time after time

May 262023
This pair of books about time travel, spotted while checking out how a couple of Barnes & Noble bookstores in Louisiana handled banned books, tells me that I should only read sci fi written by women. The Yu book (spine label F Yu) creates some lovely techno language that combines made-up time travel scientific terms with English major story and narrative exegesis all of which is ultimately about emotion. I guess if you want Steven Spielberg to make a movie of your book, it has to be about a boy's search for his father, but I find that trite plot line predictable and irrelevant to my experience.
The Time War book was just delicious, an epistolary novel about a relationship between two women--one is more of a robot construct with some organic components--who move up and down the stream of history and jump between alternate threads of the braid that constitute the universe across all time. It's amazingly sexy for a book where the lovers never actually meet, but leave letters for each other in strange ways. Red is from the Agency, a "post-singularity technopia", and Blue belongs to "Garden, a single vast consciousness embedded in all organic matter." Yes, this all works.

pride in unity

May 202023

I posted this kind of cryptic comment on FaceBook this week:
My WORLDle word of the day is ethnogenesis. It happened in Suriname when the slaves escaped the plantations and bonded with the native tribes of the rain forest. I think a political ethnogenesis may have happened at a Unity select board meeting last night. Welcome to the rain forest.
It summed up what I see as an important new solidarity among progressive voters in town. People like me who came up in an old world where not drawing attention to your gay identify was instictive and survival-related were a bit wary of having a pride month. So younger people in town have organized some pride activities, including a parade, barbeque, cross walk painting and flags. They requested about $1100 in economic development funds, and that was approved by the EDC and the selectmen. The meeting shown here was where the selectmen actually voted to approve the funds. The pride planning team led by Colleen Maguire got to the meeting early and filled the seats. It was a room full of friends. Most of the objectors had to stand in the hall. Colleen had arranged for a deputy to be present. No discussion was allowed and it went quickly The bonding I'm referring to here is between the more cautious old liberal guard and the newer more out and out-spoken gay people in town. It will be a productive coalition going forward. I have learned not to engage with the negatroids online in local FB groups, but conversations with real people are almost always a good idea.

Now at the end of this day comes news that Unity College may use its huge empty campus to house asylum seekers. And you think their head were exploding before...

time travel with jazz

May 9 2023


This trip we actually carried through on the threat to tour our home town of Port Allen. I can sum it up this way: everything that was small and seedy and unpaved is now a glorified well-funded public space. The library is a huge, beautiful airy space with 90K items, and all the digital stuff. The old court house is now a spacious museum, wonderfully curated, with art and giant artifacts from sugar making. The seats in the video room cleverly made to look like a shack are from the Magic Theater where we watched westerns on Saturday afternoons. The old ferry landing which was our only way to get across the river to Baton Rouge is now a park and the levee is paved on top and good for bike riding.

Saw a lot of great acts at JazzFest including Blato Zlato, Mavis Staples, Allison Russell, Helen Gillet, and a great interacial gospel choir called Shades of Praise. The cameras on our new phones (Pixel 7 Pro for me, Pixel 7 for Melissa) did not disappoint. The 30x digital zoom on mine got me some good shots.