After what seems like forever, I finished my first non-fiction book of the year! The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao by Ian Johnson was a lovely series of essays, using the Chinese lunar and agricultural calendar to break up the sections. It covered a wide range of religions and similar practices: Daoism, Buddhism, qigong, Christianity. It's a really lovely portrait of the struggle that a society has in trying to regain it ethical and social bearings after the Cultural Revolution.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend once. Her mother said she didn't think mainlander Chinese were "real" Chinese, because the Cultural Revolution had stamped out so many practices and beliefs, and "real Chinese would never have let that go." And it's interesting to read this book, some 9 years after that conversation, which I think shows that no, these practices and beliefs weren't let go. They're truncated, like a three-day funeral process becoming one when handled by urbanized children, and young people aren't as good at the craft as their elders were, but they are living things that change regardless.

I also really loved the language in the book--Johnson knows how to write a lovely sentence and there were several really nice paragraphs that I wanted to take quote.


Other things I've read recently:

NYT on the Kiini Bikini lawsuit, about how the fashion designer who has a rep for taking anyone copying her design to court herself filched the design from a woman while holidaying.

A visit to a GLITTER FACTORY, there are so many great moments in this.

A sensitive answer about how to gently talk to young people about their attitudes. I really liked the framing of puberty and the attitudes associated with it as a symptom of overwhelming feelings, and how the time period is about learning how to deal with it, and the challenge is to deal with it without being antagonizing towards the people one loves.

An important observation on the racial dot map.

Obituary of Zura Karuhimbi, who saved dozens of people during the Rwandan genocide using her reputation as a witch.

A librarian on media literacy, political memes, and the value of librarians.

A new term / meme in China that roughly translates to "poor ugly" and how people using it to express their, uh, millennial mood, I guess.

A look at the bonkers process of Facebook moderation.

Piece on how Vietnamese food in America is essentially trying to remain the same as it was in the 1970s. A symptom of diaspora nostalgia than it is about living culture.

Tiara had a really good take on the hot takes on Marie Kondo's new show.

The Atlantic on "Instagram Husbands".

yeah that is kind of how I spent the bulk of my day: playing Samurai Love Ballad Party a LOT. I also made a wee bit of progress on the Mean Girls story on Episode but.... I'm sort of... annoyed by it? Like I get people make a lot of dumb decisions as teens? But it feels, idk, unreal? There's a lot of manufactured drama which is deeply unpleasant to read through, and it makes me feel like an old curmudgeon.

After lunch I went out to try my new Go-tcha! I walked to campus, hatched an egg by the time I got there. Then I took out a Zagster bike and cycled around campus a couple of times putting my Gotcha to auto-spin, which worked out really well! I'm back to 1==+ Pokeballs from only 30. Tomorrow I'll do the same, but I'll also put it on auto-catch (I'd turned off the catch option because I wanted to focus on the Pokestops). There's a similar kind of lag between when I pass a stop or Pokemon and when I feel the Gotcha vibrating like there is for the Plus, but the auto function helps a lot so I don't get the extra lag of having to press the damn button. (This is apparently not an issue with iPhone Plus users, apparently.) I'll probably still use the Plus for walks, but the Gotcha might get me to add cycling to my exercise routine. My knees were really wobbly when I got home though, like, ow. I feel that this should not be the case. Might be the bike, might just be me. I... definitely could not make it up a certain hill that I walk up all the time.

I also started reading Courtney Milan's novella collection-- I'd read the first one already and it was really really good (recognized some of it from an article on the romance novel genre and its tenuous relationship with implied consent and how romance novellists are boldly trying to figure out ways of creating consensual situations; I forget where that article is though, will try to find to post later). I'm really enjoying the collection a lot! And enjoying novellas generally. I feel like I'm not being asked to invest a ton in the book which makes getting to the end and re-reading sections more pleasurable. And also because Courtney Milan is a really funny writer.

Roomie and I went out to dinner at a new Chinese restaurant which apparently has dim sum in the mornings! It's OK, overall. It's kinda far so probably not a thing we would go to often but I really want to try the dim sum sometime because the offerings look properly good. Also we don't have a decent dim sum place in Riverside. This place, on the other hand, looks like it has a Very Large Kitchen, which means they probably cook their own stuff?? I'm pretty excited tbh.

Aviya needs a hat for her steampunk outfit that she's wearing to LosCon so I got down my hat box to take pictures of what I've got to potentially let her wear.

This also means access to my MALTESERS BUCKET so, uh, I kinda went to town on it, again. I will put it back up though!!! I've been very good and not touched it in the three weeks since I left it up there!

Sigh. I wish I had more self-control.

So, I did go swimming this afternoon. I've promised myself I'll swim every day this week because of the HEAT WAVE WHICH IS SO UNREASONABLE. I tried using the swimcap, and I thought I had it on right (and I tied a ponytail too, to help it) but it popped off during a lap early on, so I was like, fuck it, and left my ponytail floating free. It was hella dry after, but I conditioned it, so it's better now. (Didn't shampoo. My first time doing this.)

I read two things today: a queer witch anthology and a short-ish novel. I'm also trying to make my way through Rainbow Islands. I'll try to finish it tomorrow on the train.

Tomorrow I'm going to LA Chinatown to escape the heat and put some food out for hungry ghosts. I might return next week for the actual single-day festival... I'll try and see if I can find someone who speaks English and can tell me whether they're doing anything. Then I'll take the Metro trains out to Culver City and go to the romance novel shop, which is apparently really close to the train stop!! Fingers crossed that I'll find it, and get back in time for a later train. (I usually take the first train out of Union Station, so this will be new.)

It's about an hour to and from Culver City each way so I'm kind of nervous about that. I've never tried taking the Metro so far before--I've definitely taken the bus pretty far. I feel a bit silly that I've never done this. But there's a first time for everything!

So I had two wisdom teeth removed yesterday, and they're supposedly healing just fine today. I went in for 4.30, the doctor had me do an X-Ray which seemed quite a fuss, then extracted the top one, but spent some time on the bottom one.

The teeth had been chomping on the inside of my cheek a lot lately, with really painful results. I'd gone to a different dentist on Monday for some cleaning, and was told about needing surgery. I'd also booked an appointment with the first dentist for August 5 and was told they'd call if something opened up, and lo, something did, the next day.

There's still some swelling, but the sutures are holding and I seem to be fine. We had a blackout yesterday too, and I think I'm running a slight fever from that.

I got really mad though, because my dad made Nyonya inchi kabin last night and I couldn't eat it >:{ I couldn't eat all night! And I won't be able to eat much for the next few days. I'm going to bug someone to take me out for ice cream.

That said, I did get to read IBAN JOURNEY (which is actually a sequel to a previous book called IBAN DREAM) by a local writer. It has proofreading issues, a lot of very awkward language. Quite a bit of repetitiveness and wording that doesn't have to be there, so the editor did a really poor job, and these are micro issues.

There's a great deal of detail, mostly going in so that you understand this is an IBAN STORY about IBAN PEOPLE and look at all these IBAN THINGS THAT IBAN FOLK DO. Structurally, it resembles more of an origin myth, and is probably better suited as an oral performance than a written novel. The long drawn-out details aren't really terrible; it's a plus or a minus depending on what you're expecting out of a novel that's supposed to take you into a world that's rarely written about in fantasy--at the same time, it doesn't have the feel of a genre novel, more of a literary feel, and even so, like I said, the awkward language really takes away from it. There're a lot of words which feel too clinical for the story ("banana inflouresence"? do we call it that in regular language? IDK), which really jar me out of the story.

The character motivations are very simplistic, and clearly we're dealing with archetypes--so, great as an origin myth, not so great as an actual story. There are just some things which I know are supposed to be based on myth, but make no sense even within the setting. For example, apparently the protagonist was supposed to Do An Important Thing and he wasted time not Doing The Thing, and gets scolded by a spirit-god for it. But... there're no clues that he was supposed to Do Said Thing (he gets the Thing he Was Supposed To Get by sheer luck). So it's unclear to me, as the reader, why I'm supposed to think that the protagonist was making stupid decisions, when he was making perfectly fine decisions with all the integrity he can muster at the time.

The denouement was also not very satisfying--a bit too reliant on ex machina, so to speak, which allows Our Hero to live the rest of his life without complication. It kind of bugs me that it's quite unsatisfying because halfway through the novel, it changes premise from "plucky cursed hero sets off to find his place in the world" to "group of variously cursed people decide to start a community together", which is the sort of thing I like to see! But there's something about the structure of the novel that makes it feel too pat.

I can see why this is being lauded as a "unique novel" because of the Iban angle, and it certainly is a clunky first try at introducing lesser-seen cultural elements into a genre that isn't used to it. However, there is a definite lack of craft overall.

So... this was my first ever book signing, as in, I had a table and all. Rubato came to get me around 11.45 and we got there around 1-ish, in pretty good time. I'd never been to Clockwork Couture before so this was a pretty great chance, and I hadn't hung out with Rubato in a while. I had copies of STEAMPUNK WORLD and MOTHERSHIP.

I sold 3 copies of SPW and 1 copy of Mothership. A grad school friend came out to see me even! Another grad school friend came to get me home. I felt loved.

I still have a bunch of books left... wondering if I should try to sell to school mates and then send the rest back to the publishers or what. Hrm, decisions decisions... I don't really know what the protocol is!

I wish I had taken up Bryan Worra's offer to get a folding table when I had the chance. He bought a really great little camping table that would have been perfect for the occasion (and other occasions since we ate at it). I haven't really been able to find it since. Anyway, things I was missing at the signing:
- table
- tablecloth (luckily Dru had one extra)
- something decorative
- credit card square (luckily rubato had a program on her phone for credit cards, otherwise I might not have sold anything at all!)
- pens (because man I am not very clever)

It was an interesting experience and I think it confirmed for me that when people think steampunk they're not really interested in reading material unless it's also in a visual medium. Especially short stories! I may have done better in a general bookstore, except of course this venue was a lot more cooler!

Maurisa and I talked writing on the way home, and continued over dinner.

Tomorrow I really want to go to JoAnn's to take advantage of the coupon I have, get some embroidery threads. Maybe more mint-green thread. And I'm gonna harvest my worm castings tomorrow! See how much they've produced anyway.

So. I just got an email from the prof I'm going to TA for. I'm staring at this syllabus and my eyes are straining at trying to focus from how white it is. ( I really need to not freak out, right? )

- yesterday I baked a cake using the brown rice / white rice / tapioca flour / cornstarch mix I made. It tastes like tapioca, mostly. Which I don't know how to feel about. I think I'd like it better as a cookie.

- i made a sewing machine cover as well

- then I read David Eddings' Elenium for the first time ever. It is chockful of the usual racism and strange gender stereotypes. His usual cast of characters - the thief, the strange child, the sorceress, the "practical everyman" - were present. I don't care much for Sparhawk like I did for Garion, which might be on account of his age, but he's as old as Althalus and I think Althalus is more amusing. The Styricans as being less metropolitan but more civilized, in their own view, was really interesting, but it doesn't go very far since we only have one or two Styric characters. Of course there were some Laugh Out Loud lines and some philosophical passages. Also glad that his oeuvre includes marriages between immortal women and mortal men, partners of similar ages, because the Much Older Man + Aggressive Younger Woman thing kind of tweaks my nose a bit. They're easy books to read because of all that tho, very plot-driven. Definitely not the kind of stories I've been picking out for the SEAsteampunk antho at least XD

Is there a name for the trope where the main character has to have sex in order to save the world? Aside from all the fairytale endiings where Heterosexual Love's Kiss or some declaration of Heterosexual Love, Jay Lake's MAINSPRING ends in a Realization of Heterosexual Love and KW Jeter's INFERNAL DEVICES ends in, essentially, sex-to-save-the-world. I'm going to call them Acts of Aggressive Heterosexuality, but there must be a TVTrope about this already.

(Also Lake's GREEN ends in an Act of Aggressive Heterosexuality even though it's technically a homosexual act, because it's a lesbian-for-the-sake-of-the-Male-Gaze act therefore it is essentially an Act of Aggressive Sexuality.)

I mean really now.

I've also read NEWS FROM NOWHERE and LOOKING BACKWARD, both 19th century utopia novels. NEWS FROM NOWHERE has that silly "it was a dream!" trope and is awfully libertarian ("abolish government!") and was supposed to be a response to LOOKING BACKWARD which is, well, The Government Is A Corporation which is about centralized socialism growing out of capitalism but man, is that hella optimistic (and it also has an exceedingly silly romance subplot). Marge Piercey's WOMAN OUT OF TIME's utopia also has that odd libertarian feel and the idea that each village has its own culture which is adapted from specific regional culture is kind of... iffy to me. (Although I did laugh at the future sense of history in which Harriet Tubman delivers "Ain't I A Woman" before, uh, laying seige to the Potomac?) I also liked "per(son)" as a gender-neutral pronoun, but there still didn't seem to be a lot of queerness going on. Although it's better than Joanna Russ' THE FEMALE MAN which is hella binarist, I mean, father-mother two-parent family units in a future where there's pretty much just one gender?

I also got around to reading FLATLAND. It was cute, but kind of flat.

20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA was not, as I had hoped, about fighting kraken 20,000 leagues in the sea's depth, but more a 20,000 league tour of the world's oceans and a very long catalog of the fauna, geography, shipwrecks and one Canadian's kvetching about being trapped in a submarine. There are exactly three obvious anti-colonial sentiments expressed by Nemo in the whole of the book; the rest is pretty much him being a misanthrope and quitting civilization just because he can.

I'm going to read as much of SO LONG BEEN DREAMING now.

For quals, that is, and more to remind myself that I got quite a bit accomplished in a short amount of time and I should be able to do just as much in the next couple of weeks.

NON-FICTION

Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World.
Started off slow and I thought it was gonna be more of what he wrote in Imagined Communities, but really much more engaging and as Dr. G said, more interesting. Covers a lot of regions: Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia. Some interesting observation on historical trajectories of radicalism and independence.

Elleke Boehmer. Stories of women: gender and narrative in the postcolonial nation.
Mostly about how postcolonial writers write about women as stand-in metaphors for the nation and national identity. I'm not crazy about it because there was a lot of close reading of things I never read before.

Ketu Katrak. Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World.
More stuff I never read before, more gender stuff, lots of things that we already talk about as women writers ourselves, idk.

Gayatri Gopinath. Impossible Dreams: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures.
Was afraid this would be more of the same, but not really. Diasporas trouble the concept of national identity; queerness does the same on the gendered national body. If the nation is gendered according to patriarchal norms, then queerness creates a destabilizing frame with which to approach and trouble national identity. Kinda cool, eh?

Khoo Gaik Cheng. Reclaiming Adat: Contemporary Malaysian Film and Literature.
So, adat, a thing I don't really understand but anyway, Khoo argues that modern media allows for the recuperation of adat. Lots of focus on Tuah/Jebat binary, critique of ketuanan Melayu, and Malay cinema as Cinema of Denial with tensions between adat, Westernization and Arabization. Put this way, the feeling I get from local writers querying me about whether mythological creatures in their SEAsteampunk submissions makes sense; I'd been worrying about getting more "magical East vs. technological West" stories as if magic stuff is really all Asian writers have to offer to the SFF ouvre, but set in a context of reclaiming adat it kind of makes more sense. Still, would like to see a good mix of hard science steampunk alongside fantastic myth steampunk.

Achille Mbembe. On the Postcolony.
I did not so much read this as skim it; lots of big statements, sweeping theory, very grand, very Africa-specific, many big words I could not handle at this point in time.

Martin Barker. The New Racism: conservatives and the ideology of the tribe.
Less a theory about race than an examination of the rhetorics surrounding the many justifications of racism and xenophobia (this was written in 81). Really goes in deep talking about Hume and sociobiological stuff.

Amin Sweeny. A Full Hearing: Orality and literacy in the Malay world.
A look at how oral culture remains steeped even in the print culture of Malay storytelling. Not sure I buy the argument but it's pretty interesting!! I thought I could buy it especially when thinking about Twitterjaya but hrm, I just don't know.

Sulastrin Sutrisno. Hikayat Hang Tuah: Analisis Struktur & Fungsi.
The prof loaned me this book just to see how I'd react to it, and it was strange. Apparently it was a really big deal when it first came out! Because it was the first time anyone had ever thought to analyze Hang Tuah using structuralism. And I don't like structuralism. It's got diagrams and shit. Also a handy summary of the whole hikayat. Which was kind of strange. Lots of things I don't recognize from the usual Hang Tuah stories. Also a genre discussion because genre discussions never die.

FICTION:

Keris Mas. Jungle of Hope. English translation of Rimba Harapan by Adibah Amin.
I really liked it! It was slow, as most of these things are, but I really liked the ensemble cast. I've never been bothered by shallow head-hopping, especially when it's done to show how complex people are. It ends at the point of tension, but it's a long-term sort of novel which also hits my buttons.

Somerset Maugham. "The Force of Circumstance"
Racist white woman can't handle that her racist white husband had a Malay live-in mistress and three kids before she came along. It's too bad because they are so very in love. She might not even be racist but for constantly calling the Malay woman "black" and it was kind of jarring to see the N-word being used.

---. "Footprints in the Jungle."
Murder mystery! Telegraphed whodunit from page three!

---. "The Yellow Streak."
Yellow streak referring to the Malay blood in the main character who has some crazy white anxieties about being tainted by his mother's blood.

---. "The Outstation."
The classist snob versus the racist bully. Classist snob has principles informed by noblesse oblige adopted from his aristo friends; racist bully has a chip on his shoulder because he's a white dude born "in the colonies" so not as good as a ranking officer or whatever. The latter gets killed. He had it coming.

Fatima Busu. Salam Maria.
Posted about it earlier. I'm not crazy about it, but then I am not crazy about cardboard characters and special snowflake figures.

Books I bought the other day on the B&N run with HH:

- Gail Carriger’s Blameless (because I lost my copy, re-reading to write fic with Chinese characters and my world did not feel right with a missing book in the series)
- Gail Carriger’s Etiquette and Espionage, book 1 of the Finishing School series (I’m not as taken with this series as I am with the Parasol Protectorate… I guess because I feel putting children in an environment where lying and two-facedness is just terrible, but I must make do until the Parasol Protectorate Abroad series comes out)
- Cherie Priest’s Fiddlehead (last book of the Clockwork Century series?! Sadface!)
- Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox (never read her before, might as well read some of her now)
- Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (because I ought to read some postcolonial literature sometime)
- Essential Arabic (gotta work on some vocabulary and not let that uni year go to waste)
- That comic book with shorts from ATLA. (I read Part 3 of The Search. Blech what they did with Ursa but at least they gave her a happy ending, and she apologized for abandoning Azula and Zuko. I guess.)

The Parasol Protectorate is always a pleasure to read, although I find I have less and less patience for Alexia Maccon and her interminable need to open her damn mouth every chance she gets instead of just listening and being smart about her questions. Same goes for Conall. But Ivy! And Lyall! And Biffy! I tried fancasting for them the other week, came up with:
Ivy: Amanda Seyfried
Lyall: David Tennant
Alessandro Tarabotti: Christopher Eccleston
Akeldama: Tom Hiddleston (Tom Cruise is no longer as effete as in his IWTV days sadly)
Channing Channing of the Chesterfield Channings: Fassbender
Biffy: Either Blair Dunlop or Ben Barnes
Countess Nadasdy: Julie Walters
Floote: Jean Reno

E&E is... already showing signs of disturbing the canon set in the PP books and that always makes me cranky. I guess I have very little patience for settings which are all cutesy on the surface ~dark brooding danger underneath~ but that might also be the YA standard which I can't deal with.

I considered buying more JR Ward Black Dagger Brotherhood books and then realized how much I didn't care given that I've already given away all my BDB when I left HALIFAX.

Cleaned my office today and then went to see Frozen followed by dinner at a Japanese resto with KK. It was a pretty decent movie. I kind of... don't like Elsa's SUDDEN REVELATION at the end about how to SUDDENLY control her powers? Like, really? It felt very ham-handed. Olaf was not as terrible as I feared and Kristoff could have been drawn Saami and that Hans thing, well, I could have done without it. Meh. Whatever. It was fun for a lark.