incandescens | Reading

Snowed again last night, an inch or so, as the winds of March kept my house chilly. Temps rose steadily during the day, disposing of the snow,nand will continue to rise overnight, to 'do we really need the heat on?' levels ie 10C/ 50F. But yes, yes we do, because the winds of March are still blowing. Rain tomorrow and then wind again as temps drop back to the minuses. Follow the bouncing ball.

Thus was indoors all day and accomplished nothing bar a half hour of exercise and a fast reread of The Moving Finger, one of the better Christies. Maybe tomorrow I will tackle those dishes, do a dark wash, and write those belated letters, but today is all sloth all the time.

flemmings

High winds last night had the odd effect of making my upstairs for once much colder than downstairs. Was resigned to staying in but the sun melted snow from the roofs so I decided to try my luck. And was very lucky. The salter bobcats came through at some point last night, leaving their tell-tale salter tracks on the sidewalks, and I could have done the walk in shoes. Anyway, now have potatoes and cheese for omelettes. And will stay in tomorrow because we're due for another bout of snow, sleet, possible freezing rain, and rain rain as the temps climb to 10C/50F on Monday. The spring equinox is known for wintry weather here, and this year is looking to be no exception, even if a tad early. But all hail the March sun, which is at least warm enough to melt whatever March throws at us.

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

flemmings

It was very nice of that storm system to not start snowing until after the morning rush, about 11ish. Roofs were bare when I first got up and then, when I came to breakfast after my exercises, we had whiteout. Stopped two hours later and I went and pushed the near-freezing slush off my steps and walkway and sidewalk. Neighbourly duty done for the day, except it started again in time for the afternoon rush hour. However it didn't stick on my pavement so all I need do now is put a little salt or sand against the early morning dip below 0.

But now, in the absence of alcohol, I want to make a Dutch Baby pancake. Indulgence, indulgence.

flemmings

DW is hanging like a hanging thing. The Graun loads OK though my solitaire page doesn't at all. Maybe my connection is wonky, maybe greenfelt.net is having one of its periodic outages.

Bright blowy November day out there with swift clouds and the occasional snow flake tumbling from a blue sky. Snow tomorrow and on the weekend, so I went out to return Strange Houses to the five people waiting for it, and had-- err, whatever you call a 3 pm meal, the oposite of brunch: linner? at Sushi on Bloor. My waiter there loves me. But my stomach must be shrinking. The small size sushi selection is too big for me now, and I must go to the three piece + a roll sushi appetiser.

Checked out the former By the Way which is now Brasserie Côte, having a soft opening with a menu that does not inspire me to go in. Apparently it has a sibling out Ossington way, a much smaller place with a larger menu which one hopes they will bring here. Although Côte de Boeuf's menu seems to run heavily to the same escargots and sardines and charcuterie as the new place. Well, brasseries are brasseries, but I was hoping for something a little broader. Which I must still go to Le Paradis for, the bro-tachi's local, even if it's not local to any of us. But their boeuf bourguignon is amazing enough to make the trip worth it.

And since I'll be housebound until Monday at least, I walked up to Loblaws for milk and such, and to my physio's across the street to get my receipts for tax purposes, and thus racked up 7000+ steps.

I have always wanted a bidet-- more so when I was younger of course, but still think it would be nice. Especially after reading articles about how tp really doesn't cut it. My bathroom is far too small for a real one even if my knees would permit it-- which they wouldn't. Happy ads say you can add a douche to your toilet seat-- 'So easy you can install it yourself!' Uhh no, I doubt that very much. But googling around I discover something called a peri bottle, for postpartum women. Details of same make me glad I never had children: there's a lot about childbirth they don't tell you in sex ed. But peris sounded reasonable for hygiene so I bought one (from amazon.ca, mea maxima culpa, because neither Shoppers nor Starkman's has them even if they say they do) and will see if they make any difference at all. But because this isn't in any way a Japanese toilet with blowdry function, one must still use toilet paper, so what do these countries with bidets or bum guns or whatever use instead of that?

rachelmanija

A French children's book in translation from 1961, in which five children are trapped in a cottage by a landslide.

14-year-old Laurent's family is concerned that he spends all his time reading and doing chemistry experiments, and isn't engaging with other people. So they dispatch him to stay with his younger brother and sister in a cottage only occupied by a 14-year-old girl and her younger brother, who are alone because her mother is having surgery. The idea is that Laurent will have to take care of the other kids, and this will make him come out of his shell more. His parents do leave him the out of being able to pack up his siblings and return to Paris if he really hates it.

I am honestly not sure if it was even vaguely normal in 60s France for five kids ages 14-5 to stay alone in a remote mountain cottage for ten days, or if this was just a literary convention. Anyway, Laurent unsurprisingly hates it and packs up his siblings to leave. But while they're on the train platform with the other kids, he has a change of heart and they all head back to the cottage. But they stop in the cottage of a family friend, who is out at the time.

It gets buried in a landslide! They're all trapped in pitch darkness! In an only vaguely familiar house! They can't use the stove because it already nearly suffocated them with carbon monoxide! Their only air is from a narrow shaft leading to a giant canyon! There's very little food! No one knows they're in trouble because one of the kids wrote ten postcards dated for every day of the vacation, then arranged with the post office to send one per day!

The kids having to do everything in total darkness for most of the book is a really cool twist on this sort of "trapped in a space" book. (One of my favorite moments is when enough dirt slides away that some light gets in, and they see that they've been half-starved in pitch darkness with two huge hams and a lantern hanging from the ceiling.) It has some cozy elements - they're trapped with goats, which they can milk but which also get into everything and poop everywhere, and one goat gives birth to twin kids - but gets desperate quickly when Laurent gets an infected cut and the main milking goat drowns in a flooded cellar. But it all ends up okay when they first signal with Morse code in a mirror (in a nice touch of realism, it takes a long time for anyone to figure out the message as the kids get some of the letters wrong, including signaling OSO instead of SOS) and then make and set off gunpowder!

Not an enduring classic, but an entertaining read.

larryhammer

A few musical links, from various traditions:

A 1-hour mix of Chinese lofi tracks from Lofi Girl. Excellent. (via)

A 1-hour mix of jazz arrangements of traditional Iranian music. There’s lots more on the channel. Dig it. (via YT sidebar)

A 2-hour mix of the Pokémon Red/Blue soundtrack covered as Japanese jazz fusion. Ooo-kay then. (via YT sidebar)

---L.

Subject quote from Me and Bobby McGee, Janis Joplin.

flemmings

In spite of the constant stream of scammers and robocalls and robocall scammers that I get, I really must stop answering my landline with a curt Yes?! because occasionally there's a real well-meaning person on the other end. As today, the third call of the morning after This is VISA security and This is doors and windows, was my doctor's locum reviewing my bloodwork from Monday. My blood sugars are up from last year when I was evidently doing something right. 'Of course the holidays see a rise in blood sugar but do you think there's some changes you might make now?' Well, I allowed, I could stop drinking Black Russians. She agreed that would do the trick. Not that I've been drinking Black Russians this week, but I have been putting vodka into my cocoa. However, the bottle is finished and I won't buy another, so we'll see in another three months. But equally I'll be moving more now that the worst of the snow is (fingers tightly crossed) over for the nonce. Exercise, exercise.

This week I finished Lost Souls etc and Strange Houses. Doubtless read some Dr Priestleys-- yes, ok, Death in Wellington Rd with the poisoned pigs, and The Domestic Agency. Rhode's problem, more apparent in the former book than the latter, is that he never gives too much information. Mystery writers ought to give us more details than we can use. If they don't, every piece of information we get is significant, so that if Chekov's Australian cousin is mentioned in chapter 2, for sure he will turn up, probably as the murderer, by the end of the book.

The other problem is a hardwarish one: Kobo's Rhodes will occasionally just hang as I'm reading and refuse to go either forward or back. This only happens on my phone, but the upstairs tablet won't load Kobo at all. This happened last week so I went and bought The Mystery of the Yellow Room to see if it happened with other ebooks. Answer is no, not, and it's a fun read even with the Belle Epoque Gallic piling up of adjectives. (Yeah, OK, Lovecraft did it too. Not just the French.) But can I quibble at a translator who talks about 'the assassin' and not the more natural murderer. Assassins in English are political murderers, not people who shoot inoffensive young women in their bedrooms.

rachelmanija

Gyre explores the tunnels of an alien world in a mechanical suit, her only connection to the outside world the voice of Em, her handler who she’s never met, who may or may not have her welfare in mind, and who definitely has boundary issues.

Gyre has less experience caving than she claimed, and caving is extremely difficult. There are sandworm-like creatures called Tunnelers that will kill multiple parties of cavers for unknown reasons, so cavers go in alone, unable to take off their suit for weeks on end, with their handler as their only link with the outside world. Em can literally take control of Gyre’s suit/body, can inject her with drugs, etc - and not only has little compunction about doing so, but won't tell Gyre what the actual purpose of the mission is.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

This is a type of story I don’t see very often, in which there’s one main science fiction element – in this case, the mechanical caving suit – which is explored in depth and is essential to the story, and it’s also set on a (very lightly sketched-in) other planet. Generally the “one science fiction element” stories are set on Earth. Apart from the Tunnelers, this novel actually could take place on an Earth where the suit exists.

The Luminous Dead, like The Starving Saints, has a small cast of sapphic women and takes place almost entirely in the same claustrophobic space; if it was on TV, we’d call it a bottle episode. I normally like that sort of thing but unlike The Starving Saints, it outstays its welcome. It has about a novella’s worth of story, and while it’s very atmospheric and any given portion is well-written and interesting, considered alone, as a whole it’s very repetitive and over-long. I would mostly recommend it if you like complicated lesbians with bad boundaries.

larryhammer

Speaking of Sayers’ writing ability, as a name of a Victorian bust decorating an Oxford college hall, the Reverend Melchisedek Entwistle is just about pitch perfect.

(Gaudy Night, end of chapter 9)

(Yes, I did have to look up who Melchizedek was.)

---L.

Subject quote from Come Together, The Beatles.

flemmings

Finished Strange Houses and then went to the internet to find out what I just read. Internet was mostly reddit, whose black-out spoiler redactions do not appear when highlighted. But a lot of people had the same suspicions as I about the architect jumping at once to 'murderous child killer cult' while other people noted that that's just the way Japanese horror rolls. Which, fair enough. And also noted that what's important is once again the things not said, sigh. But the general impression was that everyone but the narrator and the architect are lying and what's actually happening is a conspiracy, yes, but not the one we think. Although people did seem to think the weird cult thing was true, which to me is, ok, if you say so. Do not think I'll be reading more of his work.

I know better than to go for a blood draw on a Monday especially a Monday when I've just lost an hour of sleep, but it's going to rain all week and then snow. So out I went at 10 new time and came in to a posted 45 minute wait. But I waited, and then waited some more when they called my name because they said the room available was too narrow for me. Told them I could walk without the rollator but they were all No no just wait. And when they called me again I went without my walker just to show them. But the nurse got my vein first try, no having to use the other arm as in December, which is either her being more skilled than the other or my veins being pumped up from my water drinking. Whichever, I am grateful.

Could have done without the two large guys who barged into the elevator before I could get off it as I was leaving. Men, said Jessica. And am now headachy and am going out to dinner with bro and s-i-l tonight, but again, nobody made me get my draw this morning.

larryhammer

For Poetry Monday:

She Says, Being Forbidden:, Leonora Speyer

And was there not a king somewhere who said:
“Back, waves! I do command you!” I forget
His name, beloved, or his race, and yet
I know the story and am comforted.
The tides will rise, are rising—see, they spread
About your robes, your ermine will be wet,
Your velvet shoes, your dear dear feet! Ah let
Me warn you, sir, the waves will reach your head!

My king, my kingly love, how shall we stay
The bold broad lifting of this lovely sea?
What is the master word that we must say
To bring these roaring waters to the knee?
The other king went scampering away!
Will you so do? Or will you drown with me?

Hat-tip to

conuly. Ah, Cnut, we hardly recall ye. This is from Speyer’s 1926 collection Fiddler’s Farewell, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

---L.

Subject quote from Respect, Aretha Franklin.

flemmings

So nice to see the snowpack from last January's dump shrinking on the mudroom roof. Yes of course it will snow again in a week-- this is March in TO after all-- but for now it's melting happily in the 14C/ 50sF warm. And will melt more in tomorrow and Monday's sun.

Am only partway into Strange Houses but either I've been reading too much John Rhode or the consulting architect has been reading too much Japanese detective fic/ weird tales. Because. Here's this house with a second floor windowless room in the center, marked Child's Room. It has its own toilet but no bath. Here's an odd unmarked space between the walls on the ground floor. Maybe intended as a pantry in the kitchen? No, no, it myst be a crawl space that allows the child to access the windowless bathroom. OK, but why must this child not be seen? My thoughts go to Holmes' Yellow Face or Cthuluan monstrosities. The architect's thoughts go to 'the child is a murder weapon. The parents entice someone into their house, get him tiddly, suggest he have a bath, then when he's drowsy from alcohol and heat, the kid comes in and stabs him to death.' Like, this is the first thing you think of, guy? Now why would that be? I am having Deep Dark Suspicions about that architect

But of course this is Japan whose psychological reasonings are never anything that make sense to me. I await further developments

flemmings

I spent the day, or most of it, in sweaty domesticity, which is not how I prefer to spend my days. But it was raining and cleanliness helps the megrims, so I doped my back up and took the couch apart so as to add some more cushions as I've been meaning to for a while. Am still not able to get up out of it without them. But of course this involved vacuuming everything, all sides, including the amazing amount of dust on the nether side of the cushions and the amazing amount of crap between them. Then got at the corner by the wall which was festooned with cobwebs and thick with dust because it's very hard to reach. Emptied cannister, drank 500 ml of water, then vacuumed the rest of the living room and the hallway. Some day I may get the carpet up and the couch pulled out to remove the dust elephants there, but that's a bit more than I'm up for just now. Lemon polished the wooden tables instead so they glow.

Am not totally satisfied because there's still too many miscellaneous boxes and bags here. A bag of unwearable back braces that still don't fit, the plastic hooked hanging thingies I use for laundry between the furnace turning off and the cherries falling, and a pile of calendars I can't throw out because they're where I tracked my weight gains and losses. Maybe if I noted the general trends in a notebook somehow? This would be easier if I had a computer of some description.

Currently have some basmati rice cooking so I can have omuraisu tomorrow. And maybe tomorrow will get to the kitchen floor.

flemmings

Hacked my way through Cabell's Figures of Earth and wondered why I did. Yes he's of his time and yes he's the generic Southern Gentleman but sheesh why does he go on and on about howcum wimmen never measure up to the romantic notion men have of them, and howcum all women want to remake their husbands, and I wonder why did generations of people marry when they didn't even like the opposite sex. Yes I know why, but. Like Blackwood's mother who at bloody eighteen married a widower with five kids, and whose mother-in-law made her life a misery because she didn't think her good enough for her son. Like, who else would marry a blubbery seal hunter with five kids, huh?

Anyway, finished two Dr. Priestleys as well. Am currently reading Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon, which I think I'd rather read in Japanese if my library had it in same. The translation is OK, it's just... very Japanese. Am taking my time with it to fight the instinct that says 'five other people are waiting for this copy I must finish it ASAP.' No I needn't. I have it for three weeks and I can take all of them.

Because next is Strange Houses which is even more Japanese and has even more people waiting for me to finish it.

larryhammer

Have His Carcase has one of the classic opening paragraphs of literature:

The best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people seem to think, repose upon a manly bosom. Much more efficacious are honest work, physical activity, and the sudden acquisition of wealth. After being acquitted of murdering her lover, and, indeed, in consequence of that acquittal, Harriet Vane found all three specifics abundantly at her disposal; and although Lord Peter Wimsey, with a touching faith in tradition, persisted day in and day out in presenting the bosom for her approval, she showed no inclination to recline upon it.

That’s up there with Pride and Prejudice.

---L.

Subject quote from ABC, Jackson 5.

flemmings

Yeah well, that art gallery isn't going to view itself, now is it? So I cabbed down to the AGO, which confuses me by having automatic doors for wheelchairs everywhere but on its outer facade. Kind people let me in, but yanno. Somebody wasn't thinking. And I know they used to have a button outside but Ghu knows what they did with it. Anyway, I then discover why not to go in winter ie you must check your coat and it costs $4. But these niggles aside, got in and saw first the David Blackwood exhibit, disquieting etchings from his Newfoundland past, of iceberg calves and baleen whales and sealers wrecked on ice floes and dying of exposure and cold. This was a famous disaster that happened in 1914 when 78 men died after being stranded on the ice for 53 hours in the middle of a blizzard.

https://ago.ca/exhibitions/black-ice-david-blackwood-prints-newfoundland

Maybe because I'm a Capricorn, maybe because I'm a city child, just about the most unheimlich thing I know is the ocean. Mountains are a close second: was fantodded by the Alps at the age of 9 and never grew out of it. But mountains are just earth stood on its head, and they're always in the same place; oceans are water that never stops moving and there literally is no there there. Anyway Nfld is an island and you can't get away from the ocean, but I can never understand why anyone would willingly go out on the sea that surrounds it.

Then got to the Jesse Mockrin exhibit, the one that closes on Sunday. She uses Renaissance techniques to paint pseudo-Renaissance subjects, many inspired by paintings and objects in the AGO's own collection. I like her paintings even if I suspect I'm not supposed to. But colour! She has colours! How could anyone resist?

https://ago.ca/exhibitions/jesse-mockrin-echo

The other trouble with going in winter is that one must wear boots, and boots are not kind to that pesky neuroma on the sole of my foot. So though there are other things I should have seen, I figured two hours was enough and headed home. Took the TTC up to Dupont, intending to wait for the bus and finish by shopping at Loblaws. But oh lookie, here's a Shoppers, let's get some garbage tags. Which they no longer sell. Online or at Canadian Tired only, and how lucky I didn't make a special trip to find this out. Then I look at Dupont which is one lane as far as the eye can see, because condos, and after that sewers, so hell, will not kill me to walk two subway stops. Except that it nearly did. But I have more cushioning pads for my feet, and if it gets as warm as they say it will, maybe I can be in shoes later on this week. Phone says this was all only good for 6000 steps, but will take it.

flemmings

I do not see me getting up at 6 ayem to see the Blood Moon. It will have to bleed without me.

Another library book of long holding came in so I went out in sun and not-that-cold to get it. Then had indifferent grilled chicken at Pour Boy where I ate in lonely splendour. Odd. Their fried chicken sandwich is excellent, their chicken satay is excellent, but their grilled chicken is tendony and fat, like KFC in Japan.

I've been wanting an acrylic floor polish for the laminate kitchen tiles but no supermarket has it. Lotsa stuff for wood floors which tells you just how yuppie this 'hood has become. When I finally remember to google it, transpires that hardware stores sell it. And since I'm out on Bloor anyway, might as well trot over to Wieners and get my steps in. Noting along the way the many businesses that have closed: not just the vape stores and cannabis outlets, but two or three of the longtime Korean places. That odd health store with its cures for bladder problems (in men), one of the accessory hats'n'jewelry places that also changed watch batteries, another stationery store I think, Tom and Sara with its anime plushies... Anyone would think we were in a recession.

Got my floor polish and then walked the half block to Brunswick to see what had replaced By the Way. Answer is, nothing yet, though at least the sign is up for a French brasserie thingy. Presumably waiting for spring to open, which may also be the reason the high scale Japanese steak house in the old Second Cup and Presse Libre site is still at the Coming Soon! stage. That one has been in the works for close to a year IIRC and I have ceased to hold my breath.

And some day will get down the street for my quarterly blood draw, but who wants to get out of bed early these days? Only it will rain later this week and then it will be achiness rather than laziness that deters me. Not to mention grunge on the wheels, which was bad enough today with melt and rock salt applying a cm coating.

larryhammer

For Poetry Monday:

The Llano Estacado, John Poch

How much soil do you plow to soothe a conscience?
If you’re a staked plains, dry-land, long view man:
a sky’s worth. Some even sow the dry playa
mid-summer with sorghum, the cotton plowed under
after early hail. Thus, not every farmer keeps
an old broken homestead sacred as a graveyard.
Today, no Sharpshin on a pivot for an omen,
no stoic farmer on a turn-row changing water.

Among a little wind grit, in a grid on a grid, somewhere
like the crossroads of outer space and Earth, Texas,
a handful of ragged elms withstand a long sway
of heat and wind. These old guards of a home haunt
the field but wither even as ghosts must. Honor them
with a walk among homesick bricks, and prophesy good.

First published in Poetry issue July/August 2009. The Llano Estacado is a large mesa/plateau in west Texas and easternmost New Mexico, extending from Amarillo through Lubbock and down to Odessa. The name is often translated as “staked plain,” with a folk etymologies explaining that its dry grassland is so featureless that Native Americans supposedly put up markers to guide their way (and Coronado famously did find it confusing), but the actual origin is probably “stockaded/palisaded plain,” referring to the escarpments of its eastern and western edges. The sharp-shinned hawk is a common small hawk of the region. The elms, which are not native, would have been grown by a former homesteader by irrigation from wells.

---L.

Subject quote from Dreams, Fleetwood Mac.

Profile

incandescens

January 2026

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Page Summary

flemmings - (no subject)
flemmings - (no subject)
mark in dw_maintenance - Performing some traffic maintenance today
flemmings - (no subject)
flemmings - (no subject)
rachelmanija - Landslide, by Veronique Day
larryhammer - “windshield wipers slapping time holding bobby’s hand in mine / we sang every song that driver knew”
flemmings - (no subject)
rachelmanija - The Luminous Dead, by Caitlin Starling
larryhammer - “got to be good-looking because he’s so hard to see / come together right now over me”
flemmings - (no subject)
larryhammer - “all i’m asking in return, honey / is to give me my propers when you get home”
flemmings - Diffugere nives and Strange Houses
flemmings - (no subject)
flemmings - Reading Wednesday
larryhammer - “sit down girl! i think i love you! / no get up, girl! show me what you can do!”
flemmings - (no subject)
flemmings - (no subject)
larryhammer - “your loneliness / like a heartbeat drives you crazy / in the stillness of remembering”

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Mar. 16th, 2026 04:56 am

Imaginal Casements

Making Bricks Without Straw

Reading

(no subject)

(no subject)

Performing some traffic maintenance today

(no subject)

(no subject)

Landslide, by Veronique Day

“windshield wipers slapping time holding bobby’s hand in mine / we sang every song that driver knew”

(no subject)

The Luminous Dead, by Caitlin Starling

“got to be good-looking because he’s so hard to see / come together right now over me”

(no subject)

“all i’m asking in return, honey / is to give me my propers when you get home”

Diffugere nives and Strange Houses

(no subject)

Reading Wednesday

“sit down girl! i think i love you! / no get up, girl! show me what you can do!”

(no subject)

(no subject)

“your loneliness / like a heartbeat drives you crazy / in the stillness of remembering”

Profile

January 2026

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags