ada_hoffmann

I can't remember if it ever occurred to me before last night's re-read of Jane Yolen's Neptune Rising: Songs and Tales of the Undersea Folk (1982) that her Greyling (1968) resembles Gordon Bok's "Peter Kagan and the Wind" (1971) in that both are stories of selkies who return to their seal-selves not despite the bonds of human love but because of them—a father in one case, a husband in the other, both fishermen in peril on the sea. Bok and Yolen knew one another; she partly dedicated the collection to him. It's slightly nuts to me that he never set either of her sea-songs published in it, since it takes so little imagination to hear "The Ballad of the White Seal Maid" or "The Selchie's Midnight Song" in his deep-grained swell of a voice. I don't know whose version coalesced first. I grew up on both of them.

Via

regshoe, a book meme.

General Questions

This week I'm reading: I am currently in the middle of Naomi Mitchison's To the Chapel Perilous (1955), the paperback reprint sent me by

boxofdelights in 2022 as a replacement for my long-lost, lent-out college copy. Also re-reading Yolen's Merlin's Booke (1986), the Ace first edition inherited from my god-aunt in 2000 which I had not then read since my childhood in the Cambridge Public Library. For the first time, Jonas Kreppel's Adventures of Max Spitzkopf: The Yiddish Sherlock Holmes (trans. Mikhl Yashinsky, 1908/2025), a present from my parents earlier this year. With snail-mortifying slowness, I am continuing to poke at the modern Greek of Nikos Kavvadias' Πούσι (1947).

My favourite book of all time is: Impossible to answer. I did that hundred books meme last spring and kept having to append titles that had slipped my mind.

My current favourite book (read or re-read in the last 3 months): With apologies to Molly Crabapple and Seamus Heaney, almost certainly Leon Garfield's The Stolen Watch (1988).

The last book I bought was: Joan Coggins' Dancing with Death (1947), a present for my mother which she promptly loaned back to me so that she could discuss it. The last book I bought for myself was Andrew Hiller's Hornytown Chutzpah (2026), brought to my attention by

mrissa.

The first book I bought with my own money: No clue. My first real job was in a science fiction and fantasy bookstore when I was fifteen and they might as well have paid me off the shelves.

The first book I received as a gift: Equally impossible to estimate. I can remember receiving Brophy's The Prince and the Wild Geese (1983) early on, but it would not have been the first.

The last book I received as a gift was: Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (2026), courtesy of

a_reasonable_man.

The last book I borrowed from the library: Either Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (1960) or What Time Is This Place? (1972), whichever was not checked out first.

The book physically closest to me right now: Robinson Jeffers' Such Counsels You Gave to Me (1937), the burgundy-boarded, jacketless first edition from my grandparents' house. After that, Imogen Sara Smith's Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy (2008), which I gave some years ago to

spatch.

Do you read bookfic, and if so what is your favourite bookshop fic? I don't think I have ever read a bookshop fic. I read Satoshi Yagisawa's Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (trans. Eric Ozawa, 2010/2023) when

spatch gave it to me for our last anniversary.

This or That

Physical book or e-book: Physical book if at all possible, since I process them differently. E-book in the inevitable event that I can't get hold of something and there's one copy digitized maddeningly on the Internet Archive.

Used or new: As a reading experience, I don't think it makes much difference to me. If I own a book, I try to keep it in good shape.

Fiction or non-fiction: At the moment I seem to be reading more fiction than nonfiction, which may or may not be the case in another three months.

Read at a coffee shop or at the park: I haven't been inside a coffee shop in years. Last Friday I was reading on the stone wall overlooking the water at Spy Pond Park while waiting for

ladymondegreen.

Paperback or hardcover: In terms of preferred reading format? I don't think it makes much difference to me, either.

Romance or Crime: More crime than romance.

Yes or No

Stream of consciousness? Yes.

Poetry? Yes.

Memoirs? Yes.

Philosophy? Yes.

Thrillers? Yes.

Chronicles? What?

Dialogue heavy? Alan Garner?

Current Music: Gordon Bok, "Peter Kagan and the Wind"

sovay

The World Cup is upon us. Insofar as I have opinions about it beyond the strong feeling that this country is currently too authoritarian to have been allowed near anything that even pretends to internationalism, I am rooting for Cape Verde: it is their first year and the diaspora in these parts is second only to Brockton. I may also have found myself, for the first time in my life, in a house divided by team affiliation.

spatch ancestrally favors Scotland for this weekend's match and I am hoping Haiti beats the kilts off them. Anywhere the man in the White House disapproves of, let them shine. The 1936 Olympic spirit.

Current Music: Hila Ruach, "Sprint"

sovay

Jane Yolen has died. Her books were some of the first I read. Even with my library in storage, I can see several of her titles just by turning my head. Her shadow sisters got into my Jewish demons. She ushered me through the corridors of the sea. I had the fortune of sharing some panels with her; I did have the chance to tell her how much of my sense of story she had shaped. Tam Lin and Commander Toad, White Jenna and Merlin, dragons and owls and selkies and golems and cats and always, unsentimentally, words. Which remain, but it still feels like a great light blown out.

I saw a sailor once
shed his skin
as quickly as a crab
sloughs its shell.
He danced alone,
easy in his bones,
amid the coral memories
of his sunken ship.
When he opened his mouth,
little colored fish
swam in and out,
avoiding his brittle teeth,
his stripped and shining jaw.
They were quick and bright
as laughter,
running their zigzag course
through the silent syncopation
of the sea.

—Jane Yolen, "Metamorphosis" (1982)

Current Music: Yene Velt, "Indwelling"

sovay

I have partly triumphed over bureaucracy! The parking ticket which it made no temporal sense for the car to have incurred was dispelled by a perfectly friendly clerk, exasperated with his computer and overheated in his office whose fan seemed just as overworked. Other forms of bureaucracy remain to contend with, but nonetheless.

Hollywood Hotel (1937) is otherwise such a prefabricated meta-movie musical that neither

spatch nor I expected it to bust out with the three-minute jam of "Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing)" that directly encouraged the legendary 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, but it justifies the entire film especially when it's chased by the integrated magic of the Benny Goodman Quartet on "I've Got a Heartful of Music." I pulled myself upright on the couch at the speed of Pavlov at the instantly recognizable Gene Krupa. The proto-Singin' in the Rain (1952) shenanigans of the plot also offer a chance to see the normally prim and mustached Allyn Joslyn as a clean-shaven, fast-talking publicity heel, in which capacity he is a sarcastic delight, but the total experience really shoots one of its feet off when it sets up a very funny and totally deserved parody of Gone with the Wind and then tops it with blackface. Just watch Lionel Hampton instead.

It makes me happy to hear about the musical version of Pride, not least that the original miners and the lesbians and gays who supported them approve.

My mother wasn't joking about Mamdani repealing bedtime.

Current Music: Wet Leg, "Chaise Longue"

sovay

I spent far too much of my day engaged in the further pursuit of bureaucracy. Ironically I feel that I may be coming out of the tunnel vision of the last few years when I was focused almost exclusively on not dying because I seem to be seized with chronic low-grade grief. I was able to present

spatch with his CD of Harpo Speaks! The Riverside Symphony Concert (1964/2026) which I had ordered for him the second I knew of its existence. Yesterday I did actually run screaming into the afternoon and took a couple of pictures to prove it.

( Thankfully, summer's here. )

WERS played the Last Dinner Party's "Big Dog" (2026) and I have been playing it ever since. I haven't heard someone wail like that into a chorus since '90's PJ Harvey.

Current Music: Armalite, "Metastic!"

sovay

I have spent the majority of my day in the pursuit of bureaucracy, which is obfuscating and elusive and in our supposedly frictionless digital age requires multiple rounds of phone tag, and am seriously tempted to run screaming into the afternoon. I hadn't known there was a documentary about Pete and Toshi Seeger and the Clearwater, but it's playing the Somerville in July. Recent fruits of college radio include Violet Grohl's "Bug in the Cake" (2026), the Japanese House's "Boyhood" (2023) and Noah Kahan's "Doors" (2026), which the DJ at WERS declared would make her cry all summer as she drove around Boston, unless she'd actually just been looking at the price of gas. I took a picture of myself yesterday with the late-blooming dogwood in my mother's yard.

Current Music: Nxdia, "Nothing at All"

sovay

Good Monday! I slept an hour and have to fight with both my insurance and the city parking department. Have a small number of links.

1. Thanks to the ongoing movement to eat the invasive green crab, I have discovered the existence of Maine Garum. Of course I want to order a bottle of their fish sauce; I haven't had garum in the kitchen since our last apartment. Then I want to order their crab sauce, because intense oceanic funk is most attractive to me.

2. Since I last checked in on Dermot Turing, he has produced two books of obvious interest to me: Enigma Traitors: The Struggle to Lose the Cipher War (2023) and Misread Signals: How History Overlooked Women Codebreakers (2025). The first makes me hope he has written about Leo Marks and Englandspiel, the second is right on.

3. Have a photoset of Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton outside a pub in Shepperton, 1963. They are obviously in the middle of filming Becket (1964) and just as obviously are the modern AU. "He's drunk and wenched his way through London, but he's thinking all the time."

I have draft schedules for both Readercon and NecronomiCon Providence. I like the looks of both of them. Wish my constitution luck.

Current Music: Joy Oladokun, "Nothing Comes Easy"

sovay

For the seventy-second yahrzeit of Alan Turing, it feels inevitable that I should find AI tools incorporated into the creation of opera and sculpture about his life. The flaw in the imitation game is not the mimicry of the machine, but the mirror test of humanity which has such difficulty recognizing itself to begin with. How much more readily the present of this future ascribes personhood to an app than acknowledges it in a rainbow. No chatbot has ever been as queer as the Manchester University Computer. His ideas on computability are still investigated and his reaction–diffusion systems turned into art and I can't remember knowing that a road had been named after him in 1994. When Alan imagined a child-machine, he included the concern that it would be made fun of at school. It was never necessary to share a taste for strawberries and cream.

Current Music: Rabbitology, "Sweet Death of Me"

sovay

I had entertained fantasies of attending Pride, especially since I can really get behind the theme of protesting since 1776, but what I actually had the energy for was imitating a pancake. Eventually I gathered enough verticality to walk around the neighborhood and make hot dogs for dinner. TCM gladdened my heart by running The Sea Wolf (1941). I have not enjoyed the news about either Marjane Satrapi or Anthony Stewart Head. In lieu of a parade, I wore the rainbow cat T-shirt my godson handed up to me.

Current Music: Houndmouth, "Tiger Blood"

sovay

For six years I did not see

ladymondegreen except through a screen, so it was especially lovely to meet them in the bright hot afternoon by Spy Pond and catch up on the respective ways we had managed not to die since last we compared notes, after which it planlessly evolved that we repaired to my parents' house and ended up cooking a suitable dinner with interludes of watering the irises and the alyssum, touring the art in the house with my father, and lying around on the couch. Late in the evening

akawil and

pecunium came by to collect their spouse and talk programming and rocks with my parents and my mother had to kick all of us out into the night before her natural nocturnal clock ticked over to the point where she woke up. We are resolved to keep not dying so that it need not be another six years before we share a view of the water.