Yuletide recs (part ii)

( Elementary: 3 )

( Fire and Hemlock: 1 )

( Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence: 2 )

( DWJ's Howl series: 3 )

( The Middleman: 2 )

( Discworld: 3 )

todo/tada

( todo )

( tada )

Poetry, in passing

I have more-or-less finished reading the entirety of Michael Donaghy's work: three slim volumes. I first came across him (as so many others) in Staying Alive, with Machines. This morning I lost my heart to two more pieces; Poem On The Underground, which contains the glorious lines

But Harry Beck's map was a circuit diagram
of coloured wires soldered at the stations.
It showed us all we needed then to know,
and knew already, that the city's
an angular appliance of intentions, not
the blood and guts of everything that happens.
Commuters found it 'easier to read'.

Here is the other, in its entirety:

Midriver

- and is a bridge: Now to either then:
child to lolly: spark across the wire:
lover to the target of desire:
Lambeth to Westminster: back again.
Verb's a vector not a monument,
but someone skipped a stone across this river
fixing its trajectory forever
in seven arches after the event
- so stops halfway and, neither there nor there,
but cold and rained on and intransitive,
watches London switch from when to where,
why to silence in the traffic jam,
thinks I can see the borough where I live
but here is temporarily who I am.

Mosaics within mosaics within mosaics (repurposed fragments)

Happy housiversary: my housemate and I have been living together for a year as of today in our ridiculous flat with our ridiculous lives, and she just took the time to spend five minutes curled up on me on my sofa catching up before running out the door again. It is pretty great.


I just sent myself an e-mail containing the following:

JUST FOR FUN
Marie on Mars: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X14007262

Lunar dynamo paper: www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6214/1246753.abstract

Carbon-bearing iron phases and the carbon isotope composition of the deep earth: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/12/11/1401782112.short

LIPs and supercontinent assembly: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026437071400163X

Lower-mantle water reservoir: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v8/n1/full/ngeo2306.html

Lunar cryptomaria: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032063314003912

I am having feelings about access to speech.


I wrote two things for Yuletide this year: At the going down of the sun, in the Vorkosiverse, an oral biography/history of Olivia Vorbarra Vorkosigan's life and how she got involved with Piotr anyway; and a treat in the Mechsverse, specifically about the Sirens in Ulysses Dies At Dawn: You'll Reign Supreme. Two things to note: (1) I now want to write Ulysses-fic about the Furies; (2) to my utter bafflement, the Vorkosigan fic has immediately become the most liked thing I've ever written??? Which I suppose is a little reassuring given that I wasn't convinced I'd done a terribly good job of it.


I have discovered that I can reliably do French and Dutch braids tolerably neatly on myself. This is excellent because it means that my hair is less of a disaster when I go a week without brushing it, which makes Dealing With It less intimidating; it's also excellent for reasons including "it does a better job of keeping my hair off my face" and "people's reactions are really funny".


I am poking at my brain quite hard and will post about it soon.