Weekend rundown

We need the rain, but I can't bring myself to lament gorgeous clear autumn skies too sincerely. It's been ridiculously beautiful all weekend, and for once there have been things to do. Metro did its best to make sure that nobody made it to anything on time, but lo, we would not be thwarted.

• The LOC book festival was reedonkulously crowded, which is how it should be. I skidded in just in time to hear Michael Dirda's intro to Terry Pratchett (summary: You know who he is, I think he's as good as Chaucer, without further ado etc.), who was his usual engaging self. The news that Christopher Lee will be voicing Death in the next movie sent me scrambling for my phone to call Weebat as soon as the speech was done. Also the story about how the ALA's Carnegie medal is just the same size and shape as a chocolate coin, and fun to be had with that information, was a classic.
• Magical Montgomery, conveniently close to home, was full of dancers, volunteer coordinators, and local artists, some quite good. I picked up a triptych of photos from one booth, each showing a different path through woods or boulders. The Joy of Motion tribal-fusion belly dancers were very impressive, smiling faintly while they demonstrated first-rate (from my uneducated perspective) torso work and hand precision, and it was hard not to be charmed by the tiny and distinctly non-Celtic moppets performing soft-shoe Irish dance with a ceilidh band.
• Watching a dress rehearsal of La Mère's tai chi group at the Lisner, I boggled again at the coaches' daughters, who are hyperflexible and strong and look far too sweet to be the kind of martial artists they clearly are.
  
• Crafty Bastards was worth the trip, but a leetle too insanely packed with the city's entire hipster population (I ran into Rockninja and the Object, who agreed that it looked like some of Brooklyn's population might've been bused in). I give some negative marks for overuse of felt and Bob Ross as self-consciously ironic jokes, but there were still things worth checking out.
• Fiesta DC 2007, up in Mount Pleasant, featured a lot of great demos by local dance groups, including a Bolivian troupe who soldiered along despite wearing clothing not at all suited to the 80-degree weather. It takes guts to pay tribute to Pachamama when you're in a swampy Indian summer day and wearing three layers of nylon and corduroy. I especially liked Batala, a DC-based all-female samba drum band, and the various groups wearing huge frame-and-feather sequined costumes.
  

The only problem with a weekend like that is that it's hard to get motivated to do actual exercise. I felt triple guilt: One friend rode a century race on Sunday (clearly not the act of a mentally balanced individual, but there it is), the DC triathlon meant that the streets near the book festival were fill of tasty sinewed folks in spandex (reason enough to make that a regular event), and my masseuse on Friday pointed out that my lack of flexibility is putting further strain on my back and hips. Damn, there really aren't any good excuses for dodging exercise, are there?

We only look sweet

I dunno what the context of this picture is, but it makes me twenty kinds of happy.

H/T Making Light's Particles.

Hacking the cerebral cortex

Part the nth of playing games with your fellow beings: Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day. Rose Tyler had this one nailed: "To get that many people dressed up and being silly, they gotta be students." If the respeckable adults among us did it, though, how much stranger and more fun would that be?

Favorite suggestion: "The classic version of this is to get some kind of smoke bomb or smoke machine, as well as an anachronistic costume. Wait for someone to walk past an alley, then set off the smoke and stagger out, looking dumbfounded. If they don't run away, grab their shoulder and ask what year it is. If they respond, shout 'The experiment was a success after all!' and run away. It works even better if you can get some friends wearing suits and dark glasses to go to the person immediately afterwards and ask if they've seen someone matching your description."

Give an author a fish

There's a charming interview with Neil Gaiman over at the Guardian. Gaiman's blog has probably been one of the underlying factors in his recent surge of popularity; once you know about Kitty and Olga and how icicles grow by the wallport, you're sort of invested in actually reading the book that kept getting interrupted by a suicidally bad-ass feline and Cabal and demonic produce.

One thing I think that the stories about his blog have overlooked is his role in sales of other people's books. Bloomsbury, for one, owes Gaiman a debt for the early success of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Not long after the book came out, Susannah Clarke came to the DC area as part of her book tour. First-time author, dauntingly odd and very large book that defies easy description, few to no reviews out in the press...and the place was full. A quick survey in the autograph line after her reading established that at least 70% of the people were there for the same reason: "Oh, Neil mentioned the book was good, so I figured I would see what it was like." The book stood on its own merits (and HOW), but by giving it some favorable mention, Neil reached a large group willing to take a flyer on it; the early adapters, basically. Hey, he's using his powers for good.

And sushi.

Adventures in Cappi-sitting

Things wot I am learning in dressage:

• How to handle a fast sitting trot.
• How to use my legs more effectively to control turns and straightness.
• That I'm rubbish at getting a leg-yield to the right at the walk.
• That Cappi will do almost anything I ask, including the infamous right-side leg-yield, at the trot. "Almost"—he is very reluctant to stop once he gets the chance to be speedy.
• That bareback Western work is helping my dressage seat. Cappi's back is so wiggly that I feel like a hula dancer half the time, but thanks to Doc I can keep my hips in contact with the saddle without getting seasick.
  
• How to identify Rock Creek fauna from fleeting glimpses during Cappi's apparently mandatory panic-induced skitters. (Last night it was a fox and a 20-meter leaping bolt.)
  
• That it is high time to go back to the massage place for a lil hurts-so-good tuneup. The bastard leg yield uses exactly the set of muscles involved in all the SI aggro, then we did some balance work involving resting mostly on one leg, and what with one thing and another my left hip is filing some serious whinge with the central office. I am going to hit the anti-inflammatories but good before tonight's bareback Western class.
  

Follow-up on yesterday's snarling

Another subscription is the last thing Casa 3pennyjane needs right now. Popular Horseman is expiring, but I'll probably replace it with Western Horseman or Horse and Rider; The New Yorker has been a must-read ever since Tina Brown took her incoherent mess on the road; and while Wired is inconsistent, the outlier articles on the upper end are too good to miss. Outside is the only one that won't make it through without a genre-sibling replacement. And now I'm starting to think that I may need to start getting The Atlantic, which has, over the years, run some of my favorite articles.

This one, about gay life in Saudi Arabia, is timely in light of Ahmedinejad's comments yesterday, since it discusses how regulating social contact between the sexes can encourage homosexual activity even in countries that legislate heavily against same-sex behavior. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence described a certain acceptance of gay sex between the Arabs with whom he traveled, so this isn't a new phenomenon, but the "look the other way" attitude taken by all parties seems to have kept it from drawing much media attention. Read for yourself; fascinating stuff.

Synchronicity

In our adolescence, in the brief five minutes between our death-or-glory sibling battles for Lebensraum, Seesterperson and I agreed on the genius of Margaret Cho. To this day, we quote her quoting her mother on heteronormativity Back Home versus in the Castro: "So many gay! Every country have the gay." Long pause. "But not in Korea!"

Or in Iran either. Hm, so the Axis of Evil (or at least their near neighbors) has achieved the stated goal of the GOP's xenophobic bottom-feeding base? For anyone in the reality-based community, that's 100% unsurprising. But hearing that news on the same day that a straight-faced "senior administration official" (gotta be Cheney, yeah? what with the rest scuttling for the hawsers) accuses Obama of insufficient intellectual rigor to be Prez, and I start to wonder who the hell is taking the piss here. (To all of you who reflexively said, "Larry Craig," shame on you; clearly "David Vitter" is the correct answer.)

But I didn't have to overload the weary indignation circuits, because Doc time is an automatic mood recharger, excellent for the mental health. At this time of year, every drive over to the barn is a race with sunset, and after this week I think the dark will win. We got out for a little trail time under a glowing gibbous moon, then came back in the hazy deer-infested twilight for ring work. According to barn scuttlebutt, a masseuse came in to work with some of the ponies this weekend, and Doc enjoyed some extra attention in his hamstrings. That might account for the fact that he was way, WAY up once we started working on trot and canter stuff in the ring. No bucking or other egregious misbehavior, but he was emphatic enough about fast go fast that I wished I had put a saddle on him after all. To quote the cartoon character, "C'mon, horsie, whoaaaa!" The webbing loop on the front of a bareback pad is pathetically insufficient for fine work. I forgive him for oh me achin' hip, but next time will definitely involve stirrups, because there are only so many times a body wants to go sliding sideways at speed. I think I will go lie down.

No more Thomas Hardy!

Pride getteth in the way of taking the easy joke about the Beatles and my relief at finishing Jude the Obscure, so insert your own comments and take them as read. The plot, once it finally rambled into view, involved more angst: Jude and Sue wander around failing to get married, Jude's Pearl-esque spaceboy son from his previous marriage shows up and haunts them with his aged mien, hassles ensue regarding their growing family, freaky son kills himself and the other children "because we are too menny," Sue gets religion and goes back to the husband whose touch makes her flesh for to creep and makes a huge deal about how now she's a submitted wife and will actually have sex with him, Jude reunites with his scheming boozy wife Arabella, he never recovers his strength and dies while she's out gallivanting with the lecherous doctor, and the readers live happily ever after, amen, knowing that Hardy never wrote another novel.

I did, as promised, cleanse my brain with Making Money and a 1960 SF collection of short stories that I bought from a street vendor in New York on the strength of the cover art and the inclusion of Cordwainer Smith's brilliant "The Game of Rat and Dragon." I wasn't overly impressed by the Isaac Asimov "Ideas Die Hard," but I liked "Dead Ringer" for its pacing and "Volpla" just because. Someday I will find the poem that begins, "The owl and the pussycat went into space/ In a modified Jupiter C..."; it must be collected somewhere.

In other news, oh, what to wear to Oktoberfest? Die Ausgebürgerte offers a tip to da laydies. When I see "Die Dirndl-Trends 2007," I expect to see some Nordic futurewearz, but it turns out that the savvy Dirndl-trundler will not be plumping for PVC and chrome and quilted space fabrics this year. This year it's all about slumping around the walls of the pub and looking hopeful (or drunk). Next year? Who knows! Die clubben might be in.

Further thoughts on Jude

Cripes, y'all, when is some plot gonna happen? Two hundred pages down the line (paperback edition, about 400 pages total, if you want to know), and I'm being murdered by inches. Also, what with Sue showing up ever 10 pages to tease Jude, all, "Oh we mustn't. But it would be hot if we did. Did I mention that I hate all the sex I have with your former mentor?" I'm putting her in the same category as Lily Bart: "nominal heroines I would happily reach through the page to dope-slap." Jude is in the male category, just above Newland Archer and slightly below Spineless Marner. You can't really blame the characters, exactly, but there is something ooky about the idea of digging up Hardy and Wharton's moldy bits for a postmortem smackdown.

Oh, but if someone manages to develop a good way to vent on choir-invisible authors, please give me a shot at Tolstoy as well, because I carry a grudge about Anna Karenina. Yes, yes, you-as-Levin think that the serfs haven't thought through their economic system correctly despite their simple gay natural outdoorsy lives, that's 150 pages of my life I will never get back, and by the way, where do you get off, killing Vronsky's mare?

Thoughts on starting a Thomas Hardy novel

Oh, this isn't going to end well for Mr. Obscure, is it.

I've made several tries at Hardy novels in the past and have never been able to get past the stifling English-classroom wordiness of them (this from a woman who adores Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, mind). Plus there's the whole dumb-dark-belly-tension thing about gender relations, and the leitmotif about tender hopes being crushed under the hobnailed boots of tradition, and the general impression that the lusty peasantry are thisclose to ritual cannibalism, and to sum up I am a literary masochist for even considering trying this again. Six chapters in, it is clear that a cleansing reread of Cold Comfort Farm will be in order if I ever finish reading this book rather than hurling it across the room and shrieking, "Life is too frakkin' SHORT!"

(Hee. "Eeeeeeeemoooooo.")