see punk run

Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care, by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba:

An approachable, personal guide on how to organize against a hostile state. It starts with the idea that we must first imagine a better world and then do what we can to create it—while also respecting our limits to prevent burnout—and emphasizes the radical act of reciprocal care. A shrewd, but hopeful, book about what we can accomplish together and the practical means to do so.

I got this as part of Haymarket Books' 2024 Ten Free Ebooks for Getting Free bundle. I happened to be reading it on Labor Day when I learned about Haymarket Square from another source, recalled the publisher's name, and was like, "Ohhhh."

Contains: n-word; descriptions of torture, racism (environmental, institutional), COVID, cancer, violence (carceral, police, state, structural).

The title is a reference to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, one of two Christie mysteries I've actually read, and the one where everyone's on a remote island, unable to leave, getting killed off one by one. The math joke took me longer to figure out. I think I only got it after I'd finished.

But neither are required to read and enjoy this novella about a woman who is invited to a remote Canadian island to attend the first ever SarahCon, where hundreds of Sarah Pinskers from across the multiverse have gathered to meet, attend panels, and mark the achievement of the Sarah who invented cross-dimensional travel.

You can read it for free in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 15: And Then There Were (N-One).

Contains: references to addiction.

Five stars for Kevin R Free's performance—especially his voice for Naja (and the pirates)—but I don't know, I feel like half of this novella could have been an infographic. You know, like a theme park map? I'm thinking of Libertarian Disneyland again.*

I'm here for Murderbot and its humans and its murderous BFF and that one part where Murderbot's like: "Emotion check. Yes." I'm not here for an exhaustive level of detail about our transit options, and I'm sorry to say that the turn-by-turn directions are even less interesting the second time around. So three stars for the actual book. (Here's my review of the actual book.)

System Collapse, which I re-read right before this, suffers from the same problem, but at least all those tunnels do eventually become relevant, and the walking is (mostly) balanced by Murderbot's emotional journey. I felt more satisfied with it this time around, which I wasn't expecting after eyerolling my way through all those descriptions of tunnels for the third time.** At the end of Platform Decay, I mostly felt relieved it was over. And that was with sort of fuguing out every time Free described which passageway went where. Because just when you think you're done walking, there's more walking.

In an attempt to be fair to Wells, I was like, well, maybe it's just the way Murderbot interacts with the world. It's a SecUnit after all and this attention to navigational detail has been present throughout the series. But then I remembered the recent short story Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, and Murderbot's not even in that and we still have to hear about our transit options in exhausting detail. So it's not a character choice. It's just...a choice.

*Status update at 38%: "This section of the book is like if Murderbot brought Nana, its wife's wife, and their kid to Libertarian Disneyland, and there were people trying to kill them while they visited the gift shop and got snacks on their way out to the parking lot."

**Status update at 52.42%: "Weeping with how little I care about all these hatches and hangars."

In another life, parts of this near-future speculative novel set on an archipelago of manufactured islands (and old cruise ships) floating off the coast of California and populated with what we would recognize as so-called "free citizens" (dodging taxes and jail time, mostly) were once short stories, and despite Kritzer's pleasant and assured prose, I think the cracks show. It's also the kind of YA where the world's problems (and solutions) are unrealistically flattened. I had so many questions about the way this society functioned that I could barely concentrate on the story in the beginning. Sample question: If most goods need to be imported, at an enormous cost, then why are these children regularly drinking coffee?

But this is written at such a fast clip you won't have much time to wonder over the details. There's basically no downtime as thing after thing happens to Beck Garrison, a preternaturally self-possessed sixteen-year-old who grew up on the seastead and is extremely good at finding items people are looking to trade for. When the stead realizes her talents extend to missing people, well, check out the content notes. Things get real. And Beck rises to the occasion. Almost unbelievably so.

The number of inconsistencies, repetitions, and copy errors were a bit annoying, and suggest this wasn't given a thorough edit before publishing, but it's still an entertaining read, and Beck's competence levels are off the charts as she works to make her home a better place. It's a straight up power fantasy untroubled by petty details, but an alluring one. Especially now.

Contains: human trafficking, bonded labor (i.e. slavery), child custody violations, union busting, assassination, threats of terrorism, dead bodies, infectious disease, descriptions of compulsive behavior, bioweapons, anti-vaxxers, and shitty dads.

A graphic novel in fourteen pieces. Literally. It comes in a box. The story has no set beginning or end. You just pick up a piece and start reading. One is the same size and form as a Risk board, some are almost as big as a broadsheet newspaper, another's in the style of a Little Golden Book, others are as thin as a pamphlet or as wide and fat as a coupon book. I read them in order of decreasing size so it'd get easier—physically, at least—to read as I went.

It was an uncomfortable experience, for many reasons, but, going against type, I liked that the story could be shuffled around in any order, that I got to choose how to read it, though at times I had no choice but to read it with a magnifying glass because some of the text is unreadably tiny, and some—the building's cursive thoughts, for example—is just unreadable.

The story follows the inhabitants of three apartments. Here's the summary in what must be Ware's own words:

After years of sporadic work on other books and projects and following the almost complete loss of his virility, it's here: a new graphic novel by Chris Ware. Building Stories imagines the inhabitants of a three-story Chicago apartment building: a 30-something woman who has yet to find someone with whom to spend the rest of her life; a couple, possibly married, who wonder if they can bear each other's company another minute; and the building's landlady, an elderly woman who has lived alone for decades. Taking advantage of the absolute latest advances in wood pulp technology, Building Stories is a book with no deliberate beginning nor end, the scope, ambition, artistry and emotional prevarication beyond anything yet seen from this artist or in this medium, probably for good reason.

Ware's art ranges from simple and cartoony to lush and detailed, but mainly weaves between the two, with friendly shapes and primary colors. Some of the pieces have no text at all and are just a snapshot of a life. The stories are told with skill and empathy, but everyone is miserable and hates either themselves or everybody else or both, and any brief moment of happiness they experience is quickly extinguished by some new disappointment. It's fucking life, man, but I get enough of that already, so while I deeply respect the work that went into this project, I'm just not in the mood to be depressed right now, thanks.

Contains: nudity, sex, abortion, domestic violence and emotional abuse, suicide and suicidal ideation, death of a parent, cancer, homophobic slurs (even from the fucking bees, man), character who uses a prosthesis, and so: ableism, fat phobia and body shaming, r-slur, accidental sexual (?) contact with a minor (the adult was not seeking sexual contact, unclear what the minor had in mind), and two pet deaths, one of which messed me up real bad and the other I manged to skip.

An original m/m romance novel about a prince and a celebrity chef that's utterly charming and very kind, a modern fairy tale where the prince is democratically elected and publicly gay, and the celebrity chef promotes local, sustainable practices.

And because this is Sam Starbuck, aka copperbadge, you can read an early draft on AO3 (which is what I did, it's fine!) or download the final draft in PDF from Drive.

And if you like that (and I did!), there's plenty more Sam's written in this universe, though I've only read this first piece, twice now.

Contains: low heat (implied sex only), three kinds of cheese (lots of descriptions of food and eating and a celebrity chef made in the mold of Guy Fieri (affectionate)).

How else to rate a greatest hits album but that it contains all your favorite hits? Of course Ask Me, my favorite Stafford poem, is here. (The icon on this post takes its keywords from it: "hold the stillness exactly before us.") As is At the Bomb Testing Site, because I am a simple person, and I cannot resist the image of that lizard, its elbows tense, as it waits on the desert sands, and, yes, also the anti-war message.

Stafford's anti-war sentiments pop up frequently in his poetry, at times making him sound almost naive, but as a conscientious objector he spent four years in the Civilian Public Service during World War II, fighting forest fires, building and maintaining trails and roads, halting soil erosion, and still getting up early every morning so he could write. There is nothing naive about him.

Stafford's voice is consistent, steady, warm. Family, nature, the homestead, all of these things repeatedly show up in his work, and his poetry often feels haunted, by loss and injustice, but in such a delicate way that these things are often only hinted at in oblique melancholy—a son a lost kite, the father left holding the empty string in Father and Son—and many of these I finished reading and felt compelled to go right back to the beginning and read them again. I am curious about the poems that seem to be from a Native American perspective, and those that seem to belong to the pioneers; there's something to get into there, but mainly I'm drawn to his more transparent work, and the way he can lay the natural world on top of the human world and make a statement about both. Here's a poem about a mole:


Starting with Little Things

Love the earth like a mole,
fur-near. Nearsighted,
hold close the clods,
their fine-print headlines.
Pat them with soft hands—

But spades, but pink and loving: they
break rock, nudge giants aside,
affable plow.
Fields are to touch:
each day nuzzle your way.

Tomorrow the world.


Some others I enjoyed from this collection: These Mornings; Ceremony; The Fish Counter at Bonneville; Malheur before Dawn (ed: yes, that Malheur); Climbing Along the River; Any Morning.

( Status Updates from Goodreads )

The one with the racetracks, and the titular parade.

It took me way too long to get into this because I was too busy going Tran? Bautista?? Florin??? Brittany???? every time a supporting character popped up without an adequate reminder of who they were (like, here I am picturing Florin with the head of a crocodile and nothing the book said either proved or disproved it; imagine reading anything else like that, like, yeah, iirc, Hamlet is a hammerhead shark with robotic legs)(ilu Jamal) but once I stopped caring about that, I had a lot of fun. Just as propulsive as the other books. With a couple of those sneaky big feels that occasionally ambush Carl. And a clever resolution to the eleventh floor.

Contains some actual animal harm, like to actual animals. Plus the usual gore, violence, and conspicuous adherence to a gender binary, including, at one point, the phrase "female boots," like wtf, Dinniman, fucking slap that phrase into Google and put your eyeballs on some ladies footwear and fucking describe it. But even worse is that I think they were probably motorcycle boots and did not need to be gendered at all. Which could be said of a lot of things in this series.

Cal has come to think of Ardnakelty as his home and thinks he finally sees it for what it is—all the tangled connections between the people who have lived on the land for decades, whose families have worked it for centuries, and the ways those connections influence what justice looks like, how it's meted out, and by whom—but being accepted by the locals as more than a blow-in means Cal's finally seeing the real depths of the machinations, and who's behind them.

These books are deep and chewy because as Cal learns about the village and the people who live in it, the layers of Ardnakelty are slowly peeled away, one by one, and there's always some intensely troubling shit between those layers. This book, like the others, was super tense and I was constantly bracing myself for what was going to happen next. But unlike the others, it took me two weeks to read. For some reason I felt like it didn't have quite the same sense of urgency as the others. This is more of a slow motion disaster, but I was still worried about the characters. Lena, in particular.

I highly recommend the series, but you have to read the first two books before picking this one up. Out of all three, The Hunter, the second, is still my favorite—this one did not have enough Trey—but like for good, normal teenaged reasons. She's not part of the problem this time.

Contains: Discussions of suicide and depression, fear of animal harm.

LOVED the art. Fun, colorful, cartoony, and expressive. Brings to mind Matt Groening and John Allison.

LOVED that there's more trans and genderqueer characters than you can shake a stick at.

LOVED the framing device with the kids in the museum.

LIKED the first half of the book with the Spiritual Association of Peers, a secretive community/cult that lives in the lawless exurbs outside the New York City Administrative and Security Territory and refuses to talk to the researcher sent to research them.

LIKED our hapless trans man Lucius Pasternak, researcher, who's just trying to do his job.

NOT KEEN on the second half of the book with the visions and the monster(s) as a metaphor for, idk, self-loathing or capitalism or whatever. It's not a trope I have a natural affinity for and this didn't sell me on it. I want real monsters or I want self-loathing, but don't outsource the problem. The romance also felt whatever. There was chemistry between them, but little else.

UNSATISFIED by the ending, which seems to be resolved in passing by two randos, but also raises a lot of big questions that go unanswered and left me skeptical.

IN SHORT, the first half is kind of a mystery where you're getting to know the players and the setting, and the second half is a kind of gory fairy tale where it's about types of people and social movements, big picture stuff, and I felt like it didn't really match up with the first half.

BUT I'm always glad to read something from Lubchansky and this was a fun way to spend some time.

CONTAINS: some misgendering, including from the robotic health care system; nudity; sex; animal harm (scraggly and aggressive wild bear); violence; cartoon blood and guts; cartoon cops and their cartoon blood and guts.

Poetry of Chiyo-ni: The Life and Art of Japan's Most Celebrated Woman Haiku Master, edited and translated by Patricia Donegan & Yoshie Ishibashi:

An important book as it was the first—and perhaps still the only—of its kind in English, a translation dedicated to a female haiku master. The introductory material provides valuable context for the time in which Chiyo-ni lived, the forms she worked in, and the influence of Zen Buddhism on her art, but it can be repetitive, covering the same ground multiple times, and I wish the biography had stuck closer to things that could be verified and wasn't so gossipy. We know very little about Chiyo-ni's personal life, not even if she was married, and Donegan apparently felt the need to pad her bio with unnecessary—and often melodramatic—speculation.

Chiyo-ni's haiku has, you'll never guess it, a more feminine approach than those of the old male masters, and for this her poetry has been criticized—by men—as not being "as good." But here's yet another example of men needing to shut up and let women work. Chiyo-ni's poetry is different because it's hers, just as Issa's work is different from Bashō's. Chiyo-ni's haiku is often more personal than that of the old male masters, with more people, particularly women, present in them:

woman's desire
deeply rooted–
the wild violets

Bashō would never. Issa might, but he'd add fleas. (Not in a gross way, he just loved bugs!)

Chiyo-ni's haiku is perhaps also more deeply rooted in Zen Buddhism—she was a nun after all—and as a result I found many of them inaccessible to me, as they're mainly interested in expressing Zen principles and feel kind of canned as she repeatedly returns to the same images and phrases. "Cool clear water" is nice once or twice. It is not as nice the fortieth time. It didn't help that the editors were constantly in the footnotes explaining how this was a poem about impermanence or non-duality and praising the deepness of her understanding of such things. It started to make the poetry feel performative, like Chiyo-ni was trying to win some kind of contest, and it didn't offer much to this non-enlightened reader. Like they didn't even bother to explain what non-duality was. But I still found several pieces that were meaningful even without Being The Best At Zen, like this, one of her best-known poems:

a hundred gourds
from the heart
of one vine

And her most famous haiku:

morning glory–
the well-bucket entangled
I ask for water

And this, one of her best known Buddhist haiku, which is supposedly expressing the peace of detachment, but I just love how dismissively breezy it is:

anyway
leave it to the wind—
dry pampas grass

I, too, wish I could leave it all to the wind.

Recommended because it's important to keep Chiyo-ni's name out there, mentioned in the same breath as Bashō, Buson, and Issa, but there's also good poetry in here. Like this haiku, which I absolutely love because the structure suggests that the horsetails were there first and the ruins came later.

つくつくしここらに寺の跡もあり
tsukutsukushi / kokora ni tera no / ato mo ari

among a field
of horsetail weeds–
temple ruins

Or this classic:

falling down laughing
at others falling down—
snow viewing

The poems are presented one per page, with the transliteration first, which is a weird choice, then the English translation, and the Japanese (with furigana) in three staggered vertical columns, read right to left. (Personally, I think either the translation or the actual Japanese should have been offered first, as the transliteration is the least attractive on the page and not particularly meaningful if you don't know Japanese. If you do know Japanese, it's still of limited use.) Footnotes identify the kigo (seasonal word), and many include translation notes, further background, or another poem on a similar subject.

Now for the bad news: I read this in ebook because that was the only way my library had it, and it was not a pleasurable experience. It's listed as an epub in the catalogue, but it sure did act like a PDF. It was an image of the book rather than a text that would flow to fit your screen, and you could only zoom in, not increase the font wholesale. You couldn't highlight text (or search) with any accuracy, and you couldn't highlight at all if you were zoomed in. None of the many end notes were linked. I was pretty mad at this book, not going to lie, and it made my time with Chiyo-ni's poetry kind of frustrating. Definitely get it in print if you're able.

I picked this up knowing nothing about it except that it was science fiction, and I spent the entire book trying to figure out where it was going, but in a good way. It starts out with a raid, so I was thinking military SF, but then it quickly transitions into a mystery, and from there we go through some spy shit, a bit of romance, a Mission Impossible-style heist, a miner's strike, and, finally, cyberpunk. It's quite a ride. It's got unremarkable queerness (people are queer! it goes unremarked upon!), the protagonist is a woman of color of........complicated origins, and there's a fascinating relationship between her and an AI. Cohen, as he calls himself, is hundreds of years old, controls dozens of networks, and has expensive tastes.

In part, this book is about memory, what your memories make you, and who you are without them, and at times I felt like it was messing with my memory because it seemed to be skipping over important things in the investigation and in the spy shit. Like how did Li get her Beretta back? They took her knife, but left her with that gun and the ammo for it? No. It's also the kind of science fiction that comes with a ten page bibliography at the end in case you want to read up on quantum entanglement, but just tosses you into the world, dumps a bunch of new terminology on you, and lets you figure things out on your own. Which I mostly did, but it's a bit of an uphill trudge at the beginning.

This is the first in a trilogy, a fact I discovered when I was 82% through this one, and happily my library had the other two ebooks, as well, so I checked out the second book as soon as I was done with this one.

Contains: sexual assault, attempted rape—brief and not lingered upon; (sexual?) slavery—underpins a side relationship in the book.

An Australian epistolary YA novel of extreme tweeness where the format may almost forgive some of the hysteria, as much of the book takes the form of final exams written for a gothic literature course, but I found it childish, not only ridiculous in the way of teenagers, which felt true enough, but even the adults were being juvenile, and the way the privileged teen drama was played for comedy and took precedence over the actual problems of at risk youth irritated me. It does include some surprisingly stylish teen poetry, though.

Contains: references to child harm and sexual abuse; homelessness; underage drinking; suicide attempt; dementia.