dr_whom

When writing a poem in (my best English approximation of) a classical Latin meter, upon an ancient Roman topic, do I treat the proper names:

1) according to how we tend to pronounce them in English and where the stress falls, or

2) according to the Latin scansion rules of which syllables are short vs. long?

In other words, is "Augusta" stressed on the second syllable, or is it two long syllables followed by a short one, for the purposes of that poem's scansion?

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/Lcf5kG)

swan_tower

The "Wildwood" issue of Fairy Tale Magazine is out today, containing a poem from me! (Yes, I have had rather a lot of poems published since the beginning of this year.) As the name suggests, this issue is themed around Green Men and Green Women, dryads, tree spirits, and other things in that vein. My poem, "Drawing Strength," is a sonnet about meditation and metamorphosis, and I'm joined by some excellent names in the Table of Contents. You can download the PDF issue for free, though they do ask for a donation to help keep the magazine operating. It's a PDF because they do gorgeous, art-filled layout -- check it out!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/SLbDAr)

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

swan_tower

So far we've been talking about friendship in a one-to-one sense, as a relationship between only two people at a time. But of course, we all exist in a much larger social world -- even during periods when that existence is best defined by a position firmly outside the circle. What does friendship look like when we open up our scope?

Well, for starters, "friendship" starts to be a word that maybe ought to have sarcasm quotes around it. We are social primates, and unfortunately, that entails some pretty nasty behavior alongside the nice stuff. As I said last week, depending on how you use the term, a friend might just be somebody you know and haven't outright declared an enemy or dead to you. Or, depending on how you use the term . . . your "friend" might indeed be somebody you are out to hurt.

If that sounds like a particular negative feminine stereotype, you're not wrong: in our society, teenaged girls in particular are proverbial for how horribly they may treat their so-called friends. This isn't inherent to being adolescent and female, though; it tends to show up anywhere you foster the kind of hothouse atmosphere where a bunch of people are trapped together and can only rise socially by climbing over each other.

And that means it can describe a royal court every bit as much as a high school! Reading about the interpersonal dynamics of Elizabeth I's nobles and ministers, I was struck by how much their behavior resembled the cliques and grudges of teenagers. The specifics differed -- A offended B, so B arranged to have one of A's political hangers-on denied the right of entry to the more exclusive precincts of the royal presence -- but the vibes were much the same.

Associating this specifically with women is therefore not entirely true, because men can behave in similar ways. It's also not entirely false, though, because control of social dynamics is a form of soft power, and in a patriarchal society where women are denied access to the formal levers of government, soft power is the only kind they can use. So now the question becomes: how do you acquire that power?

Some of it comes from obvious sources. If a person has some more formal type of authority -- or, in the case of a woman, is associated with a man who has such authority -- that tends to give their social presence more weight. After all, offending the prime minister or the wife of the Lord Treasurer might mean all kinds of political difficulties, whereas gaining their friendship could open new doors. This is true even at lower levels of society than a royal court; the wife of a town mayor or village headman probably has a certain amount of social cachet.

Similarly, wealth brings the ability to host more people more extravagantly, which is beneficial no matter what scale of party you're looking at. Though in many cases, the power of wealth has to be evaluated in light of status: where commerce is scorned, then a woman from a merchant family, be she never so rich, will be seen as more déclassé than a noblewoman of more modest means. The former can still win social authority, but she'll have to work harder for it.

What form that work takes depends on what's admired in the society at hand. As we've discussed before, fashion can play a role here: exhibiting good aesthetic taste will bring approval, and if you can combine that with just the right amount of daring innovation, you might become the trendsetter everyone else looks to for guidance. That's difficult to pull off if you're a social nobody -- your innovations are more likely to be sneered at as missteps -- but one admiring comment from the right person might begin your rise to social influence.

For those of more modest financial means, it may be easier to aim for becoming known as a good conversationalist. Remember, this is a social world, so being someone people enjoy talking to is a major asset! Flatter the right people just the right amount, so you don't sound too obsequious; tell rousing anecdotes about interesting situations; extemporize good poetry to commemorate the occasion at hand; exhibit whatever type of wit is most admired right now . . . which, yes, can include the back-biting type where you're constantly tearing other people down, though it doesn't have to. A lot depends on how vicious the local dynamic is.

Under the right circumstances -- and this will be of interest to many people who enjoy reading SF/F -- you can even win social influence through your book-learning and smarts. If you live in an environment of intellectual ferment and scientific exploration, then being au courant with the latest discoveries gives you fodder for attracting attention. You do still need to be a good conversationalist, so you can deliver what you know in an interesting fashion -- otherwise you'll have a reputation as a pedantic bore -- but it isn't always about jokes and empty gossip.

For women in Enlightenment-era Europe, in fact, social gatherings were a major part of how they kept up with the intellectual scene. The French salonnières of the early modern period famously established a model of social interaction that spread across the continent and into the British Isles. "Bluestocking," the Victorian pejorative for an excessively bookish woman, was originally the name of an eighteenth-century "salon" or social circle focused on literary discussion -- which, given the era, included philosophy, history, and scientific research, not just fiction. Their community included men, but it was led by women, and through the connections formed at their gatherings, they helped advance each others' minds, laying the groundwork for the advances of feminism in the nineteenth century.

It's not all so high-minded, of course. Like I said, these environments can also feature a ton of backstabbing and social climbing: witness all scenes set at Almack's Assembly Rooms in Regency romances, where a single introduction from the right person might set an individual on a path to an advantageous marriage . . . while others with competing interests do their best to spike any such alliance. The Lady Patronesses of Almack's, with their control over vouchers for admission, held a great deal of power over that scene.

In that case there was a group of women in control, but where a single queen bee rules over it all, she can be as capricious and arbitrary as any formal autocrat. She's likely to be a central gathering-point for gossip, and whispered into the right ears, those juicy tidbits might become a scandal that brings down a minister. Even without such weapons at hand, declaring someone persona non grata at her own events can mean they find themself excluded elsewhere as well . . . and without the chance to rub shoulders with influential people, their chances of advancement, whether through marriage or political appointment, go into a steep decline.

So is the social scene occasionally petty and vicious? Absolutely -- but that doesn't make it trivial. Stylish ladies or sociable gentlemen can leverage this world as an alternative route to power, all without ever lifting anything more dangerous than a fan or a pen.

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(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/G7vEgj)

swan_tower

This month I finally did something I should have done ages ago: I checked out every library ebook currently available from my wishlist there and put holds on as many others as they would let me hold at once, so I could browse -- the way I once would have done in a bookstore. The truth is that there are many books where I can tell within the first ten pages that they're unlikely to be for me, and by taking some time to give a quick look to a bunch of things, I was able to clear a good portion of that bunch off my list.

. . . meaning that instead of my TBR being seventeen miles long, it is now a mere sixteen miles long. But that's progress! And it in no way interfered with me being able to finish a goodly number of books last month.

How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, Django Wexler. This was selected by a book club I intermittently participate in, and I was startled by how quickly it drew me in. (This definitely contributed to the decision to ebook-browse: one of those periodic salutary reminders that there are plenty of books out there I don't have to "give a chance," because they click right out of the gate.)

The premise here is straightforward isekai: Davi, the protagonist, is someone from our world dropped into a fantasy realm, with no idea of how she got there or why she keeps resetting to the moment of her arrival every time she dies. She's supposedly the prophecied hero who will save the human kingdom from an army of monstrous wilders led by a Dark Lord, but after failing at that several hundred times, she decides to sort of take a vacation by joining the winning side. Why not be the Dark Lord for once?

I'm normally a poor audience for too much of a modern, pop-culture tone in fantasy, but here it worked for me. If you try this one and find the opening too bleak, consider sticking it out for another chapter or two; I think Wexler is setting you up for why Davi is so burned out that she takes her subsequent path, and/or front-loading the dark stuff so that anybody inclined to nope out at that won't get blindsided by anything later on. Much of what follows isn't surprising -- for starters, the inhuman wilders turn out to be just as much of a mixed bag as humans are -- but I found it highly engaging.

What Stalks the Deep, T. Kingfisher. Third of the Sworn Soldier novellas, which I've been greatly enjoying. I agree with Sonya Taaffe's comment on her own blog about wanting more from the central weirdness here; it feels like Kingfisher spends too long setting up the creepy atmosphere of the abandoned mine and not enough time on what the characters find there. Possibly this one should have been a short novel instead of a novella? You could start here if you wanted to, as the references to previous adventures aren't so load-bearing you can't pick them up from context; each installment is a different flavor of historical-dark-fantasy-tilting-toward-horror, leavened by Kingfisher's trademark dry narration ("I tried to back away from the floor. It went about as well as you'd expect").

The Owl Service, Alan Garner. A classic of children's fantasy I somehow managed to miss for four and a half decades. It is, as I had gathered, highly atmospheric in its restaging of the Blodeuwedd story in twentieth-century Wales, with characters being swept up in re-enacting mythic roles they never signed up for. "She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls." I greatly enjoyed everything except for the feeling that my copy somehow left out the final chapter, the one that would give me more than half a paragraph of off-ramp from the climactic moment.

Can anybody tell me if the TV adaptation is worth tracking down?

Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me, Django Wexler. Normally I try to space out my reading of a series, because I've learned the hard way that too concentrated of a dose tends to make me enjoy the later installments less. But since the Dark Lord Davi series is a duology, and the first book had such madcap energy, I decided to go ahead.

I don't think it's the concentration of the dose that made the conclusion somewhat disappointing. There are a number of enjoyable moments, but on the larger-scale level, I feel like the narrative ball got fumbled. Wexler set himself up with a significant central conflict -- the ongoing hatred and warfare between humans and wilders -- and then let it be handled far too easily, in a way I can't simply chalk up to the humorous tone of these novels; doing that cheapens both the story conflict and its real-world parallels. I was also underwhelmed by the eventual explanation of why Davi is in this fantasy world, why she's looping, and what the villain is up to. So, good start in the first book, but a swing and a miss in the second.

Where the Dark Stands Still, A.B. Poranek. Slavic-inspired and very folkloric fantasy about a young woman who goes into a haunted forest to pick a magical flower that blooms only once a year, all to get rid of her own magic -- only to instead wind up serving the master of that forest and uncovering the history of what's been going on there all this time. The mythic elements here were occasionally undermined just a touch by the story swerving toward conventional YA beats, but those never lasted for too long. This appears to be a standalone, though it ends with the kind of stinger that miiiiiight be setup for a future book? I sort of hope not, as it works well in its current form. And I enjoyed it enough that I promptly put another of Poranek's novels on my wishlist -- this being, of course, the curse of finding a book you like.

Paladin’s Grace, T. Kingfisher. This is a series I keep hearing mentioned in various corners of the internet, so I decided to finally try it out.

Somehow, in seeing all those references, I had missed the fact that this is straight-up fantasy romance: not a fantasy novel with a romance subplot, but a fantasy novel where the romance is the plot. Which, as I have mentioned before, winds up being less romantic to me than the alternative. I did enjoy this -- especially the worldbuilding around the Saint of Steel's paladins, the Temple of the White Rat, and so forth -- but I wanted that to be the focus of the story, not the "oh, this person couldn't possibly be interested in me" dance of the main characters' relationship. This particularly grated when it came to the serial killer plot, which landed in the worst possible middle zone of being resolved too conveniently while also not being fully resolved because (presumably) it will continue into the books centered on the love lives of the other paladins. (Also, I don't particularly like serial killer plots in the first place.) So the ending wound up being more frustrating to me than satisfying, even as I enjoyed individual elements of it.

Well, now I know. My wishlist can shrink a little instead of growing again.

Shanghai Immortal, A.Y. Chao. It's apparently my month for enjoying types of thing I normally bounce off, because this novel -- set in Jazz Age Shanghai and its underworldly (in the magical sense) counterpart -- has a protagonist who routinely exhibits a total lack of self-control, and I'm a bad audience for characters so angry at the world around them they just can't hold back. But the setting was vivid enough, and Jing's reasons for lashing out clear enough, that I happily stayed on the roller-coaster. The ending dragged out a little too much for me, with too many characters suddenly appearing to stick their oars in, but that was more a matter of craft than concept. Turns out there's a sequel forthcoming, which sends the characters to Paris; despite my reflexive "bleh" reaction these days to the word "vampire," I will check it out!

Botanical Curses and Poisons: The Shadow-Lives of Plants, Fen Inkwright. This is a lovely hardcover book with copious black and white line illustrations, organized like an encyclopedia, alphabetically. Inkwright is interested in not just poisonous plants but anything with a dark reputation, whether that's from association with witches or death, a starring role in a tragic legend, or anything else. My main caveat here is that I'd check any factual information you want to get from it, as the cited sources are often rather old ones, and I caught at least one outright error. (The Japanese word for wisteria does not mean "immortality." It's a homophone for the name of Mt. Fuji, and one of the proposed etymologies for Fuji is "immortality": not the same thing.) If you just want it for general inspiration, though, it's good for that, and very pretty!

The Alchemy of Stars II: Award Winners Showcase 2005-2018, ed. Sandra J. Lindow. Having learned this exists, of course I had to get it! I was pleased to see it includes the Dwarf Star winners, after the SFPA added a separate award for poems 10 lines and shorter. Like the first volume, it's an interesting longitudinal section of what's been going on in speculative poetry over the decades.

Little Thieves, Margaret Owen, narr. Saskia Maarleveld. As I've mentioned before, I've kind of gone off YA, because it's often out to do something other than what I really want from a novel these days. I gave this one a shot anyway because the premise sounded like it was going to land right on top of the Rook & Rose gear in my mind, and I was not wrong. What I didn't expect was that it was also going to bring a delightful folkloric strand to the party, and the kind of textured worldbuilding I so rarely get from YA. Combine that with a lively prose style whose occasional modernisms bothered me much less than usual, and, well, as soon as I finished the audiobook I went and ordered it in paper, along with the sequel. If "loose retelling of 'The Goose Girl' meets politics and a con artist/thief in a flavorful Germanic world" sounds like it's up your alley, absolutely try this one out.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats, Ursula K. Le Guin. A little collection of her various works (poems, prose, drawings) about cats, mostly her own. I'd encountered a couple of the poems previously and decided to get the book. It's cute, but ultimately I found I'd already read the best bits of it.

This is as good a place as any to mention that I read a lot of poetry this month. In addition to this and the collection above, I was participating in a poetry challenge for all of March wherein I had to read and comment on other participants' work, and I'm on the Rhysling jury for the long poem category. Which leads us to . . .

The Art of the Poetic Line, James Longenbach. Recommended by a fellow poet during the challenge I just mentioned. When the book showed up, I realized I'd read another from this series -- Mark Doty's The Art of Description -- which I did not find terribly useful. But this is the kind of nonfiction series where one not liking one book has absolutely no bearing on whether you'll like another by a different author, so.

Did I like this one? Kind of. I have a long-standing puzzlement with the craft of deciding where to break a line in free verse, and the idea here was to unpuzzle myself a bit. Longenbach does make a useful-to-me distinction between the end-stopped line, the parsing line, and the annotating line, and he gives a few examples about how to switch between those for effect. However, he also has a tendency to quote a bit of poetry and then describe how the lineation creates thus-and-such effect that . . . I just don't get from the quotation? Poetry is subjective; news at eleven, I guess. I learned some useful things here, which is all I could really hope for.

The Servant’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. Second of the Dame Frevisse mysteries about a fifteenth-century Benedictine nun. This one had much less of my main quibble with the first book ("why have you not asked questions yet about Obviously Weird Thing?"), and meanwhile it had as much if not more of what I liked, which is interest in how people lived back then. Here that alternates between Frevisse's life as a nun -- complete with some back-and-forth about what the religious life gives her, and what it takes away -- and the life of the titular servant, with all the stresses of being a poor peasant worrying about how she'll pay the taxes and fees that will come due if her alcoholic husband dies. This is an ideal series for me to dip in and out of when I want something short and comfortable; the third is already on my shelf.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/7VMVVP)

swan_tower

Friendship hardly seems like something that needs worldbuilding. It's a basic human behavior, right? We all make friends?

Sure -- but what friendship means does not stay the same.

Starting at: Who can you be friends with? Then and now, social divisions may complicate the answer to that. Can men and women be friends? If sex segregation means that women aren't supposed to go out into society or interact with men who aren't their relatives, then cross-gender friendship is pretty much restricted to a trusted cousin or two. (Even then, the relationship is likely to be spoken of in familial terms instead.) But a more egalitarian society may still be dubious of friendships between men and women, with many people assuming there will always, inevitably, be an undercurrent of sexual tension there: friendship as a consolation prize, or a barrier to head off escalation to something more.

What about friendship across class lines? That will often be awkward, even without formal hierarchies of status to get in the way; after all, if one person's struggling to make rent and the other could buy their entire apartment building, you have some inherent inequality there. This gets particularly thorny when one person employs the other: however well they get along and enjoy each other's company, their personal and their business relationships may wind up pulling in opposite directions, to the detriment of both bonds. In that light, it's not surprising that many past societies would have said straight-out that such connections cannot be true friendship. That can only exist between equals.

Class also shares a quality with racial boundaries, which is that both of them are deeply interwoven with culture. People from different groups may have any number of cultural differences, creating significant contrasts in how they spend their free time, what they eat, and even how they converse. These things don't prevent friendship -- we have far too many real-world examples proving otherwise -- but they can make it more difficult, with opportunities arising for misunderstanding or conflict.

But what does it mean to be friends, anyway? So far we've been glossing over that as if it can be taken for granted . . . but one look at an elementary school (where kids are very much learning the social ropes) shows that's not the case.

The answer here isn't just cultural but personal, too. One individual may refer to anybody they know in a positive, non-business capacity as their friend; to their neighbor, most of those people are "acquaintances" or "people they know," with the term "friend" reserved for those who enjoy a deeper connection. Digital relationships particularly complicate this, with the rhetoric of "friending" someone on a social media network implying more connection than actually exists. And how many friends can you have? Most people don't put a real cap on that, but they may feel you can have only one best friend at a time, and that to throw the superlative around more broadly cheapens its meaning.

Part of what muddies the waters here is that we rarely have formal markers for friendship, the way we have them for marriage. Friendship bracelets (which are said to have historical origins in Central America) started being shared in the '70s or '80s; however, they're not universally used, and people can wear that style of bracelet without it signifying anything in particular. Children may declare "you're my friend now" or ask "are we friends?", but adults -- at least in the societies I know -- are more likely to leave it implicit, with all the social pitfalls that entails.

Because part of friendship is being able to share certain intimacies with the other person. That might mean dumping your troubles on them, knowing (or at least having good reason to hope) you'll receive a sympathetic hearing; it might mean asking them to do things for you, without needing to negotiate some kind of explicit compensation or trade. If you try either of those things with someone you assume is a good enough friend for it, only to find they don't see the two of you as being that close . . . oof. It can get very awkward, very fast.

And "intimacy" may go a lot farther than that. In much of the past, and in many parts of the world today, it's entirely normal for friends to show a degree of physical affection that my fellow Americans generally reserve for significant others: hugging is okay, at least for some people in some circumstances, but holding hands as you walk down the street? Kissing, on the cheek or on the lips? Taking a bath together, or sharing a bed? Those things look romantic to us, not platonic.

The same goes for emotional intimacy, or rather, how it's expressed. If you read the letters of same-sex English friends from the nineteenth century, they regularly speak of each other in terms so passionate, you could easily mistake them for lovers. And in some cases, we have reason to surmise that's one hundred percent true; deep friendships could indeed be a cover for a type of relationship not sanctioned by society at the time. But that cover worked because friends did write to each other in such terms, without anybody assuming that "I long to kiss your lips again" carried sexual implications.

Which makes for interesting challenges when it comes to fiction. If you write such behavior into your invented society, then it's likely that a high percentage of your readers are going to interpret that as shippy. In some ways that's fine -- a certain type of reader will ship all kinds of pairings you never intended -- but in other cases, that may make your audience think you're queer-baiting them, suggesting something and then not delivering. Even if they don't feel cheated, the weight of association is going to shift how they read the characters' behavior, adding sexual overtones where none were supposed to be.

Finally, there's the question of how friendship ends. Again, children tend to make it more explicit: "I'm not going to be your friend anymore!" Social media gives us the passive-aggressive option of unfollowing somebody, which they may or may not even notice happening. If you have some of their belongings, or they have a key to your place, a sufficiently bad rift may entail a dramatic scene of shoving somebody's stuff back at them or revoking their access. But mostly we just drift away, ending the relationship as ambiguously as we began it. . . with every bit as much room for uncertainty and misinterpretation.

Seen in that light, there's frankly a lot to be said for worldbuilding more overt structures around the beginning, ending, and depth of friendship between your characters. Or maybe not: maybe crossed wires and hurt feelings are exactly what your story needs!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/QcgTOl)