or big sleeves, and otherwise, don’t worry about it.

Arrive ~30 minutes ahead of time.

Use the other theater manners you already know.

Enjoy!

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How to Like Ballet, Part 2

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 18:31:51 GMT

In the first part of this series (I, II, III, IV), I laid out what kinds of access you may have to ballet in its live and recorded guises. Here are a few ways to get started with those resources.

I recommend three paths to get into ballet as a novice adult, whether or not you end up liking ballet long-term:

Wade In: Use the power of the Internet to discover your tastes.
Jump In: Pick a show and go see it.
Dive In: Do it yourself.

Wade In: The Power of the Internet

The best place to explore your tastes for free is YouTube, specifically, the YouTube channels of companies. Different companies will have different styles and hold different repertoires, which themselves will likely encompass fairly diverse works.

If this is where you want to start, I recommend taking some free time and browsing the YouTube channels of the Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet, and the Dutch National Ballet (pretty much in that order), just seeing what looks interesting to you. (If you know what company is closest to you, see if they have a channel too — many do. I just think that these are the ones where the companies clearly put the most effort into outreach.)

In particular, I think the RB’s “Insight” series is great for beginners. They are a series of roughly 60-minute programs, each of which includes short rehearsals, interviews with the rehearsing dancers, and more in-depth interviews/presentations by members of the creative team. I also rate the NYCB’s “Anatomy of a Dance” series, where dancers commentate short clips of themselves dancing onstage, remarking on favorite and least favorite steps, their artistic choices, and the history of the piece. DNB has two series, “How to make a ballet?” and “Ballet: behind the scenes,” which go into the task of preparing for new productions, with dancers, choreographers, and others discussing all the moving parts — and clips, of course!

All these recommendations focus on finding a way “in,” where involved people explain what they like and why they do what they do. I will personally always look these up if I am going to see a new-to-me show, because they give me a way in too, and I enjoy them afterwards or for old warhorses as well, because every new dancer will have their own fascinating perspective on the work they do.

YouTube also hosts a few ballets in full, mostly classics, but you can find archival footage of some Balanchine and other older neoclassical pieces. Some of these are very good performances indeed, filmed in good quality, too. I don’t think you should worry about “spoiling” any narrative ballets you go to see: it’s actually good, imo, to have some experience first. Some people find the stylized ballet mime difficult to follow without practice.

Lastly, there are some ballet-fan commentary channels on YouTube which take a more classic “YouTuber” tack. I think the best of these is Ballet Reign, but that is also the only one I’ve ever tried, because I find that style kind of annoying, tbh. But Ballet Reign is there for you with some basic explainers for the classics, and some fun commentary videos where they break down excerpts of great ballets, from their position as dance teachers. (NB that there is… some kind of Christian thing going on in the background there, but so far they seem to scrupulously keep it out of the videos, so that’s all right.)

Basically, just watch stuff! I am sure it will turn out that you like some things more than others, and then you can find out just what those things are.

Jump In: Pick a Show

So maybe you just want to jump in the deep end! See what’s available around you and pick whatever sounds most interesting to you. Remember that there’s a season every year, so if nothing appeals, something else will come around next year.

You can also read the next post in this series, in which I will talk about how to pick a show you’re likely to enjoy.

There is something so special about live art. It’s the collective effervescence! Even if you are struggling a little with what you see online, I highly recommend going to at least one live show if you are serious about trying to become a ballet-enjoyer. Remember, there are ways to do it inexpensively, and the special aura of the theater is worth it.

Dive In: Do It Yourself

So maybe this is a little off-the-wall, but I am actually so serious. Real talk: most ballet, the great big institution, the art form as a whole, the absolute majority of people who “do ballet” — it doesn’t happen at the professional companies, much less the major companies. Most ballet happens in local dance schools, community centers, and educational institutions! You might not have a high-quality company near you, but you definitely have a class nearby. And the nice thing about adult ballet classes is that all the pressure is off. You will never be a professional. The only incentives for the other students to be there are love for the art, personal enjoyment and achievement, and fitness; and the only incentives for the teachers are to be nice and effective enough to keep paying students coming back.

I personally think adult ballet classes are lovely! Through things like “ballet barre workouts” have kind of… made things weird… a real adult-beginner class can be such a great time. Dancing is fun! Ballet is fun! When there isn’t the looming specter of your short-lived career hanging over your head, class is fun too! You get to leap and spin and run around to nice music! You can just wear normal workout clothing, except the shoes! It is actually a great workout, especially for balance and core strength! You will never have a career! You are free to experiment with this wonderful tradition! Just dance!

If you live in a major metro area, which of course not everyone does, there are such things as mobility-inclusive and queer-oriented ballet classes too — just check things out, poke around on Instagram, call your local community college with questions, etc. You never know what you’ll find. There are such things as online classes with real teachers -- ABT's adult beginner Zoom classes come to mind -- but I recommend going to at least a few in-person classes first to learn proper foundations, which will help you avoid injury down the line.

Doing it yourself will also give you such great insight into what is happening at the professional companies, or online. There’s nothing like having tried to do a 90˚ développé à la seconde yourself to really impress you when a pro does it to 180˚ in Giselle. Or having spent time on making your arms graceful, then really appreciating that aspect of a professional dancer in a new way.

Plus, of course, this is maybe the best way to learn the French names to all the steps, if that’s a kind of knowledge you’re interested in acquiring.

You never know… you could have fun! And if you do, wow, you’ve just learned how to enjoy ballet for real for real, whether you like watching it or not.

To Sum Up

There are lots of “ways in.” The easiest and cheapest is using YouTube to watch clips and full performances to try to triangulate your preferences. If a company near you has a channel, and it very well might, this is a great way to get a taste for their taste: what they have in repertoire, which dancers speak to you, what the balance of each season is like.

You can always just dive right in and pick a show, and you should pick a show anyway, no matter which way in you choose, because the special qualities of live performance are meaningful and fun!

Lastly, “enjoying ballet” doesn’t have to mean enjoying watching ballet: you, yes you, can actually do it! There is a whole industry out there of providing classes to adult beginners, and it’s pretty fun to dip your toe in, given that there really can’t be less pressure.

So give at least one of these a shot! The next post will be about the middle option: how to pick a live show that you are likely to enjoy.

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How to Like Ballet, Part 1

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 01:14:07 GMT

So you’ve decided you want to give ballet a fair shake, but you don’t know where to begin. More than one DW person over the last two months has asked me, more or less, how to choose a ballet to go to, and, implicitly, how to like it. Inspired by seekingferret’s posts about how to enjoy the opera, I decided I might as well write my own guide to watching ballet and enjoying it, in time for the start of the ballet season, which generally runs from December through June or July.

We are fortunate to live in a golden age for ballet audiences. With the rise and institutional acceptance of recording technology expanding in-house repertory and audience access, improvements in medical technologies lengthening individual dancers’ careers, and the mature international phase of state ballet institutions incubating and circulating great dance-artists, right now is the best time in history to decide to be a ballet audience member.

I recommend three paths to get into ballet as a novice adult, whether or not you end up liking ballet long-term:

Wade In: Use the power of the Internet to discover your tastes.
Jump In: Pick a show and go see it.
Dive In: Do it yourself.

I will elaborate each of these in detail, but first, I should give you an overview of the territory. Thus, this guide will be in four parts (I, II, III, IV). This first post will establish the basic knowledge you need to understand what is available to you*. The second post will elucidate how to use the paths above to navigate that landscape and begin developing your knowledge and tastes. The third post will provide tips for how to pick a ballet to watch which you are likely to enjoy. The fourth and final installment will, at last, actually suggest ways to literally look at ballet and find beauty.

Ballet Is For You

The first thing to know is that ballet is for you.

Outside of Russia, ballet did not hold a high-status position among the European classical arts before the 20th century. In seeking to establish itself as a Classical Art™ in the West in the 20th century, ballet impresarios and nascent companies played up their art form’s court dance heritage, sought not just moneyed, but aristocratic, patronage, and used various forms of class, racial, and gendered exclusion to create distinction. Simultaneously, ballet was an integral, even foundational, part of European Modernism as an aesthetic movement: as recently as the 1940s, ballet was genuinely avant-garde outside of Russia and attracted other avant-gardists to it as a site for artistic experimentation. Becoming a professional ballet dancer is plagued with classism, racism, heterosexism, and good old plain sexism, and audiences (outside of Russia**) definitely receive this combination of Modernist pretensions and hierarchical exclusivity as making ballet-as-cultural-consumable feel alien, exclusionary, and arcane.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Absolutely everyone can like ballet. At its most basic, ballet is meant to be a visually and acoustically appealing spectacle. Despite its claims to royal antecedents and its slightly more honest claims to artistic avant-gardism, ballet as we know it today is four helpful things:

Modern bourgeois entertainment. Even the earliest court roots of ballet took place within modernity writ large, and the advent of the ballet company, most ballet steps, and even the oldest ballets you will see performed today took place within industrial modernity, designed and presented for an audience that was, all things considered, much like you in its tastes, narrative expectations, and definitions of beauty.
Objectively an impressive and notable thing to do with a human body. Even though I want to, I will not go so far as to say it is “universally beautiful,” but ballet is universally appreciable as a skilled bodily discipline, in the same way I am pretty sure everyone can appreciate that an Olympic gymnast doing their thing has achieved some kind of human pinnacle.
Less expensive than many forms of entertainment. In fact, getting really into watching ballet these days can cost exactly nothing, if you already have an Internet connection and some free time to spend on YouTube. Nabbing medium-good seats at an opera house is, at worst, no pricier than getting bad seats at a pop concert or sporting event, and at best, literally cheaper than a movie ticket. You will have a better experience if you pay at least a bit, and it is possible to spend a lot of money on seeing ballet, but it is also possible to have a passionate and generative relationship with it that costs, both relatively and absolutely, very little.
Thematically, musically, and visually diverse — and working on being more diverse in its dancers and choreographers. There is a ballet out there for you. I am 100% sure of it. Even if you decide you don’t like most ballet, there is still a ballet out there for you, and more every season.***

I believe ballet has profound artistic value. Like all art, the more you are willing to put into it, the more you will get out of it. At the same time, ballet invests a lot of its social capital and self-understanding in (usually) being aesthetically appealing in a fairly normative way. Don’t let ballet intimidate you out of ever even coming in. It’s for you.

How Do I See Ballet? Offstage.

The other thing about ballet is that while the pinnacle of the art is the performance, that is the smallest portion of a dancer’s time spent dancing. Nowadays, with the Internet and social media, you can see professional dancers dancing in rehearsals and classes. This is a more intimate and informal way of watching ballet, and I find it very enjoyable. While you can’t see whole ballets this way, you will see a lot of the impressive and beautiful work behind those performances. Some people actually prefer to watch class and rehearsal. While you will not get the art object of the performance, it is still rewarding to watch the artistic process of ballet. It’s a great way to learn the names of steps, what dancers like about dancing and specific ballets, and what the meaning of certain gestures and expressions are. It strips back some of the other art forms that cluster around ballet, like the costuming and music, and lets you focus more purely on the body. It is a great, low-stakes, basically free way of dipping your toe in or supplementing your other balletic interests.

There are multiple social media platforms where you can find this kind of behind-the-scenes content, but I recommend sticking with YouTube, where production values tend to be higher and there tends to be less Drama and Content and more actual videos of classes and rehearsals. The gold standard is the (UK) Royal Ballet’s YouTube channel, which has a backlog of decades of performance clips, explainers, interviews, filmed public outreach events, rehearsals, etc. etc. etc, all produced to a high standard. You can genuinely learn valuable practical and historical information about ballet from their YouTube channel, and it’s very visually enjoyable. Other professional companies also run similar channels, though to a lesser degree of investment, and I particularly rate the Dutch/Het National Ballet’s multiple series about commissioning new works and New York City Ballet’s “Anatomy Of” series.

Also on YouTube are professional dancers who run behind-the-scenes vlogs which often include rehearsal footage. I am less familiar with this scene because knowing things about real people is the fan-killer, but I have enjoyed videos I’ve watched by Madeline Woo (late of the Royal Swedish ballet, now at San Francisco Ballet), Dancersdiary (pen name of the official photographer of the Royal Ballet), and L'Envers du Décor (two male dancers, one soloist and one corps member, at the Paris Opera Ballet).

If you live in proximity to a company, there are sometimes opportunities to pay to see dress or studio rehearsals. These chances can come as perks of memberships or subscriptions as well.

How Do I See Ballet? Onstage.

Even if you end up deciding that you prefer to engage with ballet through rehearsals and classes, you should still try to see a whole ballet at least once. For me, this is where the greatest artistic and intellectual reward derives. There are three worthwhile ways to see full ballets. The best way is to see them live, from a professional ballet company. The second-best way is to see them simulcast in a movie theater on the big screen. The third-best way is to watch small-screen recordings, whether via the on-demand or subscription services now becoming available from the big companies, buying hardcopy recordings, through libraries and institutional accesses, or by seeing what you can find on YouTube or, er, elsewhere.

In reverse order:

YouTube has various channels which specialize in archival footage of performances. Typing in “[name of ballet] full performance” will often turn something up, especially for classics.

If you or your public library have institutional accesses, try to see what kind of recordings are available. In approximately this order for pleasure-viewing, Medici.tv, Dance Online, the New York City Public Library Jerome Robbins Dance Division, Kanopy, and Hathi Trust are broadly available repositories for high-quality and/or historically interesting recordings.

The gold standard if you want to buy DVD or Blu-Ray discs is Opus Arte.

Ballet companies hosting paid streaming of their own performances is a recent innovation and something I am so grateful for! The Royal Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet host their own streaming services, paid monthly. I have not tried PNB’s, but I pay for the Royal’s as my sole streaming service and like the large back catalog and the high quality of their recordings. English National Ballet is the only company I am aware of with a truly on-demand model; you can pay a few bucks to rent a single recording, like renting a movie, and sometimes there are sales. They have a small selection, but what is there is very good.

The Australian Ballet and, out of left field, the small vaguely alternative San Francisco Bay Area company Smuin Contemporary Ballet both have “online seasons” where you can pay a fee in the 20-30 USD range to get access to recordings of their live performances during the normal season after a slight delay. I have used both their services and was pleased with the ease of use and the quality of the dancing.

There are sometimes options for watching simulcast or live-recorded performances in movie theaters. The biggest operation with the most choices is (surprise!) the Royal Ballet. Their “Cinema Stream” program brings many different ballets and operas per year to movie theaters. Unfortunately, there’s been some kind of blip in service in the U.S., but they have a global reach and their filming quality and dancers are exceptional. Pathé Live does collaborations with the Paris Opera Ballet which are pretty cool experiences; so far there have been two, one in IMAX, and plans for more. They’re a little artsy.****

Best of all is watching dancers live. Live theater is just different. You will notice different aspects of the dance, hear the music differently, have a different perspective on the stage as a whole, experience the collective effervescence of the audience, and, best of all to me, hear the pointe shoes on the boards! There are various kinds of company which present live ballet professionally, most of which, but not all of which, are worth your time.

The ideal-typical ballet company is a state- and/or grant-supported institution which resides in a permanent or semi-permanent home (usually an opera house or large theater), employs a steady corps of dancers, maintains a permanent and expanding repertory of choreography and productions, presents a “season” of multiple ballets during part of each calendar year, and has some kind of relationship to an orchestra.

There are also “studio” or “second” companies, which are wings of larger companies which exist to “finish” immediately pre-professional students, choreographers’ individual outfits dedicated to producing the work of just one person, small avant-garde or alternative ballet companies, and strictly touring companies which are more like impresarios. Out of all these options, I would recommend you avoid that last option. For the purposes of a newbie, it is best to stick with the classic professional ballet companies. At a certain grade of seat, there is little to differentiate ticket costs between prestigious/non-prestigious companies, often because the theater management rather than the dance company sets prices, so always go for the best-quality company available to you.

There is a small tier of top-notch, globally relevant companies which set the standard and often share dancers between themselves through guesting and job changes. If you live within reach of one of these, you are so lucky and should definitely go! In the United States, this tier is the San Francisco Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and New York City Ballet. Then there is a slightly larger tier of the big-name “regional” and minor national companies, which in some cases aim to make the leap into the top tier, or maybe fell from there in the recent past. In the U.S., this includes Houston Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Boston Ballet, the Joffrey Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and maybe Miami City Ballet, Ballet West, and Philadelphia Ballet are edging their way up there. I would recommend going to these companies too, if they are available to you. Outside the U.S., the “___ National Ballet” names are usually in one of these two tiers.

In an adjacent zone at this second level are the prestigious alternative/avant-garde/single choreographer ballet companies. These companies usually do not hold “the classics” in repertoire, but perform neoclassical and contemporary ballets which require rigorous classical ballet training. They are usually smaller in size, potentially without a home base, and often more egalitarian in their dancer ranks, but they demand a similar quality of dancer to the big-name regional companies. Those dancers tend to be the ones who, for whatever reason (often race, sexuality, and/or body type) do not want to continue in mainstream company life or chose to reject it. Examples in the U.S. include Complexions, LINES, and (in a way) Alvin Ailey. They too get an unreserved recommendation from me.

Then there is a pretty dramatic step down into the small-name regional companies, of which there are a lot more. In the States, “Your City Ballet” companies are mostly this, unless previously named. There are so many more well-trained aspiring dancers than there are full-time jobs in the major companies, especially women, so this lower tier too can put on a very good show. The quality does vary from company to company, though, so seek out reviews before purchasing. Furthermore, they don’t tend to be able to put on the big classics a) at all, due to size constraints, or b) to a high degree of quality, and I would generally recommend going to see this kind of company do other things, like contemporary ballets, exciting new choreographers, and neoclassical abstract pieces, to show them to their often excellent best advantage.

Can I Actually, Practically See Live Ballet, Though?

Almost certainly yes.

If you don’t have a company near you, but you have a college, university, or performing arts center, many high-quality companies, and even superstar individual dancers, tour. Check their calendars and see who is coming around. Some very major national companies are explicitly touring companies; going around and bringing ballet To The Masses is their remit. This is unfortunately less common in the U.S., but very common in Europe, and also present in Australia and South America. In the U.S., ABT is the most major/prestigious company that tours, and Alvin Ailey is both incredibly good and incredibly willing to go to towns I’ve never even heard of. Some companies, like Smuin Contemporary Ballet in Northern California and Northern Ballet in the north of England, tour within their region or have multiple residencies where they spend part of a season in one place and part in another. See what goes on in your area.

There are “touring ballet companies” that are basically scams, which is unfortunate, but they are usually easy to detect by seeing if they have the trappings of a usual company like a permanent roster of dancers and an actual repertoire. (If it’s only Swan Lake, it’s a scam.)

For every kind of company, there will be a range of pricing for tickets, and the lower end will be quite affordable. In general, matinees and weekdays will be cheaper than evenings and weekends. Tickets at the end of a run will often be cheaper than tickets at the start of the run. The phenomenon of “rush” tickets is one I have made extensive use of, and it basically means showing up right before showtime at the box office and asking for the remainders — I think the cheapest thing I’ve ever gotten was a $13 ticket to see San Francisco Ballet do The Nutcracker. Many of the larger companies will have youth and/or young adult programs which may allow early access and discounts on tickets. Full-length “warhorses” like Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, etc. will be more expensive than lesser-known pieces and mixed bills, but brand-new full-length ballets need to recoup their investment, so will probably be more expensive in their first season than older ballets. The top companies which you might expect to be most expensive will often actually have the most generous outreach programs, plus the biggest theaters with the most cheap seats. You should look carefully at company websites and make potentially awkward calls to see what kinds of discounts are available to you.

It is worth spending at least a little money on tickets, period, and if it turns out you like ballet, it’s definitely worth getting good seats. However, I would never pay more than 200 USD for a single ballet ticket, and that 200 USD had better be getting me a great seat for a top-tier company performing some kind of known classic. I would say that what I, an experienced ballet fan who knows my tastes and dedicates a large portion of my entertainment budget towards live ballet, usually pay for a ticket in the U.S. is in the 40-80 dollar-per-seat range, with frequent dips down into the 18-25-dollar rush zone and maybe once-annual spikes up into the triple digits for special occasions.

In my experience, in the U.S., most theaters will have some program for hearing accessibility in accordance with the A.D.A., similar to what you can find in movie theaters. writerproblem193 gives some more detail here. Only large companies provide things like sensory-friendly, audio-described, and autism-friendly performances, but the large companies do have these kinds of things, especially in the UK and Europe. If you want these services, you should definitely call both the company and the theater (if separate). Many companies, especially the big ones, also have a couple of explicitly kid-oriented performances per run, with various accommodations made for the children and parents. These accommodations are, unfortunately, usually not consistent throughout a whole season, but will most likely be attached to the big classics and the “tentpole” new commissions.

Every show will have intermissions, probably multiple, for using the bathroom or other needs. It is okay to just walk out at intermission if you aren’t having a good time! If you’re late, intermission is when you can find your seat and see the rest of the ballet even if you missed some of it.

Lastly, you are classy enough to go to the ballet. There is a tiny amount of ballet-specific audience etiquette, mostly around clapping, but it’s minimal and easy to imitate. There are no special manners needed to be a good ballet-goer that aren’t also true of going to see live music or a play. You don’t need a tux, good shoes, or an indefinable aura of status and money. It’s fun to dress up for the ballet, and many people do, but I have literally never been to a theater in the US or the UK with an actual dress code. I always see a mix of people dressed to the absolute nines and people who look like they’re going to the park afterwards. At an evening show in the Royal Opera House in London, I saw a guy wearing a T-shirt with a sexy Thomas the Tank Engine on it (no, I cannot adequately describe this), and nobody cared. I wasn’t there for this, but my mom wore one of those jersey tunics with the crazy prints to the Paris Opera Ballet, which looks like this, and even the Parisians were nice to her. The staff will not be snooty to you if you wear jeans and sneakers. Your fellow audience members will spend most of their time looking at the stage, not at you. You will probably be asked to check any large bags or coats, but that isn’t a big deal and it’s not a referendum on your backpack. At the end of the day, ballet companies desperately need an audience; it doesn’t matter what that audience is dressed like.

To Sum Up

In this day and age, there is a kind of foursquare diagram of ballet options divided into online and offline, and performance and practice. Any quadrant of this table is a plausible and rewarding place to start, though some parts will be easier to access than others.

If a ballet company is within geographic reach of you at all, you should be able to see a live ballet performed well for a reasonable amount of money. It is worth doing research to see what kinds of benefits and discounts are available; they are both common and surprisingly generous. Wherever you are, you should always go to the best-quality company available, because money actually isn’t that much of a divider between them due to the economics of theaters.

Ballet rewards time, effort, knowledge, and analysis, and it also rewards aesthetic appreciation, love for music, the capacity for sublimity, and the ability to think it’s freaking cool when they do the splits in the air. I find that ballet rewards all the intellectual effort I can throw at it and helps me develop my aesthetic capacities, then rewards those expanded appreciations nobly, and I also think that coming to ballet as a beginner is a wonderful way of developing those skills. Like a Great Book™, you can go deep with it, but you shouldn’t be scared off by the depths; it’s stuck around for this long because people like experiencing it. So give it a try!

In the U.S., U.K., Europe excluding Russia (where things are quite different), Australia, South Africa, and South America. I’m not as familiar with the ballet norms in most of Asia, although Japan's and South Korea's major companies have close historical ties with the Royal Ballet specifically and, as I understand it, operate themselves fairly similarly from the audience's perspective.

At this point, please start appending “(outside of Russia)” to almost every sentence I utter yourself.

***

If you decide you only like people dancing in sneakers to Sufjan Stevens, I hope you live in New York City, but there’s a ballet for you. If you only like rock n’ roll, there are at least three ballets for you. If you like crazy light shows and raves, there are so many ballets for you. If you are more familiar with jazz, kathak, flamenco, tap, or hip-hop, there are fusion ballets for you. If what you actually like is opera, there are at least five ballets for you. If you only like media about gay people, there are thankfully ballets for you. If you are a musical theater fan or a Shakespeare fan, lucky you, there are whole subgenera of ballet for you. If you only like softcore m/m porn, people in duck costumes, horror movies, stand-up comedy, Christmas carols, clubbing in France, peasant uprisings, or historical fiction about WWI, there are (separately) ballets for you!

****

Some of the other most common movie theater ballet experiences are by the Mariinsky and Bolshoi Theatres. These are state companies of Russia, and while it is undeniable that the dancers are amazingly accomplished, I cannot recommend giving them any money at this time, given the unique political status and function of ballet within Russia and the way in which dancers are screened for political dissent before being allowed to have careers.

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H.G. Parry: Old-School MMP Fantasy of Today?

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 18:40:38 GMT

I find a pure and nostalgic appeal to a 400-600 page mass-market paperback from the 1990s with a girl on the cover (preferably with a horse, sword, or cat alongside), promising a slightly offbeat, adventurous fantasy yarn that won’t break any molds, but offers reasonable sentence-to-sentence prose and a good story. One could make one of these books one’s entire personality, but it might be a somewhat lonely proposition. I’m talking Gayle Greeno, Kristin Britain, Jennifer Fallon, Jane Yolen’s work for adults, maybe even Mercedes Lackey for a relative bigshot. It was related to the epic fantasy and sword-and-sorcery fields, but somewhat distinct, at least party because it was written and, I think, mostly read by (white?) women. I used to think of these as the absolute bread and butter of what Fantasy even meant; it certainly made up most of what I read in middle school. Then it seemed like this type of book vanished, maybe just due to those specific authors semi-retiring, or maybe eaten by changes in the publishing industry which led to the super-siloing of SFF, with its different buckets of YA fantasy, middle-grade fantasy, urban fantasy, fantasy romance and later romantasy, progression fantasy, Martin-alikes, etc. Then there was what felt like the great wave in 2016-2018 or thereabouts, where SFF writ large was on fire, starting to explore new ideas, and also everything began to be published in trade paperback. So these books, which I conceptualize as something like the beautiful plucked 90s middlebrow of fantasy writing, dropped off my radar.

I recently read a selection of novels by H.G. Parry which hit near that spot. The great pleasure of the old-school MMPs, for me, was not dissimilar to the pleasure of the romance reader: the mix of a competent plotter performing reasonably refreshing twists on a reliable pattern. When someone was especially creative, it was nice, but I always knew basically what I was going to get, give or take some telepathic cats. The pleasure I found in Parry was much like that: give or take a magical Sydney Carton, I was going to get a fast-paced fantasy adventure with a spirited young person, probably a young woman, written to a reasonable degree of competency but without major literary pretensions, far from rocking the boat, but enjoyable for its plotting, characters, and touch of difference from the major threads of today’s fantasy.

I read and enjoyed, in order of preference, The Magician’s Daughter, The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, and A Far Better Thing (magical Sydney Carton), and DNF’d the earliest, A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians, for reasons of poorly thought-out white savior implications (another unfortunately classic element of this made-up subgenre of mine).

( Read more... )

So anyway, a mixed bag with Parry, one which reminded me in both good and bad ways of the MMP fantasy of my youth. Not sure if this is a reality-based analysis at all, or just a particular confluence of characteristics to ping at my nostalgia receptors, but I felt it strongly, and it interested me to think through how and why these books were similar, and where that market stream has gone.

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2025 Fandom Trumps Hate works

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 01:03:12 GMT

At the last possible moment, I finished and posted my two remaining 2025 FTH gifts. (The first I completed in a reasonable time, and was this review of the Royal Ballet's filmed 2016 production of Giselle with Marianela Nuñez and Vadim Muntagirov dancing the leads.)

For nonplussed, I wrote a Spinning Silver one-shot based off a tiny midrash about the Egyptians' horses, "The Horse Together with His Rider." I think its true genre is "case fic."

At ambyr's request, I performed a podfic for a fic that had actually been on my personal to-record list forever, a happy coincidence: the Song of the Lioness (Tamora Pierce) canon-divergence AU "Climbs Mountains, Seeking Peace."

It was a bit of a struggle to complete these during this frantic year, but I am always so impressed by what the FTH people do to make this event happen, and I am proud to have participated again!

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Reading roll-up 2025: 278

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 04:27:22 GMT

Goodbye, 2025, you annus horribilis! Even your reading wasn't all that great.

Without quite trying, I read 28 more books than last year, even as I felt that I was in something of a reading slump. 68,691 pages. At least in terms of mind-blowing, heart-touching, life-changing books, I definitely feel that 2025 was short on those. Not completely empty of them, though!

The first book I finished this year was August Clarke's Metal From Heaven, and the final book was Deep House by Jeremy Atherton Lin.

Trends new and ongoing:
1. This was the year I read a non-TOTC Dickens novel, realized Charles Dickens rocks, and set out on a quest to Read More Dickens. Relatedly, I had a little Keats kick and did the rounds with him, so I guess I trended towards 19th century men. Had a blast, tbh.

2. I exercised my DNF powers without mercy. From being unable to DNF even the worst of books, I can now actually feel pleasure at vindictively returning the Libby ebook of something that just isn't cutting it. This is personal growth.

2. I continued reading along with 8daysofdwj_feed, though I am behind and started doing them slightly out of order. It remains delightful and generative.

3. I enjoyed a small mini-quest through British bird literature in the fall.

Top N Books per personal tracking categories, in no order:
Top 4: Novels, Anthologies, and Collections

Bleak House, Charles Dickens. Did you know Charles Dickens is a great writer? Did you know Bleak House is a masterpiece? Did you know that Esther Summerson is actually the greatest literary creation of the 19th century? I feel like I received a Kantian revelation reading this book. (Honorable mention goes to Nicholas Nickelby here, for being the first Dickens novel I read of my own volition [I can't remember why I did this. Thank you, past me.] and helping me realize they're pretty fun, such that I then read Bleak House and achieved enlightenment.)
Five Ways to Forgiveness, Ursula K. LeGuin. How is it possible that one author can produce so many masterpieces, such that there are some top-of-the-line books of hers that nobody even really reads or talks about? This novel-in-stories is up there for me with TLHOD as one of her finest and wisest.
Margo's Got Money Troubles, Rufi Thorpe. Not at all the kind of thing I usually read; I had so much fun with this, made practically my whole family read it, and then had a really lovely time talking with them over the course of weeks about the book, online sex work, single parenthood, etc. Not just a good book but an actual social catalyst for good times!
The Forbidden Notebook, Alba de Céspedes, trans. Ann Goldstein. I LOVE MODERNISM. I had my socks knocked off by this faux-diary of an Italian woman having a midlife crisis. Literally essential reading. The only literary "take" on Virginia Woolf that's worthy of her tbh.

Honorable mentions to: Spirits Abroad (Expanded Edition) by Zen Cho (reread), Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik, There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, trans. Polly Barton, and the first five Benjamin January books by Barbara Hambly.

Top 2: Novellas, Novelettes, and Comics

Cinder House, Freya Marske. A book that is totally correct about ballet! And is also a creative, atmospheric fairytale retelling! And also can be read in the span of listening to Prokofiev's Cinderella score! Provided me with one perfect rainy afternoon.
A Mouthful of Dust, Nghi Vo. Vo remains on top of the novella game. Each one is exactly the right length for its exactly right story. I would read as many Cleric Chih novellas as she ever feels like writing. Please keep them coming.

Honorable mentions to: Yentl the Yeshiva Boy by Isaac Bashevis Singer (reread) (nobody has ever done it like him).

Top 4: Nonfiction

I, Maya Plisetskaya, Maya Plisetskaya. FINALLY tracked down a copy of Herself's memoir of her life as the greatest ballerina of all time AND fuck you, Stalin, personally. There is more personality per sentence in this than in some entire 400+-page memoirs I read this year. I also felt SO vindicated (?) or maybe just profoundly touched and moved by the role Béjart's Boléro played in the book and her life; like yes, Maya Mikhailovna, I felt what you felt when you danced that, and it's so good to read that that connection was true.
The Abandoners: On Mothers and Monsters, Begoña Gómez Urzaiz, trans. Lizzie Davis. Loved loved loved this exploration of artistic mothers who chose (for a given value) to live apart from their children. Perfect mix of art criticism, cultural criticism, authorial reflection, and just banger insights into the human condition.
H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald, but only read directly after The Goshawk, by T.H. White. They have to be read together, so that you can see in a few beautiful hours a whole lot happening to birds and the British nature writers and LGBTQ people.
Bitch: On the Female of the Species, Lucy Cooke. Rollicking good scientific read all about the many advances our collective knowledge has made about the course of life on Earth by paying attention to female organisms-- including by figuring out whatever that means! Educational, lively, and so satisfying.

Honorable mentions to: The Ballet Called Giselle by Cyril W. Beaumont and Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph by Lucasta Miller.

Top 4: Poetry

Woman Without Shame, Sandra Cisneros, in audiobook. Just so fun to listen to Cisneros read these in the farthest possible thing from MFA Voice. I love the one about penises she has known and the one about dancing in a gay bar in Provincetown.
US 1, Muriel Rukeyser. Completely on the other side of the spectrum, this 1938 collection about the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster is so powerful, evocative, and skillful that it just blew me away.
Dart, Alice Oswald. Another book-length sequence or one long poem following the River Dart from its source all the way down to the sea, along with all the people who live alongside it. Carried me away on its current.
Life on Mars, Tracy K. Smith. It's crazy that anyone can have a collection that includes the "My God, It's Full of Stars" sequence of poems, and then five more that are just as good. "So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back"!!!

Honorable mentions to: specifically "The Reddest Red" in Z.R. Ghani's chapbook In the Name of Red, and "Al dormir te vuelves un continente/"Asleep You Become a Continent" from Del otro lado de la noche by Fransico X. Alarcón, which I loved so much I tried translating it myself.

As usual, if you comment with a number between 1 and 278, I'll supply a mini review of whatever book that was!

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A whole entire year's worth of nonfiction

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 06:46:47 GMT

I got out of the swing of writing up nonfiction here this year, so here's a highly selected, still long, but at least thematically sorted, smattering of what I've read in 2025, on the basis of what I still remember worthwhile specifics about. I'm leaving out a lot of stuff which hasn't lingered with me enough for me to have anything to say about it at this juncture; if it's stuck with me this long, it was at least memorable.

Visual Art and Craft (Which is Art), Excepting Textiles, Which Get Their Own

The Work of Art, by Adam Moss

My first book read in 2025! A collection of long interview/essays conducted by Moss in the contemporary, mostly Anglophone art world, in which a particular artist is asked to explain the process of developing a single project from inception to display. I was impressed by the breadth of Moss’ artistic acquaintance, and appreciative of his clear attempts to reach outside that circle at least a little ways. The artists and pieces of art, of course, were more or less personally compelling to me on a case-by-case basis, but there was such a breadth of media and subject matter that I felt quite satisfied, and educated, too. My ebook had many color “plates” illustrating the artworks under discussion, which I always welcome.

Artists' Lives, by Michael Peppiat

Along somewhat similar lines as Moss’ above, but worse: Weird about women, as they all are. “Parisian postmodern painter Art Man X was friends with London-based figurative sculptor Art Man Y and hard-drinking, flighty Art Woman Z, who wore lipstick.”

A Short History of Black Craft in Ten Objects, by Robell Awake

An incredible appetizer of a book which introduced me to several Black American art traditions and artists of whom I'd been shamefully unaware and deepened my knowledge of several others. Each of these ten objects, which range from the famous Gee's Bend quilts to the new-to-me pottery of David Drake, is a brief overview of an artistic milieu or single artist (if known), providing historical context and some light artistic analysis. I especially enjoyed the section on pottery, but they were all fascinating. My only complaint is that it is so short — but it provided me with an excellent reading list for learning more on my own.

The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club, by Christopher de Hamel

A history-in-lives of European illuminated manuscripts, from the medieval monasteries to the contemporary collector’s market. I really enjoyed this! de Hamel is a collector and expert in his own right, and brings a lively interest and affection to his portraits of book-mad manuscript collectors. In a way, this is more a history of manuscript collection than it is the art of the manuscript, but I still learned some things about the production and use of illuminated texts! I also found some of the people profiled, such as JP Morgan’s white-passing manuscript collector Belle da Costa Greene, fascinating. I might have wished for more evenly interspersed illustrations depicting the mentioned texts (there were several, but not enough!), but de Hamel paints lovely pictures with his words. It inspired me to visit my semi-local major museum’s manuscript collection with new eyes. Also, having read it in ebook, I bought it for my dad in hardcopy, and it is a beautiful and dense physical object — great gift book if you know anybody who might be interested.

In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space, by Irvin Weathersby Jr.

A mix of memoir with cultural critique, examining how white supremacy permeates (American) art and (American) public space, as the title mostly says. This is in part a response to the ongoing battle over public sculpture, taking as its central concept “the monument” and going into the physical and cultural creation of said, and the way anti-Black racism shapes the specific forms of and more diffuse reactions to public memorials. Both the art history and the memoirs were interesting, but felt a little unbalanced, with a tendency to meander slightly unsatisfyingly onwards from any given space/piece before any specific conclusion had been reached through either method — I feel like the title slightly misrepresents what is, at heart, a personal reflection on these topics. Nonetheless, interesting and some food for thought.

Textiles

Silk: A World History, by Aarathi Prasad

Another casualty of the over-promising subtitle. This cannot be called a truly global history of silk, focusing as it does on modern and “niche” types of silk and silk manufactory. I did not feel that I left with a better understanding of silk’s effect on global history, though I did know more about different silk-producing moths than I did before.

Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-hand Clothes, by Andrew Brooks

An interesting set of case studies of the deleterious effect of global secondhand clothing markets on the environment and economies of (mostly) the Global South. This was full of interesting historical and technical information, but terribly copyedited. I feel quite bad for Brooks.

Ballet

The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History, by Karen Valby

A history of the early days of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, focusing on the experiences of the titular five ballerinas — Lydia Abarca, Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan, Karlya Shelton, and Marcia Sells— who helped launch the company in the 1970s and 80s. Valby is not herself a dancer, but has a close personal connection to DTH. She spent many years researching and interviewing for this book, and the time she spent shines through in the balance of biographical detail and historical context within. There is a great deal of respect for dancing and dancers, and Valby knows when to get out of the way of her subjects’ stories. I was tremendously touched at times, and feel much better-educated about this landmark American company’s early years.

Celestial Bodies: How to Look at Ballet, by Laura Jacobs

I read this book by noted critic Jacobs (gotta be a ballet Jew, don’t you think?) more or less because I was hoping it would be The introductory text I could give to someone who wanted to Get Into Ballet, something which doesn’t yet exist. I think it is a very good and enjoyable book, a twelve-chaptered essay collection which has correct opinions on Giselle and does accessibly explain things like company structure, what pointework is, why male dancers are great, and other such basics. It’s often rather lovely in its language, though (hypocrite alert) sometimes her flights of metaphor get away from her. However, yet again, I did not find that it totally lived up to its title— if a person doesn’t know the difference between Romantic, Classical, and neoclassical ballet, is it really useful to provide a whole chapter exegeting Serenade in fairly technical terms (eg explaining what a bourrée is in terms of its being an extended sous-sous)? I mean, I loved those chapters! But I am not sure they teach a newbie “how to look at ballet.” That said!!! I still think this is much more appealing and useful as an entry point than most of the others that are often recommended as such (mostly Apollo’s Angels), with the added benefit of being current. I had fun reading it too.

Little Dancer Aged Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas's Masterpiece, by Camille Laurens, trans. Willard Wood

Yet another fib behind the colon. This is a fairly speculative quasi-biography of Marie Van Goethem, the model for the famous sculpture. Basically, almost nothing is known of her life, being as she was an exploited young woman of the lower classes making ends not quite meet by dancing, and potentially providing sexual services as well as modeling for artists as a “petit rat,” essentially a supernumerary at the Paris Opera Ballet. It is quite possible to do a good job with speculative historical biographies of women of whom little is known — Saidiya Hartman has made a deservedly illustrious career out of this— but this is not an example. About a third of the book is truly about Marie. About a third is (imo) an unnecessarily sympathetic rendering of Degas himself, and the remaining third were personal reflections that likely would have been more interesting had Laurens not felt she had to tie them in some way to the specter of Marie.

I, Maya Plisetskaya, by Maya Plisetskaya

The autobiography of Maya Plisetskaya, one of the great ballerinas of all time. Apart from sitting beside Pavlova in the ballet firmament, she was a fascinating historical-political figure of the 20th century: a stubbornly committed artist and Jew during the height of Stalinism. While she became internationally recognized late in her astonishingly long career, which granted her a degree of artistic and personal freedom, her early career was contorted by cronyism, fear, and especially tight surveillance lingering from the kidnap and murder of her father by state forces. Many times, she had opportunities to leave the USSR, which she chose not to take until the end of her career. Plisetskaya wrote this book after her departure to live with her husband (composer Rodion Shchedrin, recently deceased) in Spain, and she pretends to no false modesty, but she also doesn’t spare herself a certain amount of ridicule. She comes off as an extremely strong personality, which of course she must have been to create great art under such conditions. There are few literary stylings here, but her writing voice is lively and clear, and there’s a surprisingly good balance between her personal life and the political context I needed to make full sense of what was going on. She says exactly what she means about absolutely everything and everyone! There are a couple moments where that’s unfortunate (the poor East German Olympic swimmers catching completely unnecessary strays, for example), but mostly, I found it engaging. If this is a time period you’re interested in, regardless of any interest you might have in ballet, I think you ought to read this! It’s a fascinating self-portrait of a fascinating person.

Music and Spoken-Word Performance

Hip-Hop is History, by Questlove

Alas, I did not think that this lived up to its title. It is long and full of detail, but it does not do what I consider a good artistic history must do: tying individual events and personalities to broader aesthetic and political trends. There is certainly a lot to learn about certain keystone figures and songs, but there’s not really any attempt to place them into a historical framework or explain their influence beyond their influence on Questlove, specifically. I think that if I had not been listening to this on audiobook, buoyed by Questlove’s excited narration, I would have started skimming fairly quickly. Also, where are the WOMEN.

Spoken Word: A Cultural History, by Joshua Bennett

This, on the other hand, is almost too much a history, with not much of the actual art under discussion — I didn’t learn much about the aesthetic currents at play in the early American spoken word poetry scene, or the long-term influences of specific poets or styles. However, I did learn a fair amount deal about the early institutions which fostered those poets and styles, and got a sense of the cultural moment which first birthed eg the modern slam movement.

Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, by Natalie Hodges

A memoir/science book of the usual kind, in which Hodges describes her relationship to violin music across her lifetime, with reference to scientific theorizing about time perception. It was fine, but I think I must conclude that these artistic-scientific memoirs are better when the author is a scientist who can more expertly integrate the science.

Authors On Writing

Reflections: On the Magic of Writing, by Diana Wynne Jones

Read along with the 8daysofdwj podcast! DWJ’s collected writings on her career, including both autobiographical and critical essays and a selection of talks given at schools and SFF events. I most enjoyed the essays which focused on specific books, notably Fire and Hemlock, which appears multiple times. I felt that I received great insight into her process, and her understanding of the meaning of fantasy, both of which I think people here will find engaging. She’s also quite funny! A definite recommendation. (Caveat, though: my edition had an introduction by Neil Gaiman in it, and there are some mentions of Gaiman within that, knowing what we now know, honestly read as very sad.)

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination, by Ursula K. Le Guin

A similar collection by UKLG, this one more narrowly focused on craft. As always, it is worth hearing what UKLG has to say about craft. I especially enjoyed three interlinked essays about rhythm and the development of rhythm in prose, which took almost a discourse analysis perspective on first Tolkien’s, then Le Guin’s own, prose rhythms. Le Guin has the correct take that Tolkien and Woolf are two of the most stunningly rhythmic English-language writers to ever do it! This collection also contains what I believe to be Le Guin’s most extended discussion of her experiences regarding Ishi, the Yahi man whom her father, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, studied and formed a friendship with. Ishi was already 13 years dead by the time she was born, but her accounting describes the way his unspoken memory permeated her youth. She has often been called upon to justify her father’s decisions regarding Ishi’s life and death, and she settles on the tense position that her father’s life’s work was both “an act of imperialism” and “an act of human solidarity” (29). She does not, I must say, mention the long struggle, beginning in the 1990s, to reclaim Ishi’s ashes and brain from the Smithsonian Institution. This, and the closely following essay discussing her childhood relationship to two living Native Californian men, Robert Spott (Yurok) and Juan Dolores (Papago), sheds more light on the character of her childhood with anthropology “in the air.” I was glad to have refreshed my memory of Malcolm Margolin’s extensive writings on Native California before reading this; it helped me contextualize and evaluate Le Guin’s analysis of her own understanding of Indigenous Californians.

As always, a thought-provoking read.

Orpheus in the Bronx by Reginald Shepherd

A collection of biographical and critical writing by the poet. I am positive Shepherd would hate me saying this, but I found the biographical essays far more compelling than the literary criticism. He’s really into Adorno, with all that entails, which is just not my theoretical jam.

Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph by Lucasta Miller

(This sort of fits this category.) This very interesting book uses those nine poems and one epitaph as launch points for nine portions of Keats’ life, from his early childhood to his death, deftly mixing criticism of the poems themselves with biographical information. I was most impressed by the way that Miller kept control of the literary criticism, allowing her discussions of their formal qualities and artistic contributions to take up space of their own apart from their potential illumination of Keats’ biography, while also making convincing arguments from them about Keats’ biography. It’s neither a truly comprehensive biography nor a truly scholarly engagement with the poems as standalone works, but she is careful to thoroughly cite and refer to both of those things, should the reader be interested. I also appreciated that the poems (with the exception of Endymion) were fully reprinted at the start of every chapter. I do recall that I thought at times she was being Weird About Women —specifically, though I can’t remember the context, I definitely thought more than once that “a man being sexually attracted to a woman doesn’t mean that woman actually has power over the man”— but these were small enough blips that they didn’t spoil my interest what Miller had to say.

Nature Writing™, inc. Birds, Which is Distinct from Pop Science About Animals

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I am very sorry to say this about Robin Wall Kimmerer, but I think that this long essay on the gift economy should not have been published alone as its own book. It doesn’t have the substance to stand alone like this.

Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging, by Jessica J. Lee

Another science-memoir, this time about plant biology and migration. Uneven, as essay collections often are. The chapter on tea was fascinating, the one on seaweed so meandering. Many were far too short to come to anything resembling a conclusion or a point — sort of New Yorker-ish in that way.

Sparrow Envy, by J. Drew Lanham

A series of in-between essay/poems on birds. Some of them were quite lovely, especially one on swans. Most were pleasant to read but not especially striking, but their combined effect was detailed and highly visual.

The Peregrine, The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker, by J.A. Baker, ed. John Fanshawe

The collected works of the seminal British nature writer. I did not read the diaries, but dove right into the book and long essay collected in the front half, about Baker’s time birdwatching on the Essex coast in England in the late 1960s. Diamantine prose. Such weird, wonderful, sharp metaphors — mists of sound, smarting colors. All very elegiac in tone (this was the era of the great die-off for peregrines suffering from DDT), which is remarkable for a present-day birder, for whom the numbers of non-peregrine birds he describes boggle the mind. I read this and had to read more, thus…

The Goshawk, by T.H. White

White’s memoir of raising —and sending to its death— a goshawk according to the principles of the medievals, on the eve of WWII. Gripping, untidy, discomfiting. Sharply funny in places, then very sad.

H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald

The joint hawk-raising memoir and analysis of The Goshawk which made such a splash upon its publication ten years ago. I really appreciated reading the Baker/White/Macdonald trio back-to-back. Having actually read White right before helped me evaluate Macdonald’s evaluation of him/his text according to my lights, while I felt I could sense the influence of Baker on the more personal depictions of the countryside and the birds. The book itself, too, lived up to the hype: I found it interesting, emotional, and aesthetically pleasing.

PopSci

Everything is Tuberculosis, by John Green

One of the most successful gift books of the year. A social history of the disease twined around the story of a specific young man named Henry living with tuberculosis, packing a surprising amount of information, storytelling, and good old-fashioned polemic into its less-than-200 pages. The driving force of the book is that we could choose to eradicate tuberculosis, a scourge of humanity for centuries, right now, and do not. That is a powerful engine. It’s a very skillfully written book and one which actually inspired me to action, which is vanishingly rare.

Adventures in Volcanoland, by Tamsin Mather

A really solid, entertaining, informative layperson’s guide to volcanology. If it has a “contribution” it’s making, it’s the way Mather wants the reader to understand volcanism as a geo-ecological force which shaped the evolution of life in foundational ways, a perspective which had definitely been lacking from my previous, pretty typical public geosciences education. I enjoyed this quite a bit and may even reread it.

Ancestors: Identity and DNA in the Levant, by Pierre Zalloua

The title is misleading, and this is such a classic example of a guy who is an expert in One Thing who thinks that he can then make proclamations on Many Other Things. Full of stupid sociohistorical overgeneralization. The main thrust —“DNA does not define or determine an identity, a culture, or an ethnicity. It uncovers stories from the past but does not reveal who we really are” (214)— is obviously true and correct, and nicely put to boot, but it’s just lost in the ambition of the text.

Slither: How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World, by Stephen S. Hall

Pretty fun, lightweight popsci in the usual mode. I learned a lot about snakes! There wasn’t really one overarching theme to the whole thing other than “snakes are cool,” but there was a tendency to think about snake senses as a “way in,” and that was really interesting. I liked the chapter on rattlesnakes, a common sight around my neck of the woods, and the one on the inexorable advance of the Florida python.

Bitch: On the Female of the Species, by Lucy Cooke

A freewheeling overview of recent science (and scientists) on female organisms, long neglected and maligned in biological research, and what this bevy of new information is doing for our overall understanding of living systems, particularly through the lens of evolutionary biology. Often funny, full of truly weird and fascinating information, and interested in naming all the people involved in the discoveries described, which is sadly rare in this type of book. One of the more enjoyable and educational science books I read all year.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us , by Ed Yong

Actually accurate and descriptive title and subtitle; yay for Ed Yong! If you are interested in what the title says this book is about, you will be rewarded with exactly that. Not quite as much verve as Bitch, but organized along the same lines, with a definite sense of wonder that goes a long way with me. I enjoyed learning yet more about the amazing umwelts that are possible out there.

History

The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902, by Scott D. Seligman

Fascinating history of an almost totally forgotten strike/action in the Lower East Side, collating newspaper reports and court records to recount one community’s response to Gilded Age monopoly economies in the body of the Beef Trust. This is the opposite of speculative history: Seligman scrupulously avoids “reading in” to any of the information he finds, and the social position of these women meant that very few of them left later accounts or first-person testimonies. Nonetheless, I found this narrative of the nascent social movement totally gripping. It’s so unusual and interesting from a sociological perspective: how these women met, identified common cause, took action, and fell apart. Sometimes it all rang woefully true; sometimes it was just so alien. Seligman seems to think of this as a kind of early case study of consumer activism, but of course I was thinking about the overall Yiddishist Left — useful food for thought (so to speak) from both perspectives in this book. At one point, Seligman pithily says: “In the search for villains, nobody seemed able to see more than one step back in the process,” and boy howdy. Yep.

Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, by Ada Palmer

For once, for ONCE, a title the book actually delivers upon. A chatty, but serious, popular history offering by a subject-matter expert wishing to inject some grounded historical information into the popular and political uses of the Renaissance concept. Much needed, though, as ever, the people who need it most will never read it. I think a little too much is made in reviews of the “irreverence” of the book — this is less Internetish than eg Palmer’s blog posts, which provided a proving ground for some of the ideas presented here. I consider that a good thing: a book with ~650 pages of text (not counting the extensive notes section) can’t maintain that kind of flippant tone without being wearying. I did not feel wearied of this book. I think Palmer really earned the buildup to her great paean to humanism, having solidly established the basics of her picture of early modern Italy and its inhabitants, proceding to the thornier philosophical history, and finally getting to the analysis of modern democracies having earned my trust and established a strong shared set of priors.

Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, by Eleanor Barraclough

A material history of “the Vikings” (with discussion of that term) in the “…in N Objects” vein, which I remember wishing was about a larger N. I quite enjoyed what was here, especially the piece about hair, grooming, and aesthetics anchored on a comb, but definitely felt that it was too small!

Goodbye, Eastern Europe, by Jacob Mikanowski

Pretty sure this was a rec from dolorosa_12 many months ago. I guess this can best be called a cultural history of said region, passed through a thick veil of nostalgia (for the Austro-Hungarian Empire!!). I did appreciate the focus on movement, diffusion, and exchange as a corrective to the stereotypes of the region and as a way to keep the book from bogging down in precise details of any one country. Even so, I thought Mikanowski over-egged his insistence on a pre-Soviet pluralism destroyed by nationalist modernity. That said, my broad-strokes and especially pre-1700 but post-900 knowledge of the region is dreadfully lacking, so I was glad to have that picture fleshed out more.

The Monastic World: A 1,200-Year History, by Andrew Jotischky

I read In This House of Brede this year, recommended to me as some kind of corrective to Lauren Groff’s heinous Matrix, and it made me so mad that I used this 500-page tome to give myself a crash course in Benedictine history just so I could be madder in a more historically informed way. Did a fantastic job at that. I now understand the difference between canons and monks, and you can too. I honestly found this a great read. It’s full of the driest, subtlest academic humor, and I found Jotischky’s tendency to describe some quality of early medieval practice and then follow it up with a pithy Thomas Merton quote endearing. It can’t cover everything — notably, I thought Russian monasticisms were very underrepresented— but it did a good job of talking about Greek and Byzantine Orthodox monastics in general, and explaining how European monastics were always being inspired by “Eastern” practices. Honestly a sleeper hit of the year. And I am still informedly mad at Matrix and In This House of Brede.

The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea, by Lady Hyegyŏng, trans. and ed. JaHyun Kim Haboush

These memoirs are by a queen mother in the 18th century writing first to her son, the king, and then to her grandson, the next king, trying to clear the names of various of her family from politically-motivated ignominy, all of which seems to derive from a horrible, terrifying incident in 1762, which she won’t so much as name… until the very last memoir, when it’s revealed that her husband the Crown Prince was, essentially, gruesomely executed by his father the king for many violent crimes. Arranged in this way, it is almost like reading a mystery novel where some terrifying dark past is hinted at, but only revealed at the last. Of course, it is not a novel, but I found myself thinking of testimonial literature. The whole affair sounds like a devastatingly traumatic experience which sent shockwaves through the Choseon court which were still reverberating forty years later. Absolutely fascinating picture of deadly court politics and how women could or could not navigate within them — and also of this individual woman, who firmly believed in the Confucian strictures of her milieu but had been forced to compromise those morals again and again to preserve her life and the lives of her children, and had these shards of personality peeking out behind the genre and gender conventions she used using to write. Kim Haboush’s introductory essays and notes provided just the right amount of context and foreknowledge.

Memoirs & Biographies Which Didn't Fit Elsewhere

Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood

Finally getting around to this memoir about Lockwood’s deeply weird father, the fanatical-convert Catholic priest. P.L. is one-of-a-kind, and this book was quite the experience. The first 100 pages or so, I was utterly engrossed and laughing on every page; next, I was face-clutchingly horrified. Unfortunately, by the back third, I was beginning to think that Lockwood had run out of steam, or had no real plan to end the book, and the whole thing felt deflated. Nonetheless, those first hundred pages were worth the eventual meander.

The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries, by Emma Thompson

Mostly I wanted to know the context for the tumblr-famous screenshot about ovulation. Emma Thompson seems like a riot.

Kissing Girls on Shabbat, by Sara Glass

A queer off-the-derech memoir whose title is rather more flippant than its content. My main feeling upon finishing was hope that Glass is doing better, and that possibly writing this book helped.

How to Share an Egg, by Bonny Reichert

This is such a frustrating book. It feels borderline disrespectful to call it bait, but… as a former editor, Reichert should know how packaging and presentation will set readers’ expectations and how a reasonably okay food memoir (she’s no Reichl) will crumble under the weight of being positioned as something on par with, say, I Want You to Know We Are Still Here or House of Glass.

Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told, by Jeremy Atherton Lin

I’ll be the judge of that, subtitle. idk, man, I would have given the parts that were a fairly competent annotated bibliography of major U.S. Supreme Court cases leading up to gay marriage an A had this been written by one of my undergrads. And I liked the increasingly zany descriptions of semen. I really enjoyed the sudden left turn into art criticism at the 2/3rds mark. But there is no structure. It’s made me nervous to read Why We Went Out, which is what I wanted to read, except the holds list on it was like three months long. Maybe it will be more together…

Miscellany

The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

This could have gone in belles-lettres, as it was perhaps too-obviously aiming for, but those lettres were not belles enough. A loose memoir? essay collection? on the 2017 men’s tennis season, which I read despite knowing nothing about tennis. I think, unfortunately, that I should have known more about tennis to get more out of this, but also that RRP wasn’t putting down enough about the significance, history, or aesthetics of tennis to enter the halls of sports writing occupied by Hanif Abdurraqib and C.L.R. James, among others, where the sport is one portal to an interesting and beautiful meditation on something, rather than just a blow-by-blow of one time someone played some good game. That’s a review, not a book.

Deep Hanging Out: Wanderings and Wonderment in Native California, by Malcolm Margolin

The Bay Area classic bringing together the greatest hits of nearly 50 years of Margolin’s journalism in California’s Indian Country. Margolin (of blessed memory) was an eloquent, respectful, and community-minded journalist, as every one of these pieces shows. Non-Indigenous people tend to be very ignorant of California's Indigenous past and especially present, when in fact there is an incredibly rich, diverse, and vibrant set of societies doing pretty amazing things all over the state, and California is home to the highest absolute number of Indigenous people of any U.S. state. Margolin is probably best known for his long-term relationships with important Ohlone figures in the Bay Area, but his work took him all over, and this collection is a good introduction to some of the key players, struggles, and concerns of Native California over the past few decades.

People Love Dead Jews, by Dara Horn

This is at times scalding, and some of the essays (like the one on Varian Fry) are quite good, but I can’t help but feel that the book is hamstrung by, sigh, its lack of historical materialism. How and why did we get from deicide to blood libel to lizard people? In a very good essay about name changing and why the “it was changed for me at Ellis Island” trope is a myth, why is there no discussion of the preconditions for assimilation (into whiteness?) in America? Do “Christian story structures” really contrast with “Jewish story structures” because of, idek, some strictly theological thing true across all religious denominations? (No.) Horn makes sure to disclaim that she isn’t a historian, sociologist, or journalist, but like. That doesn’t actually absolve anyone from needing to have real sources and not make sweeping generalizations ungrounded in the literature. Also, nothing is eternal, not even “the oldest hatred,” so what are the conditions for antisemitism’s emergence and adaptation in any given place and time? Girl, I know they make even lit PhDs define their terms. Moreover, if you want to talk about Zionism, talk about it seriously, and if you don't, then leave it be instead of dropping snide and preposterous comments about BDS randomly throughout unrelated essays and otherwise not touching it. (If you talk about Zionism seriously you can actually be so much more snide about BDS, without being preposterous). Anyway, lachrymose Judaism. And where is ANYONE who isn’t Ashkenazi?

Anyway anyway, people like me like this book because it's got compelling prose and feels true to said people like me, and is in fact true in parts, but it's actually pretty bad history.

84, Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff

Picked up from skygiants and genarti, whose reviews you should allow to convince you to read this charming, bursting-with-personality collection of letters between a voracious American bookhound and her London supplier. I’ll add my two cents, which was that I loved listening to this as an audiobook, because the letters are so voicey!

Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America's Gay Restaurants, by Erik Piepenburg

Basically, a set of short personal essays set at various gay restaurants, past and present, across the U.S. There is a thesis inasmuch as the author wants to convey that gay restaurants are cool and important, but it’s not really an exploration of the phenomenon so much as a celebration and introduction to it. I was amused to see he had a bad time at the incredibly irritating gay Instagram restaurant in my current gayborhood, and touched to see Orphan Andy’s written up, but wasn’t really informed, per se. Except maybe about the role Automats played in NYC’s early gay scene! That was fun.

Belles-lettres, Like Miscellany but Pretentious

The Abandoners: On Mothers and Monsters, by Begoña Gómez Urzaiz, trans. Lizzie Davis

I looooooved this book about notable women “abandoning” their children to go live full lives. Tolkien heads know why I read this, maybe. The loaded phrase abandonment/abandoner is used very intentionally; the book is interested in discussing why, exactly, mothers living lives disconnected from their biological children are uniquely vituperated. The cases mainly focus on famous women (Muriel Sparks, Maria Montessori, etc.) and range from those where “abandonment” can hardly be the appropriate term given any empathy at all, through complicated situations full of social pressure, to more obviously Fuck Them Kids scenarios. At the very end, mothers who must leave their children —migrants, refugees, institutionalized women— enter the picture. The writing is rangy, even dreamy. It asks a question and then empathetically and with great interest seeks a range of answers. My one critique is that it would have been nice to see the very mother-child relationship more historicized — the fact that every one of these mothers was post-industrial is actually relevant, because familial expectations of intimacy and presence changed dramatically with the advent of modern capitalism. Even so, I was entranced.

Travels with a Writing Brush: Classical Japanese Travel Writing from the Manyoshu to Basho, ed. and trans. Meredith McKinney

A chronological collection of what it says on the tin (finally). I enjoyed reading this anthology after reading a bunch of Heian diaries last year, which included the traveling Sarashina Diary. Watching the different layers of allusion, trope, and accepted metaphor accrete across the centuries was fascinating and, by the end, quite heartwarming. I could wish for more detailed explanatory footnotes for the texts themselves, but found the bracketing critical essays very helpful introductory material.

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HR S1E5

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 06:26:03 GMT

Need Canadian taxpayer-funded softcore porn be "good"? Is it not enough that, in single glorious moments, it can reach inside and tap the closeted 15-year-old you once were on the shoulder, even though you thought she was dead and buried?!

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Was the pacing totally whack and the episode overstuffed to the point of incoherency? Yes! Will the next episode be meandering fluff because they've just undercut the primary tension in the show? Probably! Was everything wrapped up so neatly and effortlessly due mostly to the Marvelously Understanding Women? You bet! Was the show finally tackled to the ground and sedated by its originating canon? Unfortunately! And yet! Sometimes I swear it's like my tragic gay youth happened to another person, but she's in there still, I guess. And maybe it takes the last five minutes of a schmaltzy episode of TV to make me remember the simple things that would've meant the world to her.

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Love meme entry

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 16:57:44 GMT

✨ holiday love meme 2025 ✨
my thread here

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books

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 20:16:17 GMT

The Green Man's Heir, by Juliet E. McKenna

Rather as though the tone and conceits of urban fantasy were transposed to a quiet, rural English village, but not the quiet English village of a period mystery piece. Here, a typical, grimy UF 30-something failboat --for magical reasons-- works construction on rich berks' country retreats, but also has a connection to the wild and mystical which compels him to solve a variety of magical mysteries. This had a compelling voice and was exceptionally readable, but it was also broken into two fairly discrete halves, which I wish had been more thoroughly integrated. I may try out the next one, if I can get my library to buy it.

All of Us Murderers, by K.J. Charles

Charles is too practiced to write a bad book, but she can write lesser books, and this is one. I think, perhaps, she was not given, or felt she could not take, enough page space to fully realize this novel, which combines a second-chance romance and a Cretanly twisty neo-Gothic mystery. In particular, I think keeping all those about-faces, red herrings, and illegitimate daughters straight taxed her a little, and left the characters and even the setting feeling unusually thin -- these are usually elements she excels at writing, and so they stand out by their relative threadbareness here. The love interest in particular, Gideon, needed to be more fleshed-out; I left this book not knowing if he had any particular interests or, like, character traits outside his archetype. One of the most important accomplices, as well, has motivations and backstory that are not so much opaque as totally absent. (In fairness, the protagonist was lively and richly woven.) Simply giving each of these components more space and description would have helped enormously without changing the structure or events of the book much, if at all. I will also add that I am beginning to see some repetition: the mystery scenario bears more than a passing resemblance to Proper English (a perfect book), while the romantic scenario is much like Masters in This Hall.

The sense of suspense is unrelenting and deftly managed, and the many convoluted loopings of the plot were well-balanced, always kept track of, and pleasurably guessable-but-not-in-the-details. However, I feel that in the need to keep it all straight, Charles let some of her other authorial responsibilities drop a little. It's perfectly readable! But I have seen the heights of her house-party romantic murder mysteries, and this is more like a foothill.

The Magician of Tiger Castle, by Louis Sachar

Alas. Sachar's first adult fantasy book as she is advertase, but I didn't leave with any sense of why this had to be adult fantasy, except for the desire to have silly sex jokes. A fun concept --genuine alchemist must get himself out of trouble for overpromising his alchemical prowess; there's a Romeo-and-Juliet plot-- with sadly shallow execution. I'd find myself picking this up, reading a fair bit, and then going ages before picking it up again. It's also one of the more casually, 1980s-style sexist fantasy novels I've read in a bit, which is a shame.

The End of Everything, by Dovid Bergelson, trans. Joseph Sherman

Of the many sad lives of 20th century Yiddish authors, I do think Bergelson's stands out as being especially, ironically tragic. If reading this book biographically, I feel like you can see exactly why he thought the USSR was the place to be, and why he wouldn't leave. Leaving his life and death aside, The End of Everything (previously translated, not as well, as When All Is Said and Done) is a relentlessly meaningless exercise in ostranenie following the attractive, sinking-bourgeois young woman Mirl through a period of three dragging years. It's one of those difficult, self-consciously literary books in which the characters are half characters and half allegories. Mirl herself is probably an allegory for the whole "little world" of the shtetl, or possibly the Moschiach. As a real person, she's also rather Emma Bovary, but I did find myself genuinely impressed by Bergelson's treatment of the female characters. Read if you: wish Moshfegh et al. wrote their assimilation blues/lying on couches/exploitative sexual relations/Oh the ennui novels in elevated free indirect discourse influenced by Russian Formalism.

Don't read if you: are irritated by characters who are mainly allegories, desire any emotion other than vast alienation, or like skaz.

The Summer War, by Naomi Novik

A perfectly readable original fairytale in novella form, but little more than that. It feels a little like a diluted version of Spinning Silver or Uprooted, in that the interesting playing with fairytale tropes is fully present, but the character work, stakes, and plotting are not. Pleasurable enough, but thin.

Briefly, A Delicious Life, by Nell Stevens

An odd little novel that essentially tells the story of George Sand's life, in particular her spell in Mallorca with her children and Chopin, but with a frame story of a young medieval ghost who is enthusiastically and bisexually haunting them. This is a very fun way to write a biography. Not necessarily more than that, but that’s enough for me.

Inanna, Gilgamesh, and Ninshubar, by Emily H. Wilson

Not to be confused with the Emily Wilson who does Ancient Greek translations! This is a compulsively readable, but mysteriously lacking, science-fantasy retelling of various Sumerian myths. Each retells a myth you've heard of --Inanna's descent to the underworld, Gilgamesh's time with Enkidu-- within an overarching plot that takes a "gods as ancient aliens" tack. First of all: don't like that, think that particular conspiracy theory is one of the most boring, vacuous takes on ancient life and added essentially nothing to the otherwise grounded imaginative recreation of day-to-day Mesopotamia. That recreation was one of the strengths of this series, as was the slightly elevated, distanced narration, which I felt usefully mimicked the tone of some of the epics themselves. There were a few characters, notably Ninshubar, whom I became strongly attached to, and all the many POVs and plot threads were competently arranged. However, there was a degree of depth, or emotional resonance, or something, which I just didn't find. Obviously, though, I read these three long books in a very short period of time, back-to-back, so I liked it well enough! I will be keeping an eye out for Wilson's future work, but I'll also be hoping that there will be just a little more zing in whatever that is.

The Place of Shells, by Mai Ishizawa, trans. Polly Barton

Read on a review from skygiants. Just as Germany is opening back up after the first long Covid lockdowns, a Japanese PhD student meets a friend who died in the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami. Their reunion is awkward, as the separation of death causes various social niceties to feel false and inappropriate, and it also portends a summer of strangely looping and overlapping time, where the past comes back in gauzy layers to alter the city and the people moving through it. (There is a somewhat pro-forma nod to the Holocaust; otherwise, the past of Göttingen's Jews, deeply intertwined with the university the main character is at, notably the science faculty which inspired one of the key physical locations of the novel, and Göttingen's role as a hotbed of Nazism, doesn't appear to be relevant to this exploration of German history.) It's interior, lacy, and thoughtful, but it left no especially deep impression on me.

Rules for Ghosting, by Shelly Jay Shore

SIGH. Okay, so the setup here is great: trans Jew named Ezra (I literally know 4 trans Jewish Ezras, very verisimilitudinous) connected to a family-owned Jewish funeral home AND can actually see ghosts! When the ghost of his current lover's ex-husband begins to haunt him, what does it mean??

Well, okay, the answer is that it means nothing. It means we're in for a load of therapy speak about how Ezra is the Middle Child and was the Eldest Daughter and so Deserves Better and why does his current lover's ex-husband care about this again? Why is he Different From All Other Ghosts? Idk, not the point of the book, I guess. What was the point of the book? Idk that either. A real debut kitchen-sink which didn't realize which of its many seams of plot and theme were worth mining further, and which should have been left in the ground.

Cinder House, by Freya Marske

Aha! I have found the Marske book which works for me! And possibly the only book in this whole review that I can wholeheartedly recommend and say I definitely liked in all its parts. This is a novella-length take on the Cinderella story, in which Cinderella is also… the very house she cares for as a drudge! The idea is clever, and I enjoyed the light-touch inclusion of less-common elements of the Cinderella story, like the tree. Gorgeous gown descriptions, as one would hope. Pretty prose that didn’t get in the way, and a good bit of satisfying reveling in atmosphere for something so short. I did feel that the ending, and in particular the reveal about two minor characters being [spoiler] the same person was slightly shortchanged, but only slightly. More importantly, there’s ballet!! And ballet that understands why ballet is interesting, good, and aesthetically appealing. I really enjoyed this and read it in one gulp during a rainy evening, listening to the Prokofiev Cinderella score, which was absolutely perfect. Would recommend!

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Low-effort ballet posting

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 02:38:11 GMT

I'm so slammed with job applications, current job, and dissertating that I feel like death and have read only two books over the last two weeks. I've had a book post draft open for at least ten days :'(

Anyway, I did watch this rehearsal video of the Royal Ballet's The Nutcracker on the train home a couple days ago. Two groups of dancers rehearse parts of the ballet: first, four corps dancers rehearse the Mirlitons/Reed-flute/marzipan/French* dance, then, First Soloist Luca Acri and corps member Yu Hang rehearse "Le voyage/The Pine-forest," in which the Nutcracker Prince is transformed back into a human, and he and Clara/Masha meet properly for the first time. It's a lovely interstitial moment and one of the few really characterful dance pieces the plot allows.

However, I share it mainly because that second rehearsal demonstrates the ballet dynamic which most tickles my fanwriter's fancy. Obviously, I am a huge ballet fan, but only parts of that fannishness overlap with fic-fannishness centered on an interest in narrativizing interpersonal dynamics. This specific interpersonal dynamic I choose to call the Age Gap Pas de Deux Rehearsal.

The Age Gap Pas de Deux Rehearsal

The AGPDDR, or ag-padder, shares traits with student/mentor, age gap romance, starfucker, and competency kink tropes, but is distinct in a few key ways. First, while it can be turned romantic, it rarely is. Second, the senior partner can possess huge amounts of charisma in an almost Weberian sense, but has less formal power over the younger partner within their shared institution because they are closer to the partner than to the repetiteur or caster. Third, and on the other hand, their larger shared institution --ballet itself-- puts the two dancers strongly in league with one another to achieve the goal of reproducing their shared art form through the practice of pas de deux. The AGPDDR, then, is about achieving a special kind of beauty-oriented collaboration within a set of uniquely balletic power dynamics.

These, of course, develop from the material conditions of the ballet company. First, the age gap itself is relatively small (almost never will it exceed 20 years), but each year is freighted with excessive importance. Stars' ballet careers are long compared to some athletes, but minuscule compared to some artists: you will never have a Claudel/Rodin scenario. Kahlo/Rivera come closer to representing a maximum age gap size, but ballet dancers will never age together into a joint period of ballet-world domination. The older dancer will inevitably retire, or at least decline, before the younger dancer reaches their prime. Thus the age gap is small, sometimes ten years or less, but insurmountable. Here, Luca Acri is 33, while Yu Hang is 24 or 25, which would be irrelevant outside of ballet, but inside, those 8-9 years will be the years where Yu Hang makes it or breaks it, while Acri is pretty much as made as he's going to be, and it would not be unheard-of for him to retire now, although he may yet have another decade in him.
Why I like this for fic: Short sports/artistic careers are always poignant. One dancer will have known (of) the other for a high proportion of their life, but has been suddenly thrust into a very different kind of relationship with them.

That age gap is also almost always reflected in formal rank within the company. Though the names vary, every company has its few stars and its much larger corps, with intermediate ranks of descending soloist casting in between. In theory, these ranks reflect not simple seniority within the company but (supposed) skill and "it-ness." In the most deterministic way, they reflect what repertoire a dancer is given. A principal does not have organizational power per se over a corps dancer, but they do have social power through their charisma and sometimes significant informal institutional sway. Young stars do shoot up the ranks, but generally, the way that they do this is by being given the opportunity to dance "principal roles" (the ones you've heard of), which all require pas de deux, which will require them to interface with an older, established principal dancer. In this video, Luca Acri is a First Soloist, one step down from a principal and dancing second-tier principal roles as his stock in trade, while Yu Hang is a First Artist, the second rank up from the bottom, and being given a "minor" principal role (Clara) to test her and to introduce her to audiences. How well she can click with Acri and pull off the kind of PDD-heavy dancing required of principals with him will have major repercussions for her career, so these rehearsals rehearse her future promotion, as well as "just" the show.
Why I like this for fic: You can also get a little Lady Eve with it from the "young star on the rise" angle, or manipulative with it in the other, more traditional direction, with the senior partner having some informal control over casting. That control is definitely not absolute, though, and relies on triangulation with non-dancers in the room.

Age and rank are almost indicators, though, for something a little more slippery: charisma. Yu Hang will have spent her years of education within the Royal Ballet's in-house training system and her earliest years in the company watching Luca Acri. He will have been dancing the roles (or the partner to the roles) she dreams of dancing. She may have watched him in person or on video specifically to learn from him. As a First Soloist of the Royal Ballet, he has made it to an echelon of professional dance that the vast majority of dancers, even people in Yu Hang's position, never reach, but which Yu Hang wants very badly to achieve. In other AGPDDRs, with a true senior superstar like Nuñez, Osipova, or Acosta as one of the partners, that charisma will be absolutely off the charts. And you have to touch them.
Why I like it for fic: Being intimate with a star can be overwhelming and shocking. The younger dancer is suddenly expected to get on that star's level at least a little. They are getting lots of very direct attention and physical contact from, potentially, one of the greatest dancers of their generation. Every word or look is somehow more thrilling or devastating. And did I mention they're touching you? And for the senior partner, there's a real sense that this is an added layer of responsibility. Maybe it feels quasi-parental, maybe they get a thrill out of it, maybe they're embarrassed by the hero worship…

However, in the AGPDDR, the dancers are collaborators. They are immediate collaborators, of course: they want to dance well together so they can look beautiful on stage. It is very much in Luca Acri's interest to give Yu Hang all the literal and metaphorical support he can to make their pas de deux successful, so that the audience and his boss are pleased. Moreover, ballet is a completely physical art: even now, with video recordings and Labanotation, the main way dance knowledge is passed down is by one dancer teaching it to the next. Luca Acri was taught to do this once as a young dancer in an AGPDDR, and now it is his turn to pass it on to Yu Hang. (He actually talks about this for a second in the interview before the rehearsal.) That's a sacred responsibility! Dancers feel that responsibility very much; it is one of the great honors of the ballet world to say that you learned X piece of rep from so-and-so, who learned it from Fonteyn, who learned it from de Valois, who learned it from Cecchetti himself. It's a kind of impersonal higher drive, this preservationist impulse.
Why I like it for fic: I think this is one of the more unique aspects of the AGPDDR. There is a higher goal or even higher power in the room to which they are both subject. If they achieve balletic sublimity together, then they have successfully perpetuated this art form to which both have them have given literally their entire lives and bodies for another generation. They may have various kinds of gaps, but they are sharing one moment in ballet history together.

Beyond being collaborators, they are also in cahoots, which is something else again! The older and higher-ranked partner is still a dancer, not a coach, repetiteur, choreographer, or artistic director. One or all of those other people is going to be in the rehearsal studio at all times during the AGPDDR, and they have legitimate authority to correct, rebuke, praise, advise, and otherwise instruct both dancers. They will probably do this less to the senior dancer --you can see in the video that Acri gets one correction or suggestion for like every ten given to brand-new Hang-- but they will do it! The older dancer's power over the younger dancer is not absolute, and there's a very present reminder of that all the time. The dancers are in it together to please, satisfy, impress, and/or triumph over that other, more institutionally powerful person using their joint dance.
Why I like it for fic: Just classic group dynamics, I suppose. They are working together! They are allies in a struggle! If you want to make it evil, that other person is the one a dancer will have to get on-side to effect anything other than strictly personal career damage.

Lastly, there is the dance itself. Partnering is the hardest thing a ballet dancer does. You can get career-ending injuries when partnering goes awry, and also, just to look good in a supported stand, the partner needs to judge to a fraction of a millimeter where to balance their partner's weight. You can also have the kind of bad experience that happens when someone is touching you, sometimes very intimately, and abuses that trust. Both partners, then, are very vulnerable to the other -- it's an equalizer, in a way. In a PDD, if the lift-ee is more experienced, they are taking a huge leap of faith that the green partner is not just going to drop them and end their career in its golden years. If it's the lifter, they're hoping their inexperienced, nervous young partner doesn't flinch or overbalance them both during a lift and mutually snap some tendons in a fall. Leaving aside the potential for horrific injuries, in either role, the younger partner has basically been given the Koh-i-Noor and told that it's their responsibility now to frame it to its best advantage! Then there's the added level that PDDs are almost universally portraying romance, and the dancers are expected to act the emotions -- easy for that to be overwhelming in its own way. I think Acri is being extremely sweet with Yu Hang here; he's visibly checking in during some of the harder partnering and giving her little smiles.
Why I like it for fic: The fizz of pulling something risky off! The pleasure in learning someone else's body so intimately. The mutual exchange of deep bodily trust pulling you both into a more equal position despite everything else between you -- to perform the steps at all, you have to be engaging with each other from a position of mutual knowledge and intense attention, even if you hate each other. The junior partner might be thrilling at the thought of supporting an idol, or being supported by them.

A different pair for comparison:

This is long-time First Soloist Yuhui Choe with (at the time) First Artist Joonhyuk Jun -- who was promoted to Soloist after successfully completing this show -- rehearsing the Bluebird PDD from Sleeping Beauty. BPDD is a classic "test" role, especially for male dancers. In this video, Choe had just come back from maternity leave. She's been a First/Soloist for… ever? Possibly literally a decade, and she joined the company in 2002. She's a stalwart and dark-horse favorite for many people. Jun has been around for 7 or 8 years and has had a quick rise. (If the Royal weren't so top-heavy, I wonder if he might even have become principal this or next year, but he'll probably have to wait as it is.) Interestingly, they're also the first two Korean dancers the Royal hired, though they're no longer the only two.

I think this one is a great example of when the more experienced partner in the [Het] AGPDDR is a ballerina. Choe is really helping Jun with the partnering through her greater experience, but even so, she has to trust him to lift her, including some quite difficult ones. And she's just had a baby. The repetiteur and Choe kind of work together on Jun, shaping him up as a partner. (It's clear he needs no help with the bravura solo stuff!) Choe also has always had a very serene energy, which contrasts a bit with Jun, who's like an elastic band. Both of them really need to do well on this specific performance, Choe as a sign that she's back and ready to be cast regularly, and Jun as a sign that he's worthy of promotion. So it has stakes, but also, to me, a rather sweet and caring energy. Choe says at the end that she's danced this role with more than ten partners, so she's really training up Jun in this grand tradition from a position of enormous experience!

I find this exact dynamic very difficult to transpose out of the ballet world. I think, perhaps, it's impossible! One day I shall simply have to write a fic where it happens as itself.

I, someone who has actually danced a mirlitons variation, took several decades to learn that the symbolic conventions of this variation derive from the confusion of:

mirliton (transverse "eunuch flute") + mirliton (Rouennais almond pastry named after defunct gold coin)

These derive independently to…

Mirliton-the-flute -> party streamers (and a cigar-type pastry) + Mirliton almond pastry -> Marzipan

And somehow all of this is also shepherdesses.

Hence you have different companies doing flutes OR ribbon wands OR marzipan OR "we're French" OR sheep, or some combination of the above, because people were understandably confused wtf a "mirliton" was to Tchaikovsky and Petipa.

Mirliton=(Louisiana Creole for chayote) is seemingly unrelated and still inexplicable to me. Apparently there is also a mirliton that was a hussar's hat. So maybe one day we can see the Ultimate Mirliton Variation where they're French Creole squashes modeled out of marzipan, playing beribboned flutes in a Hungarian military/shepherding band complete with hats.

Btw even I, who have heard the Nutcracker score so many times that it has transcended all taste and is merely a part of my personality, find the four-count tootling irritating.

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A-Z meme

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 01:26:59 GMT

Fics only, because I don't feel that I titled any of my podfics myself… No translations either, ditto.

From noxelementalist via bluedreaming. Rules:

Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for starting a fanwork title? One fanwork per line, ‘A’ and 'The’ do not count for 'a’ and ’t’. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fanwork count.

( Read more... )

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Todukkot is Sukkot

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 17:53:36 GMT

Actually, it's been Sukkot, but today will be Sukkot-Shabbat, always a favorite. Have some fun nature videos from around the web.

My traditional Hakai link is now a BioGraphic link: How plants in the witch hazel family (Hamamelidaceae) eject their seeds at such speeds, with a cool video with high-speed footage.

More slo-mo video, this time of birds in spectacular flight: Tree swallows swirling, ospreys diving, and puffins "flying" underwater.

William Bracewell, a dancer who's slowly becoming a favorite and whom I may see in February, also tends a lovely backyard garden with his partner, Andrew Monaghan (of Matthew Bourne's company).

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Months' worth of fiction

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 07:20:02 GMT

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

A retelling in contemporary Irish idiom of the grisly aftermath of the Athenian defeat at Syracuse, when the remains of the Athenian army were left to starve to death in a great pit outside of town. Two Syracusan ne'er do wells with only an intense love of Euripides to provide them with a hope of a better life see the opportunity to get some quality Euripides on the cheap: just feed some starving Athenians in return for putting on a show. That show is Medea.

If you were disappointed in Station Eleven for not making any use at all of the "Shakespeare company at the end of the world" conceit, Glorious Exploits' "Euripides at the end of a world" fulfills those hopes and more. The book is far from perfect: it meanders before finding its groove, that slangy groove may itself prove annoying to some readers, it's Trying Hard™ with its one (1) female character, and it's not a comedy as promised by the marketing… However. It has something to say about art, tragedy, and Medea specifically that is exquisitely successful. The heart of the novel, the enactment of the play itself and its at-once life-giving and fatal consequences, is a beautiful piece of craft reaching all the way back to those ancient Western literary antecedents and finding in them genuine meaning, which it is able to sincerely, honestly present to the reader. A weird book, and not, overall, a great book, but with a seed of greatness in it that comes along rarely.

Mara, Daughter of the Nile by Eloise Jarvis McGraw

Long years of lirazel trying to get anyone in her DW circle to read this midcentury YA-ish spy novel set in Hatshepsut's Egypt finally paid off! This was a really interesting read, at least partly because it was a great historiographical insight into what people in the 1950s thought they knew about Pharaonic Egypt, so there were some fun "how far we've come!" moments alongside just really enjoying being immersed into a detailed setting. Mara herself is such a different flavor of girl-power protagonist than even twenty years later, much less today. In a strange way, I felt that she was allowed to be much more grown up, perhaps as a result of being allowed to make really bad personal and professional mistakes. You would also NEVER get a novel these days about a formerly enslaved character fantasizing about owning her own slaves -- but EJM really digs into that and makes Mara's slow journey to being out for others as well as for herself feel much more believable.

The major flaw here is that the villain of this girl-power novel set in Hatshepsut's Egypt is… Hatshepsut. And so unconvincingly villainous too! The complaints people have about her are all like, "She commissions too much great art! She doesn't spend all this time and money pointlessly invading Nubia instead! Sometimes people die on her construction projects, unlike during wars I guess!" Then, when you meet her, she's such a cool bitch in charge and each scene is her laying down the law while all the viewpoint characters go, And That's Awful. Completely inexplicable. Practically every other pharaoh was available.

Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

I feel like, secretly, Rufi Thorpe has written THE zeitgeist novel, but the zeitgeist will never realize that what it's looking for in all the Luster-knockoffs has just been topped by, what, a piece of chicklit?! Damn straight!

This is fully in the literary fiction wheelhouse of today inasmuch as it's about the young woman in a relationship with an older man feeling the ennui of modern life and working it out with risky sex and introspection about art. Except… The young woman, the eponymous Margo, gets pregnant. The older man is a loser community college professor. Reality turns out to be waiting just outside the window, and it's not art world NYC, it's trying desperately to find a waitressing job and childcare in Orange County. But it's not that kind of grim social realist novel either. It isn't the slightest bit hazy, either the despairing haze of grind-realism or the druggy-we-haven't-grown-out-of-postmodernism haze devouring the NYRB. It's an acute novel of character, sharp and witty while also being what I can only describe as exuberant. Laugh-out-loud funny and gut-wrenchingly tense, it sends Margo careening through a world where pro-wrestling, OnlyFans, and the looming threat of CPS all shape the playing field.

Forget Elif Bautman et al.; I actually literally think this book descends most directly from Charles Dickens. (0kay, obviously it's not Bleak House, but there are resemblances!! There's even perspective stuff!) There aren't any subversions of midlist triumphalism here. Margo emerges victorious and solvent from her topical Social Problems through the power of love and family. But her path to that victory is so different than I am used to reading about, so creative, sympathetic, incisive, and strange. I hope Oprah or Reese or someone gets their hands on this and makes the moms of America read it. I think that would be a better world!

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

As others on DW have already said, The Tainted Cup has been advertised as something blazingly original when in fact it appears to be a three-way pastiche of some of the larger SFF franchises of the last ten years. However, it is a ruthlessly competent pastiche which I enjoyed! A military/weird-plant/categorization-SFF blend with a murder mystery and good set-up for some sequels, this is not original, but things don't have to be original to be efficiently, determinedly solid Examples of What They're Doing. So if you like sci-fi mysteries, freaky plants, odd-couple detective duos, categorical worldbuilding, and derring-do, you will almost certainly like this.

Seven Days in June by Tia Williams

A contemporary het romance between two Black authors --one a writer of supernatural erotica, one a critic's darling enfant terrible-- who are thrown together by Important Literary-Commercial Considerations, nominally for the first time, except!! They already knew each other one torrid summer as teenagers, a week they have never forgotten and cannot forgive! This combines soap-operatic Dark Pasts and a loving skewer of the American literary scene with a light touch and the pacing of a true professional. A fun and effective piece of fluff :)

Benjamin January 1-5 by Barbara Hambly

You all were correct! Benjamin January is amazing! I was worried after reading a failure of a fantasy novel by Hambly, but these are transporting. I love the cast of varied characters who fill murder mystery roles without being anything close to archetypes, the richly detailed world of 1830s New Orleans in all its fading possibility, and most of all, Benjamin himself. I feel like it's possible the plots are not actually watertight, but I can't care, because the pleasure of these is simply living in them and coming to know the people they present.

The Novel of Ferrara by Giorgio Bassani

A reread (previous review here), this time out of order. This tome is an edited-by-the-author-to-cohere compilation of novels, short stories, and novellas, all taking place before, during, and immediately after WWII in Jewish community of the mid-sized, central Italian city of Ferrara, which turned out to be a hotbed of Fascism during the 1930s and 40s. The most famous of these components is The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, from which Vittorio De Sica directed a film adaptation. However, in my opinion, the gems of this collection are the short stories which bookend the work. They vividly, concisely, and wrenchingly convey the alienation of their main characters as try, and mostly fail, to come to terms with the realization that they were never a part of their beloved city. Bassani looks at the destruction of the Jews of Ferrara and its aftermath from every angle he can think of -- formerly wealthy landowners, disgraced single mothers, embittered college students, determined camp survivors, ex-Communist spinsters -- and in the process makes a truly clear-eyed, sorrowful accounting of the limits of belonging.

There's one story in which a survivor of the camps, Geo Josz, comes back to haunt the non-Jewish Ferrarans he once lived among. The story, told in a kind of choral first-person, recounts how first the non-Jewish citizens pity him, then laugh at him, then hate him, for being a constant and determined reminder of everything they did to betray him and his family. While much of the scholarship on Bassani focuses on his character of nasty little university student Bruno Lattes as his authorial stand-in, I think that Josz, written near the beginning of Bassani's career, represents him much better: the gadfly who wouldn't let anyone forget. Ferrara, which is very proud of Bassani these days, kind of made a mistake letting the great novelist survive, out of all of them.

All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg

I feel sad that I didn't connect with Ginzburg's narrative voice in this novel of WWII through the eyes of a bourgeois goyische family, especially its emotionally neglected youngest daughter. It is possible that the translation did not do Ginzburg, recognized as one of Italy's great 20th century novelists, justice, but it is equally possible that I just did not mesh with the flat, sequential narration, where everything from extramarital affairs to a character's husband being summarily executed by Nazis receives the same slightly detached, concise "this, then that" description. I do see the literary point of that -- it's about the jumble of life and the critique of an especially narrow social viewpoint which isn't capable of really comprehending the descent into Fascism -- but I just did not find the "warmth and humanity" that others apparently see in it. I was being held at too much of a distance. It's too bad; I really wanted to like my first Ginzburg.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

The charging port on the airplane on my flight back was broken, so no reading-on-phone for me! I begged the nice mom from Boston next to me for something to read, and she, in a true nice mom from Boston move, had only The English Patient in trade paperback to give me. This is a fun story. This is not a fun novel. I mean, I can see why this story of damaged art-loving misfits in a Tuscan villa was popular and won the Booker and all that, but rings hollow. Lovely verbiage, but a frankly silly story, when not being the kind of offensive that I can't even be that worked up over, because it's just so 1990s and we as a culture have moved the hell on.

A Shipwreck in Fiji by Nilima Rao

Second in a series following a Sikh policeman in the British colonial police force in WWI-era Fiji, which I started because the audiobooks are read by the inimitable Sid Sagar. The great strength of these novels is Rao's obvious care for her setting. I find everything she puts in about the social world of colonial Fiji, with its increasingly racialized social hierarchy, tenuous connections to the metropole, and far stronger connections with other British colonies, just fascinating, and worked out with a deft and thoughtful hand. The plots are pretty good, too -- not groundbreaking, but they move along at a good clip and are successful murder mysteries. The main problem, kind of innate to the setup, is of course that Detective Singh, the main character, really wants to be a good British colonial policeman and solve crimes against, of course, British colonial law, and you just have to accept that you're rooting for that/him if you're going to read the books.

Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes

Now THIS was what I hoped I would find in Ginzburg. I adored this book, the faux-journal of Valeria, a former housewife (now forced to work in an office to support her declining family in post-war Rome) coming to terms with herself and her changing world. One day, on her way home, she buys a little black composition book and begins to keep a diary. As she writes, slowly, the individual woman who has been buried beneath The Family reemerges. Her world, to which she is newly awakened by the need to describe it in writing, presents her with ever more harrowing personal challenges, signs of a world which is decidedly leaving her behind -- except that, in the notebook, she can feel herself to be the kind of individual who might not be left.

As you may have guessed from my totally inadequate synopsis, Céspedes is explicitly in dialogue with Woolf. This is one of the rare children of Woolf which earns its references. The picture it creates of a woman who wants desperately to be someone else, but simply cannot break completely with her upbringing and the world it represented, is so clear, believable, and true. Valeria's hypocrisies and her longings are unstintingly represented together by an all-seeing yet compassionate authorial eye which nonetheless constructs a completely believable from-the-heart diary. The craft of the conceit is just as good as that of the character, and the tension was such that I just could not put the book down. 90% of modernism was bad and led us down a literary dead end that we are still ramming against, but the thing is that the 10% that succeeded had to be written that way, could not possibly exist except using these tools, did actually change the world! Incredible novel.

Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

This is so slight a trifle pretending to be a murder-mystery-in-space that I feel embarrassed to even review it in the same post as the Rao, let alone Hambly. Disappointed in Waite, whose period f/f romances have some slight texture of reality to them.

Rereads about which I have less to say: Howl's Moving Castle twice in a row, Witch Week, and A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel (KJ Charles).

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A Single Man (Jonathan Watkins) - Factory International/Royal Ballet

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 04:52:05 GMT

I am back! I saw a show! I will make a book post when I can.

A Single Man is a dance adaptation of the 1964 Christopher Isherwood novel about a gay professor at a California university, probably the farthest I've ever traveled to have such a representative artistic experience. Surface-level representative, of course, as I am sadly not yet a professor and thankfully not middle-aged and grieving the death of my partner by contemplating, as literature professors from the 1960s always do, an affair with a student.

This is a joint production between the Royal Ballet in London and Manchester's Factory International, double cast: a mixed cast with RB dancers and freelancers and a cast wholly comprised of freelancers. I saw the freelancer cast, which I think was a rewarding piece of chance. My main takeaway is that, while I am truly glad that The Tribe can now put basically okay art on stage just like the heterosexuals, I wish we would come up with something good again. It's been ten years since Woolf Works!

CAST:
George's Mind: John Grant
George's Body: Jonathan Goddard
Deceased Lover Jim: Harry Alexander
Female Friend Charley: Laura Careless
Student Object of Desire Kenny: Chester Hayes
Kenny's Poor Girlfriend Lois: Naia Bautista
Homoerotic Tennis Players: James Stephens and Greig Matthews
Remaining Corps: Felicity Chadwick, Winnie Dias, Nina Murphy

( Read more... )

Unrelated, but just really enjoyed this interview with Tamara Rojo of SFB.

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A Kingdom Far and Clear - Mark Helprin

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 20:02:23 GMT

Swan Lake novels: partly redeemed. Upon my last Swan Lake book post, eccentric_hat reminded me of this trilogy of novellas, bound together in 2010 as A Kingdom Far and Clear, and anerea helped me find a copy.

What an interesting read! ( Read more... )

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Swan Lake novels

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 21:10:09 GMT

Long ago, I decided to go on a quest to read all the English-language books I could find which retold the narratives of famous ballets. I made it through The Nutcracker, where Gregory Maguire and Claire LeGrand wrote equally bad books which were Tolstoyanly awful in totally different ways. Then, I stalled on what seemed to be the only Giselle-based novel in existence, an Amazon-only, ebook-only travesty which threw me out after only a few horrible pages. Having taken three years to recover, I approached Swan Lake. It turns out there are many novels purporting to retell, adapt, or interpolate Swan Lake, but, having learned from my Nutcracker experience, I deemed only two potentially worthy of a single moment of my one wild and precious life. As it happens, they were not. At least I got this DW post!

The Black Swan, by Mercedes Lackey

Okay, so we all know what we're getting into with Mercedes Lackey, right? My and your expectations are firmly at outlandish Mercedes Lackey levels, yes? Okay, well, this book is actually worse than that, because of the plot thread wherein Prince Siegfried rapes a Romani woman in like chapter three, is haunted by her suicidal ghost until an explicitly Christian angel comes and takes her away to Heaven and gives Siegfried a Rapist Clue, and the rest of the book is Siegfried's redemption narrative. Said redemption takes the form of… not raping his two current paramours and then being true to Odette. I just do think that's a more blatant example of unexamined rape culture than the obviously kinky horse-themed Vanyel rape, you know?

That said, and this is damning by faint praise, this racist, sexist, prosaically uninspired Mercedes Lackey book is nevertheless the best ballet retelling I have yet read, by some margin. For one, it is clearly dealing with the story and conceits of the ballet, taking it seriously as a story, filling out gaps, and providing transformative context without eschewing the power of the narrative as it stands. The themes of loyalty, romantic fidelity, and community from the ballet are the themes of the novel too. In fact, certain clues even make me think that this is, specifically, retelling the old ABT version with the two prologues, suggesting actual engagement with the ballet qua ballet! Are you reading this, authors of ballet retellings? This is where the bar is and you didn't clear it!!

Rapist Siegfried's plot is plastered over two other plots, one of which is actually appealing in a straightforward, 90s way. Herein, Odile is von Rothbart's neglected daughter who must overcome her abuse and internalized misogyny, befriend Odette and the other swans, and break the swan curse through her own sorcerous powers. Great stuff, 101 girl-power fantasy, I eat that up with a spoon. There are even snatches of Odette/Odile, in a subtextual way. Then, at the very same time (oh, Mercedes Lackey), von Rothbart is actually CORRECT about the evilness of Siegfried's mother the queen, who is plotting to not even kill, just distract, the totally unfit Siegfried from the business of ruling so she can keep being regent. There are so many scenes where Lackey lovingly describes how the queen has, like, set up a business scheme to keep unmarried cash-poor noble ladies safe from her philandering son while producing high-status textiles that feed the kingdom's coffers, all of which Siegfried is completely ignorant of, and then goes, AND THAT'S TERRIBLE. In this one way and this one way only, it kind of reminded me of Mara, Daughter of the Nile, where the book wants you to hate this female ruler, and my response is, "What, this female ruler whom you've just glowingly described as a patron of the arts, an astute businesswoman, a preserver of peace, and just all-around better option than this idiotic warmonger man who spends most of his time mistreating his women subjects? This is the villain in your girl-power book??"

But okay, the Odette-and-Odile stuff and the bits about the other princesses in contention for Siegfried's hand are pleasing in an ice-cream sundae kind of way. There are beautiful dress descriptions. There are scenes to appeal to the bookworm girls reading the book. There is creative survival magic and house-setting-up magic. There are digressions about how lacemaking is a viable entrepreneurial opportunity for common-born young women. There are rhapsodies on the pleasures of flight and transformation. There are lots of horses. And it's all stuck quite ably onto the armature of the ballet's own simple, powerful story, which Lackey appears to appreciate and respect, which is frankly all I ever ask of a ballet retelling and doesn't seem like it should be so damn hard! Also, just look at this cover by the great Jody Lee. They sure don't make them like that anymore!

I mean, obviously I don't recommend this multivalently bad book. But if I were forced at gunpoint to reread one of these ballet retellings, I'd pick this one in a heartbeat.

A Treachery of Swans, by A.B. Poranek

So this book, which contains no anti-Romani sentiment and no male-character-building rape, is still somehow worse than The Black Swan. Mostly this is because, while no one would call Mercedes Lackey a generational wordsmith, she knows both that she should get her prose out of the way of her adventure story and how to get her prose out of the way of her adventure story. Moreover, Lackey had never even heard of the contemporary market category "YA fantasy" and its debased prose expectations when she wrote The Black Swan back in 1999. Poranek's prose stylings are that kind of Rococo gilt which YA fantasists presumably think represents "lushness," "poesy," or other positive phrases generally associated with, idk, Tor reviews of Cat Valente books. Unbearable dreck.

But if you are tolerant of contemporary YA fantasy prose, as I am not, I am sure that you can get past that. What I doubt you'll be able to get past is the complete waste of a very good fairytale in service of what I guess is uneven "dark romantasy" plotting set in ersatz France with little if any Swan Lake in there except the "swan by day, princess by night" conceit, which doesn't even last a third of the book. I guess I should say that there is actually explicit Odette/Odile in this, which would be a dream come true, except of course that the book doesn't even have the guts to name Odette "Odette," and the utterly unintentional Lackey femslash-bait has more convincing emotional beats.

Dreadful book, dreadful. Mercedes Lackey's The Black Swan is racist and sexist, yet also recognizably a fantasy novel with adequate plotting, pacing, and setting. Poranek's book is like scraping the sludge out of the cap threads of the blender responsible for the last fifteen years of YA dross and serving it as a whole smoothie. WHY BOTHER! Why bother ruining the extremely good story of Swan Lake, which could easily be made gay in much simpler ways, and then not even engage with Swan Lake? Why write terrible books? It's been so long since I read a book this bad all the way through that it's actually giving me a little existential crisis.

Whooo, it's been a while since I've indulged in a total hatchet-job. Exhilarating. Okay, so, I am willing to believe that, just maybe, I overlooked a hidden gem among the weirdly prevalent Christian "clean romance" Swan Lake retellings. You can tell me if so. I also seem to recall that A-M McLemore's Blanca y Roja may have interpolated bits of Swan Lake despite being mainly a retelling of "Snow White and Rose Red," and that was okay. However, by and large, I am planting my flag on the hill and declaring that the terrain is WIDE OPEN for an even marginally good Swan Lake novel to blow all existing versions to smithereens. The competition is Mercedes Lackey and Barbie. This has got to be possible.

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More books -- up to date on fiction at last

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 03:45:49 GMT

Behind Frenemy Lines, by Zen Cho

Please click back out of this details tag, Zen Cho!

I enjoyed this! I blathered on about "women's fiction" in my previous book post, and this really hit that same spot of being almost more a "woman's story" with a strong romance element than a romance per se, though I really enjoyed the romance too! Both characters were believable and lovable, and while I wouldn't actually call their early antipathy "enemies to lovers," I enjoyed their small initial stumbles and misunderstandings for how textured and realistic they were. The conceit that the MMC narrates his sections as though they were case notes added some more interest. This book felt more grounded than the previous novel in the same universe, possibly because "lawyer rich" is a lot more relatable to me than "multinational heiress" rich, but also because the author's knowledge of and affection for the minutiae of English law practice comes through so clearly and warmly. The book as a whole is "warm," and that felt really nice to read -- especially after a dismal slog through the icy heights of the Icelandic literary establishment. Definite recommend.

The Time of the Ghost, by Diana Wynne Jones

Read to keep up with 8daysofdwj_feed, which I am currently failing to do -- I am several books behind! I don't believe I thought quite as highly of this autofantasy (like autofiction, but good and fantastical!) as the hosts, but I did thoroughly enjoy this totally bonkers take on the time-travel-fix narrative. Absolutely unique and grippingly fast.

You Dreamed of Empires, by Álvaro Enrigue, trans. Natasha Wimmer

I started off reading this in Spanish (Tu sueño imperios han sido), but then I remembered that some of my DW friends had talked about the translation, and I wanted to be able to talk about the translation too! This is rather fun, a "what-if" narrative of the few short days of the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan, one which spends a great deal of time on the altepetl itself, its structure and rituals, its tastes and smells. Enrigue describes the structure as "Borgesista," and it is indeed a clear reference to "El milagro secreto" in its structure (plus there's an El aleph Easter egg in there), but imo it's a little more fun than Borges because it's actually funny. We are all living in Cortés' dream, Enrique posits, and that means that in the suspended space of the dream-history, many many strange things might have happened. But it doesn't feel psychedelic in that over-egged way so many dream books resort to: it's light and sharp, a real accomplishment of imaginary concision.

It is extremely about translation, being in some ways also a story about Malintzin, La Malinche, and so it makes a point of using its English translation to some purpose! The book is longer in English, not just because of translational expansion but because there is literally extra material in there, especially about la Malinche, people talking to her instead of to Cortés, because they can't talk to Cortés, and we Anglophones are in Cortés' dream, but we can't talk to him either… It's a lot of fun. I am glad Natasha Wimmer gets such big billing on the cover, because she seems in some ways to have been a kind of coauthor -- and this, too, I guess, is Luis "the translation is the original" Borges. Even if you think that this book isn't like what you read normally, I recommend giving it a shot. It feels fantastical.

Dead Collections, by Isaac Fellman

Alert! A book about an archivist! This archivist is a vampiric trans man living in the basement of a minor San Francisco museum, and he's trying to date the widow of the lesbian SFF writer who just left her archive to the museum. He is, despite the vampirism, rather like a lot of people I know, and to that end, he is kind of annoying to me ':D

This is a book that I found compulsively readable, but not actually that enjoyable? This is a "fandom book" in that fanfiction plays a plot-relevant role, but also in that the story-form this most resembles is the "slice of life" fic. The good parts of this book are idiosyncratic and thoughtful, but the bad parts are irony-poisoned and self-indulgent at once. A lot happens, but a lot just… happens. Pacy it is not. And yet I was quite riveted, so there's some there there! I think my problem is really that, if this were a slice-of-life fic, I would be absorbed by the worldbuilding, the main character's musings on self and selfhood, and gently ironic intertextual relationship with his fan-object, but since it is a novel, I don't find "all metaphor is violence; let me ironically lampshade my metaphors" to be a compelling basis for a book. And, after all, Isaac Fellman knows all about AO3, so it didn't have to be a novel if he doesn't like what the novel does! But hm. The good parts were good, definitely good enough to let me give Fellman another chance.

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

Before I started my present Dickens kick, this was the only Dickens novel I'd ever read, as a high school assignment. Because I was a good student and a fast reader, I did in fact read every page of every book I was ever assigned… except A Tale of Two Cities, where I skipped a good couple hundred pages out of the middle for the crime of being TOO BORING.

And you know, I think I was onto something. Both Bleak House and Nicholas Nickelby had a consistency to them which this lacked. Here we have a good beginning and a gripping end, but in the middle I just wished they would guillotine Charles Darnay already. And Lucy, ugh, don't get me started! That middle part which is nothing but Darnay making stupid choices and Lucy being sheltered from them was odious, and I becalmed there until, finally, things started picking back up when Dickens was able to start properly describing the city of Paris under the Terror. As I am coming to distinguish as I read more Dickens properly, the best parts were when Dickens is able to play "variations on a theme" using his character-models to represent and interpret nations and larger communities; the worst parts were when he was just trying to get people from place to place in a way that makes psychological sense.

Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik

My third reread! To me, this stands head and shoulders above anything else Novik has ever published (all of which I enjoyed) -- it's her greatest achievement, and it's not even close. This time, I was struck by the incredible way in which she slowly upped the scale of the problems, but never actually upped the stakes, because Wanda's ability to earn six kopeks of her own is just as vitally important as the fate of kingdoms. The tension and interest in each obstacle which each character faces never diminishes as the scale increases, they only pay off again and again each time. The complexity of the emotional plotting is fabulous. The characters are vivid and distinct. The first chunk of narrative from Miryem is Great Jewish Writing; it captures something difficult and true. I love this book.

The one, glaring flaw is of course that Wanda and Miryem should have ended up together. But that's what Astolat's AO3 is for.

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Books

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 04:35:12 GMT

Selected fiction of hot DW summer interest.

Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash, by Tasha Suri

Empire of Sand is so underrated. It should be in the top 15 or so fantasy novels published since the Great Post-Puppies Renaissance. I know genre is fake and “women’s fiction” doesn’t actually exist outside the U.S. really, but I think that if there were such a thing as “women’s fantasy,” ie a plot-driven fantasy novel centering a woman character, often with a romantic subplot, that is of high and intentional writerly quality because it needs to appeal to a consumer base which thinks about books seriously but which everyone has just decided for whatever reason (sexism) is less prestigious and will be put out through the “less prestigious” imprints, Empire of Sand is that. I think you could talk about it through the “great adult fantasy forced to come out as YA because the authors were POC” frame, but I don’t actually think this was published as YA, so I am hereby staking a claim for my own minuscule SFF subgenre, “women’s fantasy” a la “women’s fiction.”

It’s a fantastic piece of worldbuilding in an alt-Mughal Empire, focusing on the mixed-race daughters of an imperial governor and a woman of a deprecated nomadic ethnic group and the struggles they face as the empire which oppressed and protected them declines. They’re tight, evocative, emotional, just plain standout novels, and Empire of Sand in particular. Great re-read fodder to kick-start my reading back up.

The Blue Clerk, by Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand always knocks it out of the park. This is an ars poetica/modernist novel in verse (?) which purports to be the “left-hand pages” of every piece of writing committed to paper by “the poet,” read, judged, and cataloged by the Blue Clerk. These are all the unspoken, unspeakable, in both senses unrealized, words which lurk behind every attempt at written expression. Beautiful as a series of prose poems (indeed, inspired me to read the Penguin Book of the Prose Poem next and be like… “Only about ten of these are as good as any given page of The Blue Clerk”) and quite generative, actually, as an ars poetica. I think this will hit harder if you’ve read Map to the Door of No Return first, but you should do that anyway.

The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh

I sort of… I can see where this is going, and I enjoyed the front half hugely, just a total romp, but I think in the end this is a step down from Some Desperate Glory. Now, obviously this low-fantasy tale of a magic boarding-school teacher fighting demons and her own massive snobbery to protect the teenagers in her charge is doing a very different thing than Space Fascism Opera, but in a way it is actually doing the same thing, i.e. incredibly competent woman must realize the hollowness of her self-understanding and the institution she has dedicated her life to through the power of battle, grinding self-reevaluation, sapphic love, and quasi-time-travel. My feelings about this are very mixed, because the high points are so very high: the whole beginning, establishing the main character’s traits, exploring the bureaucratic but rarefied atmosphere of this school, getting a little magic-pedagogy training ourselves, introducing the Trojan Horse antagonist, all of that was so charming, fresh, and engaging.

But then there were the downsides, which are not that bad, but which stand in contrast to me with the very deft plotting of Tesh’s previous full-length novel, and which I think I could have found awkward even on first acquaintance. For one, I can definitely see the DWJ influence in the way that the numinous ending is just. Not coherent. Pulling off the numinous ending after already transitioning through both a POV-switch and a timeskip needed more hands on deck than it got. The ambiguous fate and disappearance-from-narrative of the boyfriend is not really in-keeping with the attempts to ground the aftermath back into the tone and world of the initial chapters; the suddenness of the ending cuts short some of the necessary denouement which would have made the fates of the children believable rather than saccharine (those poor kids, who were meant to be “realistic” teenagers, were so condescended to), and the final romantic endgame does not seem organic and also runs headlong into one of the Big structural issues, which is the cop stuff.

In that, I think Emily Tesh felt she had to justify the cop stuff, when in fact she a) didn’t, or b) could have done so by literally just making the school cop character the knight/paladin she clearly archetypically was. Given the endgame love interest is basically a school cop, Tesh spends a big chunk of the front half convincingly and accurately describing all the real! serious! problems with having a police presence on a school campus. This is ass-covering, but it is also some of the primary fuel for an enemies-to-lovers dynamic, which is a strange combination. Then, after the cop-knight shows her knightly skill, the narrative shows some of those bad consequences of police presence on campuses coming to pass, and then just jettisons this love interest from the story for a third of the book so that, at the end, the school cop can now just be a normal cop and she and the MC can get together. Which is, again, incoherent. Because the wedge between the two characters was not just “I don’t like her, also we’re coworkers,” it was also set up as “We have fundamentally different ethical stances on the use of state violence within the school system,” and very little about either character’s beliefs on that note actually changed! Because that ethical conflict wasn’t actually integral to the story in any way. But it took up so many pages, because I assume Tesh felt she had to lampshade this element, and because she’s a good writer, she made excellent points and made me care about this bad thing! So instead of “enemies to lovers,” because they’re actually still enemies on this totally unresolved ethical point, the main character just comes off like a hypocrite — which is of course a main point of the novel, that she is a bit of a hypocrite, but notably, that having the big climactic experience of the book is supposed to help her with that! I also can see that Tesh was trying to kind of have it both ways a la, “I know it looks like the love interest’s a school cop, but really she’s part of an order of knights paladin,” but in this low fantasy world, she could literally have let the school cop be a knight paladin and not really dug in on describing how and why, exactly, it is bad to have school cops and this person is definitely that! Then the book wouldn’t have had any of these problems at all! Like, Tesh didn’t have to do it this way in the first place. It seems like such an easy fix, if she even had to fix it at all; she could also have just done it and taken her discourse lumps rather than trying to justify it and then doing it poorly. I am bothered not because I don’t think anyone in books should ever fall in love with cops, but because it is clear to me that either Tesh was trying to kind of have her cake, or possibly two or three cakes, and eat them too, which unfortunately resulted in a rather contradictory, clunky love-interest character and narrative which takes this GIGANTIC paragraph to even explain my objection to because it was all so convoluted!

Anyway, I do recommend this book, because the front parts felt like nothing else I’d read and were super funny. Just do know that I think it falls to pieces a little at the end.

The Jasmine Throne, The Oleander Sword, and The Lotus Empire by Tasha Suri

An ambitious high-fantasy saga set in an India-inspired fantasy land, in which an orphan priestess from an oppressed client state seeking personal and national independence, and the disgraced princess seeking support for her rebellion against her insane brother the emperor, must make common cause. This is a proper epic fantasy with court politics, battles, a doomed (or is it?) romance, dozens of side characters, multiple POVs, the lot.

There is much to like here, though I don’t think it all fully pays off in the end. In part, this is because, in my opinion, the most interesting, developed, and unique character is actually neither Priya (priestess) nor Malini (princess), the nominal joint protagonists, but Bhumika, who was herself a priestess in Priya’s order, but during the final submission of their state, married into the new governing nobility. She has a kind of bone-deep pragmatism which expresses itself both in mercilessness and in mercy, and Suri maps her journey over the trilogy towards becoming a leader for a world in which all sides are able to live together with a precise, insightful hand. Meanwhile, as individuals, Priya and Malini have great moments, and their individual storylines (which spend a lot of time apart) are quite convincing as stories and as psychological portraits, but their relationship, which is nominally the core of the series, gets less persuasive with every book. Malini especially gets increasingly flattened as the series goes on, because she has to be a genius commander/coldhearted empress type while also hitting some pretty strained romance beats, and that doesn’t fit together well, particularly compared to Priya, who has more narrative space to grow without messing up the plot-engine, and Bhumika, who basically has the hero’s journey. The whole thing felt like it got a little less expansive with each book, like Suri had bitten off more than she could chew.

However, what she did manage was great. I loved the way religion exists in this world and in the story. You could say Malini is an atheist or anti-theist, even, while Priya and Bhumika have far more complicated relationships to their gods and the role religion can play as a tool of nationalism and in-group solidarity. Suri takes religious ritual and belief seriously in a way that is rare in SFF, and in that seriousness, she manages to use it to drive a fantastic set of emotional journeys and plot elements. You also get to see so many parts and aspects of this rich world, all described very beautifully.

I am sad that it didn’t quite soar, but it was definitely worth the read.

Copper Script, by K.J. Charles

The new, surprise Charles romance! Publishing gift of the year! Perhaps because it was a last-minute surprise, this tale of solving a 1920s mystery through the clairvoyant power of handwriting is a little more whimsical than her usual run of things (for a value of whimsical involving much murder). I love Charles’ non-aristocratic romances; I think they bring out her most creative and touching romance writing, and this was no exception. While the mystery was slightly flimsy, the relationship-building and the path of the policeman character were especially strong.

(Actually, I was not thinking critically enough to notice this at the time, because in the middle were several serious nonfiction books and a Korean short story collection, but here’s a book in which I was on-board with a) a cop romance and b) in-text critique of that cop romance. And I am like 90% positive that Emily Tesh is a person who has read a KJ Charles romance, so take notes, E.T., I guess.)

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

Funnily enough, I was about 60% of my way through Bleak House when that Internet brouhaha broke out about how college English majors can’t read Bleak House. And as I read the study itself, worrying, “Am I a fake and a poser who can’t read?” I was able to remind myself, “You are literally, actively reading, enjoying, and understanding Bleak House; you are the James Joyce Ogre.”

Okay, but Bleak House is so fucking good. Oh my god? This book is a masterpiece. If you were one of the people who saw the brouhaha and thought, “Wow, the first page of Bleak House actually looks great,” then I am here to tell you that it is great. I enjoyed this so much, and I have so many thoughts about Esther Summerson and Lady Dedlock!

I knew instantly upon the first intrusion of Esther’s narrative that so many male scholars must be so hateful and wrong about her. But I am right about her, and I have thought about her so much since finishing this book, how she embodies Dickens’ whole argument about unjust social systems and the simultaneous urgent need for their repair and the irreparability of their effects. She got out, but she is still so damaged! And yet, as the narrative progresses, you see Esther-the-narrator grow even as Esther-her-own-character grows, from the power of putting pen to paper and skillfully retelling her story. It’s an incredible effect, these nested Esthers, and it makes her such a complicated, fascinating cipher of a character. It’s like Dickens tricked himself into writing one (1) good female character! And then, by some miracle, Lady Dedlock is also so good! He writes her with such surprising complexity and sympathy, and the plotting of the slow culmination of her feud with Tulkinghorn is absolutely deft. ~~Pay no attention to the cardboard Ada behind the curtain; she is made interesting by her horrific taste in men and her freaky 24/7 BDSM relationship with Esther.~~

It was also totally immersive. There would be these moments where Dickens would be explaining some minor element of quotidian life in this milieu — trimming a wick, putting on a bonnet — and I would be powerfully transported to that scene and truly feel like I could understand what that little action, so common then and so rare now, would have been like. I have read very little fiction with such perfect power of imagery.

It had every emotion in it. I laughed, I cried, I rolled my eyes. There are incredible theatrical “types” like in Nicholas Nickelby, and so cool to see him basically invent the literary “type” of the detective? And beyond the types are these moments of exact humanity — the dreadful Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, who loves his wife after all, how kind everyone is to little Miss Flite, the incredibly recognizable fuckboity of Mr. Guppy. But then again, you want to know what in the everloving is going on with Mr. Badger’s posthumous cuckolding kink and revisit the Bagnets’ disciplined household.

I could go on and on —I read so many papers once I finished, and someone’s dissertation too!— but suffice to say it was at once a fantastic intellectual exercise and a wonderfully enjoyable time. I reached the end and almost wanted to go back and do the whole thing again. You should read Bleak House!

The Monsters We Defy, by Leslye Penelope

A1920s supernatural mystery/heist novel set in the Black community of D.C., with a fun conceit around deals with (basically) the devil, and how to get out of them. The pace was lively and the setting fun, but the writing was not inspired. I would try another by this author in this world, but I’d do so in the hope that everything would be just that bit more polished.

A Mercy, by Toni Morrison

I am trying to finish the gaps in my Morrison reading, and this is one of her later works which I never read. This is a novella set in 1680s Maryland, the early decades of American slavery. Morrison takes five POV characters as lenses on this as-yet half-formed system. It’s slim, but it packs many beautiful sentences and sharp insights into its exploration of slavery’s pernicious effects on everyone it touches, and also its contingencies and could-have-been-otherwises — but weren’ts. It’s a study of all the kinds of deformation produced by a society built on bondage, and also the small spaces of relief. Or mercy, I should say.

The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar

This original fairytale based on the murder ballad “The Twa Sisters” would make a good anchor for a “new and collected works” presentation, but it a little too slight to stand on its own. It overflows the perfect self-sufficiency of a short story, but lacks the substance to justify standing alone as a book. It is, of course, very prettily written and worth a read on that basis anyway, since it’s so short.

Five Ways to Forgiveness, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Five linked stories tell of the aftermath of slavery carried out between two planets seeking Ekumenical membership in a system far from Hain. This is a brilliant book; it surprises me that it is not listed in the same breath as TLHOD, The Dispossessed, and Le Guin’s other canonical works. The initial allegorical set-up might seem shallow, but the stories are multiple, slightly contradictory, and therefore robust. As each chapter/story moves forward and backward in time, between planets, and through different strata of these societies, we see different facets of the revolutionary struggle for liberation and its immediate aftermath, deeply grounded in the intimate, bodily experiences of the people — mostly older people — experiencing them. I was immensely moved by nearly every story, though I thought the second story, “Forgiveness Day,” was notably weaker than the rest.

In its way, by gathering these stories written at different real-world historical moments, the full collection becomes a commentary on UKLG’s career-spanning efforts to write about utopia, its limitations, and its necessity.

Also, she invents a special alien cat which, when it’s happy, goes “roo-roo-roo” 🥺 🥺 🥺

Independent People, by Halldór Laxness, trans. James Anderson Thompson

I don’t actually remember why I read this massive 20th century novel about miserable Icelandic sheep farmers? It took me a while to get through, and I certainly got some historical knowledge and brain exercise out of it, so I feel like I ought to write it up, but I wasn’t… actually… super gripped by this. I did find it very interesting as an example of, basically, a Marxist novel which succeeds as a novel as well as as a polemic against the “capitalist mind” (so well, in fact, that I think its own foreword author fully failed to understand that this is indeed an anti-capitalist novel). I also found it a source of inspiration and comfort when I had to tend to my mother-in-law’s endangered caterpillars in her absence. But otherwise, I mean, he did win the Nobel and everything, but I’d say I had more transforming literary experiences with several of the other, less-lauded books in this post.

Taiwan Travelogue, by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, trans. Lin King

A quiet, multi-layered narrative of relationships under colonialism set in Japanese-controlled Taiwan. A Japanese woman filmmaker and author, Aoyama Chizuko, (just the sort of person I would expect to see written up at senzenwomen) visits Taiwan to write about it — nominally to help pave the way for public opinion to swing in favor of further Japanese expansionism. She scornfully denies that she would do any such thing, but she definitely wants an all-expenses-paid trip to Taiwan rather than getting married. The problem is that she speaks no Mandarin or Taiwanese Hokkien, so she needs a local translator: O Chizuru. Or such is her professional name; her family calls her Ong Tshian-hon or Wang Chien-ho, and Aoyama quickly decides to call her by an affectionate nickname.

Both women have appetites for food described as “monstrous,” and as Aoyama tours around Taiwan, it becomes O Chizuru’s role not just to translate, but to guide Aoyama through Taiwan’s food landscape, which Aoyama is starving for not just as delicious but as exotic and different (and prepared for her by O Chizuru). There is a lot of detailed food description. The two women form a real bond, but it is predicated on O Chizuru guiding and serving Aoyama, speaking for her and cooking for her. In the end, this bond is not enough to stretch across the imperial gulf, but it might survive after the empire ends. I think the various metaphors there are pretty obvious, and the book is aware that it’s pretty obvious, but the many layers of frame conceit allow the “main” story of the two women to proceed with tight-focused, blunt sincerity that worked for me emotionally.

Outside the main narrative is this set of nested frames about the translation of this story of the two women, which is positioned as a “found document.” This mostly kicks into force after the end of the main narrative, and I felt rather like it functioned the way bows at curtain calls for tragedies do — it softened the blow. I am not sure if it totally deserved to, but the main story also definitely could not have been written in this way without the simultaneous justificatory frame… and I do like an unnecessarily complicated frame narrative.

I liked this!

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Specifically for Nnozomi…

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 22:13:24 GMT

I did want to share the Met audience cheering like a stadium crowd as Gillian Murphy knocked her last-ever Black Swan out of the fucking park.

Clip from Top_Strawberry2523 on Reddit, who was morally obligated to do it because it was Gillian Murphy's retirement performance.

How does she do that? How does she sail with those triples early on so that she can then time her fouettés to the cymbals??? And then her kicky little coupé at the end like, "That's right!" Rockstar behavior. Gillian Murphy you will always be a legend to me. Enjoy your retirement :')

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I'm here; I'm queer; I have a very tardy review of Chris Wheeldon's The Winter's Tale (ABT)

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 23:00:21 GMT

I've been places, done things. I am not having a great year, folks, and somethingses've got to give! I did backread everyone's posts, so I am up to date and please accept my goodwill for all the good and bad happenings of the last couple weeks.

Anyway, apart from DW one of the other things that's had to give is this review. American Ballet Theatre recently acquired rights to the ballet adaptation of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, choreographed by none other than Christopher Wheeldon, whom I assume the vast majority of you know strictly as That Guy Chestnut_pod Incessantly Complains About. BUT! I liked this! I actually liked it a lot and actively recommend it, and if it comes around again, I'll be seeking it out to rewatch myself. More explanation about why I think this was in the review under the cut! Please be aware that I saw this ballet so long ago that I can make it a public post because it no longer usefully reveals anything about my location, and I am posting it now because I am so sick of having that word processor glaring unhelpfully about it from the right side of my screen, where it has been for literally months. So it's not quite as finished as I like my reviews to be (in particular, I didn't cut it down at all), and there is no world where it usefully alters anyone's ballet-watching decisions, but it needs to be abandoned on the shores of Bohemia to live and be free.

( Read more... )

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My own TEW creations

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 03:49:43 GMT

I'm always like, "I'm in such a fandom slump; I never make anything anymore." Anyway, I wrote three fics and recorded two podfics for TEW this year.

Fics

Shoes to Fill -- Elwing escapes Doriath without even the shoes on her feet. This one just came so smoothly and quickly, as little one-shots sometimes do. My own contribution to the leathercraft day where I did everything in my power to convince people to write smut and everyone, myself included, instead came up with stripping leather goods off corpses.

Long Art -- An opinionated Elf MFA student goes looking for art which really takes advantage of immortality. Honestly, I started ideating this one more than three years ago during the creation process for rulers make bad lovers, and finally whatever it was just clicked and I banged this out over the course of a week or so. I wasn't super happy with it as I was writing it, but reading it back over, I do like it (as is often the case). I think I got somewhere with the tone.

Strange Self-Flatteries -- This fic is a strange mix of textile arts, boob jokes, and a real attempt at good issuefic. It was tough! I had to take a long break before the climactic emotional resolution because I just wasn't sure how to thread the needle (so to speak) of the conflict between Arwen and her Middle Man friend/love interest, keeping up both Arwen's quite limited perspective while making it clear to the reader what was actually going on with Mithar. Initial reports are positive, but in a way where I am not sure how well I succeeded at that. Anyway, I am glad I tried my hand at it! I think there are some very good parts in here. It was also quite soothing to finally write my grand Elrond Actually Kinda Sucks fic.

Podfics

[podfic] The Making of the Second Elessar -- What it says on the tin! It's a pleasantly round 2:05 minutes long. Every podfic I manage to snatch out of the jaws of my extremely loud living situation feels like such a victory these days. Elwin Fortuna writes such good material culture ficlets! Great blend of science and magic. It's work like this which inspired TEW in the first place.

[podfic] Stone and String -- Lferion always gives my poetry-reading muscles an exercise! One of these days I should make another Almacombë Lairesto, so that I can include more of their work :). This one let me exercise one of my favorite uses for audio fiction, epistolary fiction, as well as read the little poem at the end.

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