Domestic scene:

Sigrid stands in the hallway outside a closed door. She knocks gently, an expression of concern on her face. J answers. “Yes?” Sigrid peeks around the door. J is midway through Allison Bechdel’s new memoir, Are You My Mother? She’s got her finger marking her place and is looking up expectantly. Sigrid is frowning, clearly [...]

History, I have all the feelings

I recently read Elizabeth Bear’s Range of Ghosts. It’s a good book, and I enjoyed it. (I was dismayed to hit the end and realize it’s the first part of a series only because the other books aren’t published yet! I will be quite pleased when they are, and I can read them.) The novel [...]

Cue the clowns

1. It’s Spring Show week for us at Circus Juventas. I am off of work until Monday in order to help get this done. 2. My brother and his family are visiting! We’ll get to see them Thursday through Saturday, and I look forward to it. 3. Henry VI’s Regency Council was awfully shortsighted. I [...]

Red wine and British monarchs

Having my friend Nancy Clue over for English monarch drinking games is expensive. Not because she drinks that much, or because I do — in fact, she brought the wine! — but because I end up going to Amazon and ordering more freaking books. My to-be-read stack IS diminishing, I SWEAR it is. But it [...]

Georgiana

I am reading Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, by Amanda Foreman, and I came across this on my Tumblr feed: It’s so apropos. Georgiana is smart, personable, witty, social astute, emotionally damaged, pathologically insecure, and destructively needy. I adore her. Her relationship — her codependent, destructive, passive-aggressive, poorly communicated, incandescent rollercoaster relationship — with Bess reminds [...]

February!

I am still home from work. Blea. I have angered the snot gods, it seems. It’s February, so my month off from writing is done. Today will be a day of sorting through my existing projects. I need to find them all, where I’ve saved them or worked on them (hard drive, google docs, Dropbox, [...]

Wikihistory

One of the supervisors in my area has gotten into the habit of asking me for the History Fact of the Day. This came about because he would ask me, when I came back from breaks, “so what do you know?” Finally I asked him if he actually wanted an ANSWER to that, and he [...]

Thursday’s post needs a title

1. I finished Irrepressible yesterday. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s the biography of Jessica Mitford. Let me just say, it is decidedly odd to be reading a biography of a person who lived in history — you know, all those years before I was born — and then their bio starts [...]

War and skating

1. I finished the HBO series The Pacific last night. I’ve been watching this, and Ken Burns’ Civil War, and a doco about Gallipoli, and the tv series Rome, and a doco about the current conflict in Afghanistan. And here’s the thing. No matter what the tech level is, at some point one bunch of [...]

The Monday after

1. I got earwormed this morning with Sisters of Mercy’s “Lucretia My Reflection.” Here, let me share. 2. I’m listening to an audiobook of The Girls of Murder City, by Douglas Perry. It’s the story of the women who inspired the story/play/musical/movie “Chicago.” The woman who wrote the play, Maurine Watkins, was one of the [...]