Dream with Our Eyes Open

I have played this video and reaction videos to this video over and over for the last few days. Such a rich, warm throwback to the great days of Motown, Stevie Wonder, and early solo Michael Jackson:

I've been reading a lot, but a fair amount of it was re-reads for Yuletide and for comfort reading.

The Mr. and I are hooked on two new (to us) manga. I like Witch Hat Atelier better than Delicious in Dungeon (although I may cover that one later). Both are seinen fantasy series.

The setting of Witch Hat Atelier is a medieval Euro-type land where magic works but was turned to evil ends not that long ago. As a result, magicians who wish to operate openly have to follow strict rules of behavior and limits on what thei magic can do. For example, performing magic on living bodies is forbidden - even for healing! Coco, a young girl living alone with her mother, glimpses a magician's spell one day (virtually all the spellcasting shown so far depends on written sigils). She innocently tries her had at it herself ...(SPOILER) ...and inadvertently turns her mother into a statue.

The magician, Quifrey, realizing that the child has great raw magical talent and takes her with him to his "atelier," a business specializing in magic works of all kinds for pay. There he already has three young female apprentices, as well as a gruff overseer, Olruggio, who is supposed to ensure that everything in the atelier is done legally.

If you're getting a little skeeved out at the idea of four young girls under the supervision of two young-ish men, all I can do is note that this is actually not that odd a set-up for seinen manga of the "moe" (innocent and cute) type. The girls' Kendo team series Bamboo Blade was another example. Although I can't prove that things will remain innocent, I'm guessing that they will. We did have the girls in "bath wraps" (basically draped and tied bathing dresses) in vol. 6, everything was more modest than a typical U.S. beach of the 21st century.

Quifrey's other students - Agott, Richeh, and Tetia - have varying reactions to the newcomer, who has none of the educational background that they do. Intense, ambitious Agott, in particular, is pretty hostile to her. As one might expect, friendly, naive Coco eventually wins them over, but her acceptance by Agott is definitely well-earned. Along the way are all sorts of wonders and some fairly serious philosophical discussions about the history, use, and misuse of magic in this world.

The art? The art is frickin' gorgeous -

My understand is that the mangaka was inspired by childrens' book illustrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It shows, but I am familiar with some of those (the art for E. Nesbit's fantasy classics, for example), and this is even better.

Vol. 7 is due out in paperback in just a few weeks. I can hardly wait!

I'm not even 100% certain why, except that almost 40 years after they first recorded it, Cheap Trick could still do this song (with a sing-in from host Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates):

This is from a web video series called "Live from Daryl's House." I'm actually spending time watching a lot of videos lately, mostly music of some sort.

Snarfed from viridian5:

which "-core" aesthetic are you?

cryptidcore

stop simping for mothman!!! also, there's no way you're cis. i can feel it in my bones. you have a wide variety of interests which rarely align with one another, but that just makes you all the more interesting. you dream not only of meeting a cryptid, but of becoming one yourself. for now, you'll keep on vibing in liminal spaces until that day comes.

Well, I was cis last I checked? Maybe your bones need a tuneup. Now, I may not be het, but that's another issue.

A feckless young man has but one wish the day he's released from a prison term for minor charges: to take in some Rakugo, a Japanese art form consisting of storytelling by a single performer who does the narration, all the character voices, and some simple sound effects. He tracks his favorite performer, the master Yakumo Yurakutei VIII, home after a performance and insists on becoming his apprentice. Yakumo never takes apprentices, but somehow the persistence of this awkward and uneducated fellow wears the master down.

At first Yakumo treats the young man, to whom he gives the apprentice name Yotaro, as a combination of man-of-all-work, pet, and comic relief. In addition to Yakumo himself, the household includes Matsuda, his elderly valet/driver/housekeeper, and a moody young woman named Konatsu, who was Yakumo's ward when she was a child. The tension between Konatsu and her guardian is like an open wound: he ignores her most of the time, but when he does notice her, it's usually to remark on how much she looks like her father, and she reacts with angry words and tears. At this point in (recent) history, classical Rakugo was closed to women performers, and Yakumo is adamant that Konatsu will never become a storyteller while in his household.

Yakumo gradually starts treating Yotaro as an actual apprentice, but the young man's real teacher is actually Konatsu. Whatever her history, she has an encyclopedic knowledge of Rakugo stories, and although the master remarks disparagingly about her tutoring of Yotaro, he never outright forbids them to continue. Yotaro's cheerful antics, willingness to work at menial tasks, and enthusiasm make him popular in the yose (Rakugo performance hall), and it looks like he might actually succeed in his ambition.

One day, it all comes crashing down. Yotaro, exhausted from a late night, falls asleep during the evening's storytelling at the yose and snores so loudly that he interrupts his master's performance. Yakumo throws him out. Yotaro comes crawling back, but Yakumo rejects his pleas — and then suddenly has somewhat of a change of heart. He starts to tell Yotaro and Konatsu of his own history, back when he was known as Kikuhiko, and that of his fellow apprentice, the man who became the Rakugo artist Sukeroku: Konatsu's father.

I had never heard of Rakugo before. The theatrical arts always interest me (I used to be in stage crew in high school and college), and the human intrigue of this story adds another dimension, although the story starts out rather slowly. The artwork is pretty great: mangaka Haruko Kumota's drawings remind me a bit of Fumi Yoshinaga's work in its more relaxed versions (What Did You Eat Yesterday?, for example), although it's a little looser and sloppier (example here, showing Yotaro and a more senior apprentice watching Yakumo perform in vol. 1, from Sequential Ink), especially when drawing Yotaro.

You can find Rakugo in English online! Here is a brief comic tale told by woman performer (things have changed).

This josei series is compete in 10 volumes. The five I have read take the story from the beginning to the next section of the modern-day story, after the extended flashback about Sukeroku and Kikuhiko. I certainly intend to finish the series.

ETA:. This is an even better intro to Rakugo, with another woman performer.

She held on as long as she could.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court justice and legal pioneer for gender equality, dies at 87 (WaPo)

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Champion Of Gender Equality, Dies At 87 (NPR)

VOTE!

I have mixed feelings about the much anticipated sequel to Gideon the Ninth. In some ways it's a very clever piece of writing (a great deal of it in the second person), and it's both gritty enough and ironically humorous enough not to come across as too full of its own cleverness. But it suffers very much from a huge lack of Gideon Nav.

You can think about that last statement some more later.

I'm going to cut this because it's really impossible to discuss Harrow without some monster spoilers for Gideon.

When I finished this, I thought I would not want to read it all over again very soon. But now, having told you about it, I think I do.

I meant not to buy too much, to spare my recently recovered sore back (which was re-tenderized in a different way last Friday, when I slipped while walking in Spring Park and landed on my back along the edge of a landscape timber... ), but I failed. It's the height of summer-y produce and I lost control:

Peaches, pluots, cherries, blueberries, arugula, red tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, cherry tomatoes in several colors, a tiny cantaloupe, basil, scallions, goat feta cheese crumbles (for salad), plain cheese curds, and macaroons (because they are wheat-free).

This is part of my Hugo Award Reading. I read Anders' first novel, All the Birds in the Sky, back in 2016 and was meh for me. This book is better but still ends up wandering off into nowhere.

The book starts with a small info dump in the guise of translation notes, such as the fact that the people who colonized this planet, January, named the native creatures after animals from their homeworld. You have been warned.

We then join our first protagonist, Sophie. She's from a lower-class family that might, in other settings, be called peasants. Faced with a future as a producer of more peasant agriculturists, she studies with desperate diligence and wins entrance to the university in the city, where she develops a deep crush on her roommate, Bianca. Bianca is beautiful, bright, and at her core, not a great person. She dabbles with the concept of being a revolutionary from a position of extreme privilege, and when things go south, it's not Bianca who falls.

As this story unfolds, we learn about the city and to some extent, the world. In Xiosphant, the activities of the city are controlled to the hour, at a minimum. Timed signals throughout the day tell the citizens when to wake, to eat, to go to work or school. No one breaks curfew, or they are punished. Maniacal little rules occupy any spare thought cycles people might have: food can only be bought with special food currency, for instance, and there are a variety of other currencies for other purchases. Bianca's daring revolutionary actions are trivial: if they were anything else, she'd be dead.

From Sophie's memories, it seems that this draconian governance is somehow a response to the planetary situation. January does not rotate. One side is baked to a fiery hell by its sun; the other side is deathly cold. A narrow temperate zone exists between the two, home to two cities: Xiosphant and Argelo, which we learn about later.

When Sophie takes the blame for Bianca's stupid act of defiance, she is cast out of the city into the edge of the cold zone to die but is unexpectedly saved by a creature considered a hideous and violent monster. When she comes back, she is unable to take up her old life and instead goes to work in a fascinating coffee shop where people can come be different for a short period of time.

At this point, I figured the book was heading into its final arc. I was intrigued and excited. I thought, this time Anders has really nailed it! Somehow Sophie and the underpeople represented at the coffee shop will make things go right! The only thing that didn't seem to work was this strange parallel arc about a traveling merchant called Mouth, part of a desperate crew who bring in contraband goods from Argelo, a strange and dangerous journey. Mouth discovers that the sacred text of her people, whom she lost at a young age, is in the museum in Xiosphant, and plans a burglary under cover of the nascent revolution under the partial leadership of -- you knew this, right? -- Bianca.

And as you've probably also guessed, the book was, in fact, only about half over at that point.

The revolution and Mouth's caper both go badly, and pretty soon, everyone is fleeing back across the horrible leagues between the two cities. After many misadventures, most of the group arrive in Argelo. Mouth and her partner try to fit into non-traveling life, and we get some rather nice "stranger in a strange land" as Sophie and Bianca learn about Argelo. Sadly, Sophie also finally begins to learn about Bianca, who very quickly makes herself at home with the most powerful of the free-wheeling criminal organizations that run the place. Bianca has plans, and Sophie is going to be part of them.

In the final 15% or so of the book, there are battle and horror and catastrophe, and then things just kind of stop.

Anders has a wonderful imagination, and she sometimes has a way with words. But the pieces simply aren't hanging together yet, at least not for me.

I also want to note that the book strikes me as, in some way, a homage to the works of Ursula Le Guin. An obvious inspiration is Le Guin's The Dispossessed, with the two cities and their very different approaches to life on the hostile planet standing in for the worlds of Urras and Anarres. We also have the world January, its very name echoing that of Winter, the outsiders' name for the planet Gethen, setting of Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which also considered the challenges of maintaining a complex civilization in a very hostile environment.

An old favorite:

And the moon shines high over Tucson
Over waters that were long ago dried
'Cause the moon don't care if the water's not there
It's high tide ...