cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/11/07/going-to-space-brb/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=34699

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/11/07/pnf/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=34688

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/11/07/worst-caturday-evar/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=34683

s00j:

Just found out that we have A SECOND concert at FaerieCon this weekend, tomorrow morning at 11:

Sunday November 08, 2009 — 11am
FaerieCon 2009
Morning Concert in The Realm
Baltimore Marriott Hunt Valley Inn
245 Shawan Road
Hunt Valley, MD 21031 [Map It!]
Call and ask for the FaerieCon room rate or make reservations online.
1.410.785.7000
We JUST found out about this concert; sorry for the short notice!
with Betsy on cello


If you're awake, come and play with us.  And please help us spread the word!  If people actually show up, we'll play Tam Lin and the Wendies and lots of other wonderful things.

I'm also on a panel about faerie music tomorrow afternoon around 1:30pm.


Last night at the Good Faeries Masquerade was intense, but stealthcello  and I took it in stride.  Soundcheck time ran out on us, so Betsy and I just grabbed our gear, line-checked, and started playing after a short and wonderful intro by FaerieWorlds emcees Mark and Billy. (oh, we were SO glad to see them both!)  The crowd was sweet and responsive, and two gorgeous faeries in white obligingly did a tango for us right in front of the stage during "Alligator." 

Last night's setlist:
Firebird's Child
For Love of All Who Gather
Witch's Rune
Taglio!
The Pixie Can't Sleep
Alligator in the House
encore:  Tough Titty Cupcakes

Betsy, K, West and I got to meet some amazing (and amazingly dressed) people last night, and we're thrilled to be at our first FaerieCon.  We also got to reconnect with a lot of LJ and Facebook folks (hi Jess and Christina and Zoe and all!), and fans from Colorado and just everywhere.  Today we'll be at our CD table in the hall, across from the concert space.  We're hoping to catch Charles Delint and Marianne H. so that I can say thank you in person for his Ravens contribution--the two of them have a concert this afternoon.  This evening, K and I will spin glow poi during the Gypsy Nomads' concert, during their song, "Carnival"--they're first, so if you want to see us spin, be there on time.

There's also talk of playing "Sue's Jig" while riding up and down the escalators at some point today.  Skinny White Chick Flashmob of Two!

dali_muse:


These are the belly dancing Marie's who performed Saturday night at the House of Blues for the main event of the weekend.

threne:
I am also selling a signed hardback Daniel Merriam book, if any of you are interested.

Sold! :)

threne:
DANIEL and anyone else who might know...

I have some vintage Skinny Puppy and Siouxsie shirts (all in really good condition) that I want to sell. Before I throw them up on ebay, is there somewhere else that might be better/faster to sell them at - like somewhere more focused on the people that would buy vintage t-shirts?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

ps. by vintage i mean I have a 1986 SP/Severed Heads t-shirt from the Dig It Tour, a VIVIsectVI 1988 tour shirt, etc.

yuki_onna:

Was awakened at 2 and cannot get back to sleep. Everything is very silent in our room, and my stomach is empty. How I wish the streetside blini stands were 24 hours. Oh my god, streetside blini.

One of the thoughts I kept turning around in my head today was about fantasy literature and the war. WWII is a favorite garden patch for anchoring Western fantasy in historical and moral authority, from Narnia all the way down to Hellboy. It's irritated me in the past, because it seems like a way to infantilize fantasy, to say: look! It's connected to the American idea of the easiest moral choice ever, to go to war against the skull and crossbones brigade! That means it's real, complex literature! And inevitably, those stories that do choose WWII as their adoptive parent show a monochromatic worldview of depressing simplicity. (I'm sure there are exceptions. It's 4 am, this is not a critical piece.)

Now, one of the big set pieces for American and especially British fantasy is the children's evacuation from London. That flight from the horrors of the real world into the pastoral countryside is pretty much the street map for portal fantasy. And yet.

The children of Leningrad were evacuated, too, at least a large number of them (the London evacuation wasn't complete either. Kids are hard to keep track of and for some reason parents are sort of attached.) They were sent out of a urban horror story far worse than the Blitz--and yes, the Blitz sucked, and rationing was hard, but it doesn't even compare to Leningrad and their daily 125 grams of sawdust and turpentine bread, or total lack of power in -38F winter winds, or 60% of the city population dying. No jolly Doctor Who episodes about plucky Leningraders and Captain Jack, you know?

Anyway, they were sent out into...well, it's not pastoral England. But I listened all afternoon to a woman talk about where she went, and it was like a fairy tale. A Russian fairy tale. You know, the kind where you still starve. How the orphans climbed behind the stove and giggled and shared secrets and tried to guess what was cooking by the smell. How they allotted her size 33 boots, and she cried trying to put them on because they were so big, she would never grow big enough to fill them. How she was obsessed with her teacher, who she thought might be a witch, because whenever she woke up in the morning, the teacher already had her clothes on. Whenever she went to bed at night, the teacher still had her clothes on. When did she sleep? Could she take off her clothes? And then how all the children of Leningrad were so determined to stay together, to never loose each other, but now she never talks to the others anymore. (Oddly enough, her orphanage was in Komarova, where Ahkmatova is buried, and which used to be a writers' dacha.)

For me, part of what fantasy does, part of what makes it valuable, is how it can tell a story about the real world in such a way that it jars you out of the endlessly repeated sadnesses of human life and makes you consider it all in another way. How it, mythology and folklore and fantasy, provides a set of narratives through which to see one's own experience, and understand it as part of a much bigger story of the world. Because the world likes to tell stories, the same ones, over and over. The world has fetishes. The world has kinks.

And now, in my heart of hearts, I want to write the book that starts with this other evacuation of children, this shadow-sister to the famous London one. It's a different story, a different starting point that goes to places Narnia doesn't begin to imagine. Again, I struggle with whether I am the person to write it, if it would not be better if my surname were Valentinova. If I maybe don't have the right to put that to paper. But then, I listened to Galina Sergeyevna today, I heard her story and I came to this city and I married into this family with so many war stories. Do I have any more right to write Italian war stories, because I am Italian, though I know no stories of my family during the war? I don't know. All I know is that this someone is sitting at the bottom of me right now, being very quiet and still, little Galina in her size 33 boots, and I look around this city and know I cannot be done writing about it, it is not even possible that I am ready to walk away from it.

japanfiles:

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cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/11/06/cubicle-of-unfathomable-awesomeness/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=34605

yuki_onna:

Today was intense on many levels.

We walked over what seems like it must be the entire city but in reality was only about 1/5 of it. St. Petersburg is not like other European cities. It has enormous, wide streets that put California to shame, blocks that go on forever, with oddly repeating buildings so that one feels like one is on a loop, and the distances are just vast. I guess there was room enough in Russia not to skimp on the mileage here, but ye gods, my feet are killing me. Not!Leningrad combines the walkability of suburban Ohio with indifferent subway coverage. We have not tried the trolleys yet, as the scale involved only became clear to us today. The maps make it all look so close, but truly, they cajole and lie and make a fool of human hearts. Once you start walking, the city telescopes and all of the sudden you're staring down three miles of long, icy thoroughfare. Oh, look, it's only a block away! MWA HA HA. BLOCK IS INFINITE. CITY MOCKS WESTERNER.

It also started snowing today. Which was beautiful, and soft, and lovely.

We started out at the Anna Ahkmatova museum--now, normally, I hate museums. I am skirting the idea of skipping the Hermitage. I know this makes me a bad person and fit for reviling, but the thing is, museums are dead, enshrined culture, and I would so much rather make my way among the living, tasting and breathing the real and alive city, trying to scry out its heart. I see images online all day. The difference between that and a long white antispetic hall with more images hung on it, often the same images I've seen in other media, is less than you might think. With so little time in any one place, I'm always loathe to spend it in a closed space where I cannot touch anything, or smell anything, or even hear anything, usually. I live enough of my life in a purely visual realm.

But for my darling poetesses I make exceptions. Because it's her house. Where she lived, when she lived here, before the war, before she was evacuated in 1941. My passion for Ahkmatova's work has only grown over the last several years, and sitting in her room, looking out on the golden autumn garden with the first snowflakes drifting down past flitting crows to settle on glistening red rosehips--I had to go. I had to be there. It is an amazing place. I try to imagine it filled with people, with writers making inside jokes and getting drunk and being afraid and giving each other jokey awards and just being kids, the way I and my writerly friends are kids, only Anna and her friends were under a shadow, and most of them were killed, including her husband and son. Everything about Russia seems to start out as a story Americans would find familiar--raconteur writers, dashing, charismatic poetess at the center of it all, city on the verge of war--and then goes to a place so unimaginably awful that even telling the story of what happened here in those days is an act of bloodletting that most westerners avoid entirely.

So after that we went to the Siege of Leningrad museum. Now, there's almost no translation there, but I've seen all those photographs before in my research, and I knew what most of the exhibits were. We saw Tanya Savicheva's diary, and a preserved bread ration which made me feel ill--so tiny, and made with little more than sawdust. But that's what you expect in a museum dedicated to an atrocity committed in wartime.

I didn't know that the guides, the guard, even the coat check woman were all Blockade survivors. (Or as the guard kept calling it: the Affair of Leningrad.) We sat quietly by with Dmitri whispering translation as a PhD student (who turned out to be a fellow Edinburgh University grad) interviewed the guard. She laughed at some of the questions: didn't they teach you about the war in school? I was only a child. Ask the tour guide, she remembers more. Then we followed her to the coat check room, where the woman who remembers the most, having been a teenager, had the day off, and Galina, who was three, and evacuated with the children of Leningrad, told us the very little she remembers, and much more about her orphanage and life bouncing from one family to another after all but her much older sister were killed in the Blockade.

It is very, very hard to keep from crying when those stories are told. When Galina herself teared up talking about the first victory day celebration twenty years later. How she doesn't remember her parents' faces. She was so beautiful and serene, and yet this thing that happened when she was three dominates her entire life.

We walked in the cold after that, down into the impossibly deep subway, where underground, marble pillars and bronze stars shine, polished and bright. Through the streets on Vasilevsky Island, with their sherbet-colored cathedrals and apartments, everything ice-cream and custard colored, yellow and pink and pale green with white piping. We ate solyanka and cabbage and sausage and looked out at the Neva, which is close enough to freezing to have that extra sheen of water that wants to go to ice but can't quite manage it yet. I thought a lot about how much I hate American WWII movies and the whole narrative of that war for us, which ignores so much and rearranges everything else so that it all ends with a lantern-jawed GI hero stomping a cartoonish Hitler single-handedly. American cinema and politics love WWII because it was an easy war for us--the bad guys were nice enough to wear black and twirl their mustaches. It wasn't an easy war here, and people are still living in the same places, the same apartments where it happened. Galina told us that after the war she and her sister just came back and lived in the same apartment. Palimpsests on palimpsests, writing and rewriting a city.

We watched streetdogs all day, handsome black gentlemen, nosing carefully for bones. We watched the night fall suddenly, utterly, and talked about the old days, how they never really end, or begin, but just keep going, forever, like a dark street.

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/11/06/puppy-dog-eyes-definish-of/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=33914

yuki_onna:

I've been sitting on this news for a really long time, and while I am recuperating from a day of walking all over Not!Leningrad, which is NOT LIKE EUROPE in that it is absurdly enormous, with gargantuan streets and map scales that mock mortal feet, I finally get to announce it. Plain old good news, instead of craziness.

Possible some of you remember the source of the icon in this post. Once upon a time, long ago, I was planning an epic fantasy trilogy based on the myth of Prester John, arising out of my Interfictions 1 story, A Dirge for Prester John. (Speaking of, the IAF Auction to support Interfictions 2 is on now, and there is a wonderful piece based on my PJ story over there. I'll also be reading from the story at the Boston IAF spectakular next Friday at 7:30 at the Lily Pad in Cambridge, accompanied by Brian Slattery's amazing musical troupe!)

I'm deliriously pleased (having nothing to do with the pleasure of being off one's feet) to announce that I've sold the trilogy to Night Shade Books. First book should come out sometime next year.

Which means it finally gets to exist! Yay!

On top of that, my new novella, the California-punk Arthuriana Under In the Mere, is finally in the world and ready for purchase. I need to do a big post on this but I just haven't had the time, hopefully understandably. I'll make my traditional OMGNEWBOOK post when I get back on Tuesday. In the meantime, if you haven't ordered it, hie ye hence, and if you have, the first (reasonably in-depth, not single line) review posted online will receive an Arthurian gift package from me, which will include some original jewelry and other gee gaws.

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/11/06/were-not-even-touching-this-one/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=34452

dali_muse:

For Andi and Tia. I'm still uploading the rest of the photos.

yuki_onna:

Well, that's it. One night in St. Petersburg and I'm a little in love.

Trying to squeeze the most out of our reduced time here, we immediately set off walking through the city, stopping to eat pelmeni and my first borscht, as well as coffee and rum and hot wine as the cold got to us. It's only about 30 degrees here tonight, but it goes right through you.

The night was bookended by babushki--grandmas. At the pelmennaya, this amazing old woman sat at her table, right out of every Russian movie you ever saw, with her scarf and all, slurping borscht with almost violent gusto. She then wiped her mouth on both her sleeves and heaved a huge bag over her shoulder before stomping out of the place.

At the last place we went to, a club that has a "Back to the USSR" 80s night on Sunday that WE WILL SO BE GOING TO, another old woman got up and started bumping and grinding on the dancefloor to a techno remix of One Night In Bangkok. Just wow. (Also I note that about half the restaurants in our guide go something like "amazing shashlik, dumplings, fish, great atmosphere, and oh by the way topless waitresses, just saying.")

So we walked over to Gorokhovaya Street, which is where I put my heroine's house in Deathless. I chose the street more or less at random, because I liked the sound, but it turned out to be a fabulous choice, as it's an iconic St. Petersburg street, with beautiful residential buildings, in addition to meaning "pea," and thus connected to "the days of Tsar Gorokh," which is a way of saying "back in the day." So we walked along it, looking at houses that might have been Marya Morevna's, peering through the dark at long, silent, cold canals, and I spent a lot of time reading cyrillic at the approximate speed of a toddler.

The thing is, this city feels so familiar. Part Paris, part freezing version of Rome--and I've been trying to imagine it for so long for the book, that now that I'm here, it all looks so much like I thought it would, and I have such good associations with Russian food, Russian language, even Russian faces. Everyone here has their Very Severe Face on, which is what I normally look like, except that everyone thinks I'm angry if I'm not smiling. But here, I blend! Sort of. Once we were out of the airport, the immediate switch to English upon seeing my face wasn't so bad. And justbeast gets that too, from time to time.

But I love it and we've only seen a slice of it, in the dark. The seaweed coming up out of the black canal, the color of sour cream floating in borscht, the occasional hammer and sickle still topping iron fences, this odd palimpsest of old and new city. I can't wait to see it in the light.

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/11/05/this-just-in/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=34646

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/11/05/of-course-you-realize-this-means-war/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=34339

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/11/05/dells-new-meowse-a-dud/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=34604

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/11/05/hildas-revenge/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=34413