Seeking Ferret

Magnifica Humanitas

I don't believe that the dignity of humanity comes from the grace of Jesus, but otherwise I thought this was really excellent. The prose was beautiful and strikingly clear and readable, and it was a really broad and thoughtful and subtle, albeit shallow, examination of many of the threats to society AI might pose and how to take a humanity-first principle without being utterly rejectionist toward technologies that could have the power to uplift.

Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell

Stunning retelling of the story of Hercules and the 12 Labors, where Hercules is too traumatized by the grief of killing his children to go around killing monsters, so instead he ends up making friends with them and building a monster menagerie to rival the gods. Amazing exploration of grief and theodicy and the relationship of mortals and gods with that perfect Wiswellian balance of mordant black humor.

A Perfect Hand by Ayelet Waldman

A really fun revisionist take on Austen, about a lady's maid and a gentleman's valet in Victorian England who scheme to get their master and mistress to marry so that they can marry and live together. Class consciousness and gender consciousness marry with the straightforward romance plot.

Walkman sprinkles in a parallel story about the maid discovering suffragette politics, a story that is thematically resonant and yet which was somewhat disharmoniously working against the joys of the Austenian romance, the clever banter and frantic planning of the romantic leads. This may have been Waldman's intention inasmuch as the book is 'literary' rather than 'genre ', but it didn't completely land for me as much as I enjoyed the book. I also was unconvinced by the final chapter twist about the narrator.

Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use by Charlotte Stevens

This was a very good but very dense read. I really liked the argument it was making about vidding as a domestic practice and all the different ways that enabled Stevens to look at television through the lens of vidding. The chapter on multifandom vidding offered a categorization that I may find useful in thinking about future multifandom vids I might make and why I am making them and what their arguments are.

Wizard's Hall
The Devil's Arithmetic
Owl Moon
Once Upon a Time, she said
a bunch of short fiction
Jane Yolen

I've gone back and read or reread a bunch of Yolen since she passed away in June. All of it is so good at the craft of storytelling. She was one of the great masters of stories where every piece harmoniously supports the greater whole. The language choices and the plot choices and the character choices are coordinated with such skill. Her scary stories throw everything into being scary, her funny stories throw everything into being funny, her sweet family stories capture the essence of being in a family.

Vidukon was this weekend. I missed a bunch of it between Shabbat and other social obligations, but I had a group of Boston vidders over this morning to watch some of the vidshows and talk vidding. It was great.

My premiere was made last summer and is now finally live! I was flipping back through vidding discord and I've been saying "I wish I had a Miranda Bailey vidsong" since at least 2022, and I think I've been saying it at least a few years longer. I finally zeroed in on Florence + the Machine, and eventually this song started to seem more logical than some other options. So happy to have finally made my Bailey vid!

dog days (0 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Relationships: Miranda Bailey/Ben Warren
Characters: Miranda Bailey (Grey's Anatomy)
Additional Tags: Fanvids
Summary:

Happiness hit her like a train on a track

I've been a Knicks fan for 35 years and this past two weeks has been the best I have ever seen the Knicks play. They are better by far than '94 and '99. They're also astoundingly more likeable than the '94 or '99 Knicks. It's so much nicer to cheer for Jalen Brunson than it was to cheer for Latrell Sprewell.

The Hart-Bridges-Brunson Nova Knicks thing is adorable, the sheer joy of them getting to hang out again with their college buddies is one of the fun dynamics of this team and certainly contributes to team chemistry.

And KAT, especially Point God KAT that we are seeing in the playoffs, is so much fun. The problem with KAT has always been that he's so talented that sometimes he loses interest and coasts, but he is so fun to watch when he tries his hardest and I have never seen him trying harder than he is trying right now. He fights for every rebound, he's blocking shots like he was Willie Cauley-Stein, and when he drives from the three point line it's like a freight train. And yet even better than any of that is when he stands at the middle of the arc and orchestrates the offense like an air traffic controller. And he's doing it with all of his goofy KAT energy intact. What a delightfully silly man.

I haven't even said anything about OG, who a surprising amount of the time is the best Knick in the floor, a defensive wizard who has discovered how to score at will.

And OG's injury aside, the greatest delight of this postseason is how well rested everyone is. It was so miserable last season watching Thibs grind his starters into powder. Were there triumphs, yes, but the human cost was too high. With help from Mitchell Robinson, Deuce McBride, Landry Shamet, Jordan Clarkson, and even a bit of Tyler Kolek and Jeremy Sochan, the starters are getting to take a break, and the result is obvious, what everyone was screaming about last year. If you're well rested, you don't get hurt as much and you can play with more energy and have more fun. DUH, Thibs And now the Knicks get a full week off before the Eastern Conference Finals while Detroit and Cleveland slug it out.

I'm very nervous nonetheless about Detroit, who has dominated us in the regular season even though they look like they're running out of gas now. But maybe we don't need to face them at all, if they can't get passed the Cavs. And right now the Knicks look like they can beat anybody, and I cannot remember ever having that feeling. It feels so good.

I know I said I wasn't going to blog Menachos but holy shit Chonyo/Onias IV!!

Who was the son of High Priest Shimon HaTzadik and got into a succession fight with his brother that led to him fleeing to Alexandria and establishing a rival Beis Hamikdash there roughly halfway through the Second Temple period. The Rabbis of the Mishnah on Menachos Daf 109, some 300 years later, seem flummoxed by this, they can't seem to figure out if this was avodah zarah or not.

But what really flummoxed me is apparently "Beis Chonyo" stood, per Wikipedia, until ~73 CE when the Romans destroyed it, just a couple years after destroying the Beis Hamikdash. And I am so fascinated by the counterfactual of Yochanan Ben Zakkai instead of establishing Rabbinic Judaism in Yavneh, attempting to shift the focus of the avodah to the Bama of Beis Chonyo. Apparently Vespasian was worried enough about this possibility to preemptively raze Beis Chonyo, why don't we talk about this?

Revenge Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger

The second movie comes out next month... The Devil Wears Prada 2: Maybe This One is Jewish?

I mean, scriptwriter Aline Brosh McKenna said in an interview a decade ago that she had wanted to make the first movie Jewish but in early 2000s Hollywood that was unthinkable. So maybe this time is different? lololol of course not.

Anyway in preparation, I checked out Weisberger's sequel, which is set 10 years after the first one and is even more subliminally Jewish because Andy has made herself even more subliminally Jewish. She has dumped her Jewish boyfriend Alex from the first book and marries Max, a WASP millionaire who went to Duke and Harvard Business school.

Andy is a culinary Jew and one of the quiet coded ways Weisberger suggests marrying Max is a mistake is with very subtle culinary signifiers. When she is hanging with Jewish BFF Lily they eat rugelach, when she is commiserating with her mother they talk about the Federation luncheon in the City. But her first date with Max is eating steamers. And when she is in Max's world there are shrimp and crabs galore. Weisberger never uses the word Jewish in Revenge Wears Prada, but at some deep inchoate level culinary Jews are still Jews. They feel the wrongness of the shrimp in their bones even as they eat them by the pound.

Max does step on a glass at their wedding, but it's buried in the middle of a paragraph that starts "The rest of the ceremony was a blur". It's a signifier that in marrying a non-Jew she is drifting further away from her authentic self.

They have a fight over an insistence that she change her last name from Sachs to Harrison upon marriage. She likes the idea of sharing a name with her husband, but Sachs *means* something to Andy in a way she cannot put words to. The final compromise is that she will change her name but continue to use Sachs professionally. Her body physically rebels against the idea of losing her Jewish name; her mind tells her she's being irrational but her body wins. Of course, Miranda waged the same battle decades earlier and rejected her Jewish name... the whole point of Revenge in the book's title is not quite Revenge, but it is a sort of repetition. Andy will once again get the opportunity to work for Miranda and she will have to decide if she is the same person she was a decade earlier, or if she has become a better, stronger, more moral person.

And in the end, her Jewishness wins. She divorces the WASP after he betrays her ambitions for his own (and she frames it in generational tribal terms: what Max has truly betrayed is Andy's ability to transmit her values to her daughter) and the final chapter is swathed in the signifiers of her return to the fold: all of the food of her grandmother's shiva, to start, as a hint that she is finally ready to return to Alex, her Jewish ex-boyfriend and true love.

Cathedrals of Science by Patrick Coffey

I picked it up because Wikipedia says Gilbert Lewis was nominated for a Nobel Prize 41 times and never won and I was like, there's gotta be a story there. I couldn't find a bio of Lewis, but I did find this, which is a group bio of Lewis and a cohort of physical chemists who revolutionized chemistry in the early 20th century. Lewis is joined in the main cast by Arrhenius and Nernst and Langmuir and Seaborg, all names I'd heard before but didn't really know.

Lewis had some Massachusetts blue blood, but he grew up in Nebraska before returning to attend Harvard and finishing his studies in Europe. And it seems clear that he was always a bit of a social oddball, even once he established himself as the king of chemistry at Berkeley.

The book has some serious parts when it covers the intersection of chemistry and the world wars, and Lewis's strange and tragic death, but mostly it's about how amazingly petty chemists are. I loved reading about how they kept stealing credit from each other for discoveries and doing backroom deals to keep each other from winning Nobel prizes.

To be clear, because I still don't understand how Nobel Prizes are awarded, it's not that Lewis was nominated in 41 years and never won. He received nominations from 41 people over a span of something like 25 years, for multiple discoveries and theoretical advancements in the field. He also devoted those 25 years, and the 20 before, to publically trashing the science of several of the people who decided who would win the prize, or had influence on the decides. Coffey digs up amazing documentary evidence of the coordinated campaign against Lewis, but also makes you think maybe you don't blame them for it.

Anyway, a long running theme in this journal is the way science doesn't move in a sphere of pure ideas but is instead a function of imperfect personalities in collision, and this was a brilliant illumination of that theme.

And if you just think Chemistry: The Soap Opera sounds fun, this is the book for you.

I did the other post on its own because I am kinda proud. I read all of the then extant Hugo winners when I was in college and had access to the NYU library for some of the more hard to source titles. I haven't entirely kept up since then, so when I was at Worldcon last summer I was inspired to read all the ones from the last decade I hadn't read. I don't think I was surprised by my response to any of the books I had missed: Nettle and Bone and Network Effect were fine but not entirely my thing, the Teixcalaan books were tremendous but required a lot of focus and attention. I've already written about Some Desperate Glory and The Tainted Cup in the last six months.

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

It's very satisfying, the moments that suggest that I am not merely a reader, but a competent reader. The moment when Eight Antidote sneaks into the Ministry of War, I said, "I have never seen a more Cyteen-coded moment in anything I have ever read," and I googled it and found "
Also, everyone knows that Eight Antidote is my version of Ari Emory II, right? :".

Fer-de-lance by Rex Stout

Re-read, the first in the Nero Wolfe series, inspired by my enjoyment of The Tainted Cup. The book's introduction notes, and I agree, that it's a fascinating start to the series because so many serial elements are already in place and presented as established conditions: Archie has been working for and living with Wolfe for seven years already, Wolfe's staff and many of the consultants he periodically hires are maybe not fully realized as characters but are already present. I'm pretty sure when I previously read Fer-de-lance, I assumed it was a middle book in the series rather than Book 1.

What does make this distinctively the first book is its early 1930s vibes. The Depression is still lingering for the poorer and more economically vulnerable, Prohibition is a recent memory (Wolfe is trying out all of the newly available beers, in a hilariously unnecessary subplot that I kept wondering whether it would dovetail, Sue Grafton-style, with the main mystery), and Archie talks like Sam Spade sometimes. Later Nero Wolfe books, as I recall, adapt to post-war culture in many ways.

The Archie/Wolfe dynamic is so much fun from the get-go. Archie is basically competent on his own, and Wolfe affords him a lot of autonomy, but Stout knows that when Archie freelances a little too much he'll always run into trouble that requires Wolfe to bail him out. It's the glue that makes these mysteries distinctive, that the plot will always be complicated by Archie's mistakes and misunderstandings as well as the cleverness of the antagonist. That, moreso than the gimmick of Wolfe solving the mysteries from the comfort of his townhouse, is why I love these stories.

I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston

I was reading and I thought, oh, cute, a queer take on John Green's Paper Towns, with a mysterious high school classmate of the main character disappearing and leaving a treasure hunt behind, and that was all well and good, I like that sort of Konigsbergian puzzle story, but it was not super-challenging as a read. Then I got to the resolution of the Paper Towns-style quest and... there was about a third of the book left. And I was like, what's going on? Is there going to be a Scouring of the Shire? And there was! And it involved a whole bunch of temporary queer found family ganging together to overthrow the social order of a small Southern town and it made the book way more interesting than I thought it would be.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

I'm thinking of going back and reading more in this series so I went back and reread this. I don't have much to say, I liked it just as much on a reread.

Dungeon Crawler Carl / Carl's Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman

I really kind of detested the first one, so I don't know why I went back for book two. I think it's because book one is basically competent at what it's doing, and they're quick reads, so I think I thought maybe it'd grow on me, but it did not. If you hated Ready Player One, you will hate this more. I didn't hate Ready Player One, but I just do not understand why Dinniman is doing the thing he's doing in the way he's doing it. His 'campaign setting' is alternately incoherent and morally upsetting, and the idea of a character cleverly LitRPGing his way through this nonsense world that commences with the murder of 99% of all human life makes me angry in a way I struggle to put in words.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

What can I say, I'm a sucker for magical pedagogy and I loved how this book represented the mundanities of guiding young people through a world full of supernatural dangers. The teacher perspective was incredibly sharp and convincing, and the unreliable narrator of it all was very effectively handled. An excellent book I flew through.

Festivids Went Live Yesterday!

I got a really lovely Are You There God? It's Me Margaret vid that I entirely commend to everyone to watch.

[fanvid] Slipping Through My Fingers (0 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Are You There God? It's Me Margaret (Movie 2023), Unspecified Fandom
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Barbara Simon & Margaret Simon, Margaret Simon & Sylvia Simon
Characters: Margaret Simon, Barbara Simon, Sylvia Simon
Additional Tags: Fanvids, Embedded Video, Subtitles Available, Song: Slipping Through My Fingers (ABBA), Growing Up, Puberty, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Grandmother-Granddaughter Relationship, Canon Jewish Character
Summary:

Do I really see what's in her mind? / Each time I think I'm close to knowing / She keeps on growing

Oy to the World

I did not have high expectations for this year's Hallmark Hannukah movie and this about lived up to my expectations.

When Jake, Rabbi's son, and Nikki, Reverend's daughter, were teenagers, they were inseparable best friends, until high school academics made them rivals and brought out a dysregulated competitive streak in both that ruptured the friendship.

As grownups, they both seem to live stunted lives. Nicki appears to have zero adult friends and works at her father's small church as children's choir director. Jake has spent 20 years playing tiny NYC rock clubs and chasing a label signing (in 2025!) and refusing to visit his henpecking mother.

When the temple has a fire the week before Hannukah, the church invites their Jewish neighbors to make use of the church space to celebrate Hanukkah. This soon bizarrely evolves into a joint Chrismukkah with combined sermon ("Both Hanukkah and Christmas are about love," natch) and combined choir concert, as Jake and Nikki are guilted and manipulated into co-choir directing by their pandering parents.

The Chrismukkah merger is eerily frictionless. The movie is not at all interested in interrogating the reasons why Hanukkah and Christmas are distinct observances or exploring how Jewish people and Christian people are different and approach the world differently. Religion is represented as a sort of universal fiber, with the different versions no different than a comic book with variant covers.

This lack of friction extends to the film's romantic chemistry. Jake Epstein and Brooke D'Orsay are charming actors and it's clear that their characters like each other, but because all their seeming differences resolve so simply, we don't see their relationship really deepen. Everyone in both families is on board with intermarriage, nobody discusses what religion future children will be raised in, everything is just easy. At worst, Nikki is briefly confronted at dinner eith the fact that if she marries Jake, her mother in law will be the worst version of a stereotypical Jewish mother in law, but this is quickly papered over. Even the inevitable, overforeshadowed moment where Jake has to miss the concert to go back to New York and meet with a label is resolved without any argument, and doesn't actually force Jake to compromise. Surprise! Turns out he can make it to the concert after all, without missing his meeting.

Hallmark really fooled us with Round and Round. The past two years have been a reversion to the nonsense we used to get in Hallmark Hanukkah movies. I will continue to watch them, of course, but I am back to watching them with gritted teeth.

I read this year's Hugo and Nebula winning novels.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell

I wasn't planning to read this until I saw Wiswell's presentation at Readercon, which went deeply behind the scenes and made this sound thoughtful and interesting.

I had a rant a while back about my growing frustration with the Minority as Monster metaphor, where in order to accept the premise of the story you have to accept that there is something monstrous about the minorities. I think maybe it was in my review of one of the Cadwell Turnbull books? In any case, this book is doing something subtler with this, but I kind of suspect that some readers are reading it in that Minority as Monster vein. The trick here is that Wiswell isn't asking you to empathize with that which is monstrous about Shesheshen. Shesheshen knows that eating people is wrong, and is ashamed that she eats people, but it has been a survival tactic in a world that persecutes her because of who she is. This lets Wiswell explore the monster metaphor in a much more satisfyingly moral way, with twists that flesh out the metaphor and profoundly ask the question of who in fact actually is a monster. But it's only profound and interesting if you don't read the ending as a happy ending, and I think that is a big ask because it does have such cozy vibes.

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

skygiants said in her review "genarti tells me Ana Dolabra is not a Holmesalike but a Nero Wolfe-alike" but I don't think that's quite right. It's true in the sense specifically that Ana stays inside and sends out her assistant Din to do the boots on the pavement investigating, and then Ana solves the mystery, and yes, that is the fundamental premise of the Nero Wolfe series. But Din is not an Archie-alike and the storytelling is not very Stoutlike at all, so I was thrown a bit in the first couple sections before I started to vibe with it.

Archie Goodwin's narration has very little explicit interiority. I mean, that's not fair, Archie is very open with you about when he is upset or amused or hungry, he wears surface level emotions on his sleeve. But Archie will never muse about the nature of justice, or bemoan the position of the detective in a city built on corruption. Not that he doesn't have opinions about those things, but you are left to infer them, Archie will never tell you. And Bennett hangs a lot of his story on Din doing precisely that, and asking what it means to be part of an Empire. Also Din is very bad at lying! Archie looks askance.

But I liked this very much, it is one of the fairest and most well-told fantasy mysteries I've ever read, the worldbuilding is compelling and suits a murder mystery extremely well. I have already checked out the sequel; I'll report back.