squirrelhaven

I've been consuming some amazing art by and about women lately, and have recommendations to share:

books

The Power, by Naomi Alderman. Mind-blowingly good mix of literary and speculative fiction, with a fantastic premise and clever, thoughtful, and shattering execution. All over the world, women spontaneously develop electrostatic power enabling them to deliver electric shocks. It starts with pubescent women, but they can awaken this power in older women with a touch. What happens to the world as we know it when women -- all women, everywhere -- suddenly have this potentially lethal power in their bodies? I will warn that this is not a happy read (where there is power, there will be people looking to exploit that power for their own gain), but a fascinating one, and aspects of it are pure wish-fulfillment. Couldn't be more timely if it tried.

The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas. YA novel, from the POV of a 16-year-old black girl who witnesses the police shooting of her childhood friend. Also timely, for sure, but it takes a grim premise and fleshes it out with hope and humanity. The main character lives in an inner city but attends a prestigious (and mostly white) private school, and therefore straddles two very different worlds; much of the story involves her trying to reconcile these two sides of herself in the aftermath of tragedy. What I loved about this book -- aside from the excellent story-telling, which is top-notch -- is that it takes a sadly common news headline and pushes past that to make you understand that every single person who gets reduced to a phrase in those headlines ("suspected drug-dealer," etc.) is a human being with a full inner life, a family, a history that informs all the decisions they make. Full of empathy for pretty much everybody except the trigger-happy police, but even they get some nuance and consideration. (The narrator's beloved uncle is also a police officer, so there's not a simple cops=bad equation.) I found it uplifting by the end.

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tv

GLOW. This is a Netflix show based on the trashy-but-fascinating 1980s women's wrestling show, Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. (Full disclosure: I actually watched that show as a kid. For a while. Without my parents' knowledge, because there's no way they would have condoned it. At 11 or 12, I could not have explained why I watched it except that it was a can't-look-away train wreck situation. But also, there were women there who did things that women simply did not do, and were not allowed to do, ever. Even with all the trash -- of which there was MUCH -- that was oddly compelling.) With a cast and creative team that's almost entirely female, and diverse w/r/t ethnicities and body types, led by an almost unrecognizable Alison Brie (from Community), GLOW explores the ways that something so utterly exploitative could also be liberating and empowering for the women involved. Daniel and I watched this together (he thought it was wholly fictional, and was astounded when I told him it was based on a real thing) and both totally loved it.



What have you guys been reading/watching lately that you'd recommend? I seem to be in a I-am-tired-of-listening-to-white-dudes phase these days, so would particularly appreciate recs for media by women and people of color.

Let me show you it:

Save the Words

Okay, it's only awesome if you're a word geek, but if you are, I promise you will love this. Please note: the site has sound. Awesome sound.

(Explanation: the Oxford English Dictionary people are trying to save several obsolete words from falling out of the English language, by asking people to adopt them. In the sense of using them as often as possible, yes, but also in the sense of picking one that will be your own and taking care of it. My only issue with this is that there are so many fantastic words here, I find myself completely unable to choose -- which isn't helped by the fact that they're all adorably saying "Pick me!" and "Over here!" and the like as my mouse rolls over them.)

Click on words to get their definitions and sample sentences. (The sample sentence for "lignicide," which means "woodcutter": "I'm a lignicide and I'm okay, I sleep all night and I work all day.")

I dreamed last night that Abraham Lincoln was a friend of mine, and he was into trying out new hats. Every week or so he'd have a different kind of hat -- beret, tam, porkpie, etc. -- and it was sort of his thing, and we'd all tease him about it. And then one day he showed up in a stovepipe hat, expecting everybody to make fun of it, and to his surprise we all said, "Actually, Abe, that's an oddly good look for you. No, really. It somehow suits you. It makes you look very dignified." And so he stuck with the stovepipe hat for the rest of his life.

Also, in the dream, Abe was gay, and Mary Todd Lincoln was actually a man in drag. But this was in no way the point of the dream, which really centered on the hats.

I can offer no explanation for any of this.

If you had to come up with a name for a two-headed fire-breathing snake-monster who eats people -- but has her civilized side -- what would you call her?

I don't mean a classification, I mean a name. Like Shirley or Babs or Gladys. Except those don't quite suit.

Suggestions?

I am (belatedly, I know) trying to set up housekeeping here at Dreamwidth, in part because so many of my friends are posting over here (baa), and in part because I have been utterly unable to make the openID thing work for me. I really don't know why; I've tried on a few occasions, I've read all the instructions, I've read umpty-ump FAQs and the like, and it just. does. not. work. Maybe I'm an idiot. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. But maybe this will circumvent the problem once and for all.

Anyway. I still haven't figured out how I'm going to balance the DW and LJ sites. My hope is that I'll be able to import my squirrelhaven LJ over here, to have a working copy of it, and then crosspost for the forseeable future. But that will depend on my figuring out how to do the above. We'll see how that goes.

But, well. Here I be.

Remember a while back when I posted pictures of jewelry I'd made?

Well, I've made a lot more; beading turns out to be the perfect activity for when you've got small, unpredictable periods of time to work with and not much brain. And I've finally set up an Etsy store, under the very apt rubric Emily Procrastinates. (Hat-tip to sanj for coming up with the name.) I have this vague hope, you see, that my beading habit might become self-supporting. Because I want to buy more beads, and to make more things, and I can only wear so many necklaces myself.

Anyway. Just thought I'd put that out there. If you or your friends feel like enabling this addiction of mine, I'd be most grateful. (And if you're local, we could work out some kind of cash deal that would involve a discount for you and a circumventing of Etsy and Paypal fees for me. I'm just sayin'.)

I'm on a kick with the beading lately, using pretty much all of Stellan's naptimes to play some more. I should probably slow down, as I'm neglecting other tasks that need doing. But I'm having fun, and it's been a while.

I also never stop being surprised at my own competence. The things I've made, they look like they were made by someone who actually knows what she's doing. It's such a weird thought.

Anyway. D kindly took some photos of my recent work, so I can show off. ( Photos behind the cut. )

I'm starting to have this fantasy of setting up a table at a low-key craft fair somewhere, to sell some of this stuff. Because I really don't need this many necklaces, I just like making them. And it might be nice if my beading habit could support itself.

I wonder how long it's going to take for it to really sink in that we just elected a mixed-race, dark-skinned man with an African name, Muslim father, teenage mother, lower-middle-class background, sharp intellect, and liberal voting record to be our next president. That America is a place where that can really truly happen, that the election wasn't stolen from us, that bigotry and short-sightedness didn't win. Last night I thought maybe I was just too tired for the fact to really register. But today I can't shake the feeling that I need to re-check the news every couple hours, like if I stop paying attention for too long somehow reality will shift, and McCain will be headed for the White House instead of Obama, his gorgeous family, and their new puppy.

(Speaking of which, maybe I'm a total sap, but I love the fact that he promised his daughters a puppy in his victory speech. If there was a way for me to become even more enamored of the man, that was probably it.)

D and I were musing on the drive home last night about who we'd like to see in Obama's cabinet. I can't help wondering if Colin Powell will be in there somewhere. I know he's a Republican, but he's a smart, moderate, non-evil Republican, and he did endorse Obama for president. I also have this fantasy where Al Gore becomes the director of the EPA. I'll be really curious to see who does get named to administration posts. I'm also unutterably relieved that Obama's going to select the next few Supreme Court justices. The man was a constitutional law professor; he's going to do a good job with that. Hallelujah.

I know everything won't get better all at once. I'm not expecting angels to sing and life to be suddenly rosy when Obama takes office. The country is in a deep, deep hole, and it's going to take a long time to climb out of it. But for the first time in a long while, I believe we're headed upward instead of deeper down. That's a good feeling. (Or it will be, once I fully wrap my head around it.)

If it's not one preoccupation, it's the other:

I've been checking the electoral projections at fivethirtyeight.com at least once a day for the last many weeks (that is, the days that I've made it to my computer at all), to try to keep myself reassured that Obama's got a very good chance of becoming the next president. The daily poll tracking has almost all been encouraging; even when it shows a slight improvement for McCain, it's along the lines of "Well, yesterday McCain was down by 12 points, today he's only down by 10 points," and even those small gains tend to disappear within a day or two. But the thing I find myself staring at every day is the pie chart in the upper left corner of the page, showing the odds on Obama's win. I have never seen the site place those odds below 90%, and usually they're above 95%.

Upon checking the site this morning, I remembered a nightmare from last night, in which Obama's win percentage had dropped to around 70%. My heart was in my throat for a moment, until I'd digested today's actual figure: 96.2%.

I'll be so glad when this election is over. (Unless we lose. In which case I'll be devastated. But let's not think about that.)

I feel embarrassingly clueless asking this, but:

The farm we've joined will happily accept our food waste for their compost. As we aren't serious enough gardeners to have much use for compost ourselves (plus we have a dog who's a little too interested in eating anything that resembles food, even when it's decomposed), this seems like a great plan. But we know almost nothing about composting, other than that it's a good thing and cuts down on the garbage we're ultimately sending to a landfill. And all the sites I can find online that promise to help us get started are filled with technical information we don't really need at this point.

My questions are: what types of food waste can be composted, and what can't? What's the best way to store said waste during the week between farm visits without having it stink up the kitchen? Is there anything else we should be doing with this food waste, besides setting it aside in some safe way and then bringing it to the farm each week?

Many thanks.