Scroll time has been squeezed by news writing. Here’s what I’ve got.
(1) THE WORK BEGINS. Bogi Takács’ first review for QUILTBAG+ Speculative Classics at Tor.com: “The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez”.
The Gilda Stories is a Black / Indigenous lesbian vampire novel from 1991; it has recently seen its twenty-fifth anniversary reissue, in an expanded form. Gilda, the vampire heroine of the novel, also appears in a number of standalone short stories—I first came across a Gilda story when it was reprinted in one of the Heiresses of Russ lesbian SFF year’s best anthologies. (Specifically, the 2013 volume edited by Tenea D. Johnson and Steve Berman.)
Gilda is a fascinating character: she uses her superhuman strength and quasi-magical powers to support humans and fight for them, and also to build and defend her vampire family. Despite the grim subject matter, this is a very comforting book. Several of the vampires are genuinely kind—which is even more striking if you consider that the novel was written and published well before the trend of humanized vampires became widely popular. But where did this kindness come from?
(2) PIONEERING. Neil Gaiman and N.K. Jemisin in conversation at Literary Hub: “On Writing the Comics—and Queer Characters—We Need”.
NG: I was asked yesterday, somebody said “Sandman was the first place they ever encountered gay characters, lesbian characters, or trans characters. Would you write them like that now?” Well, no.
NKJ: Things have changed. You’ve changed.
NG: Things have changed. And because now there are lots of fantastic trans people making comics and telling their own stories. And I no longer would go, “hang on, I have trans friends. I am not seeing people like my trans friends in the comics that I am reading. So I am going to put people like my friends in my comics, because that’s reflecting my world.” By the way, if you are a 15-year-old boy in Middle America reading my comic, I want you to meet people that you aren’t otherwise going to meet.
NKJ: Or meet people who you may be yourself and haven’t figured out.
(3) WOTF. Two more threads discussion
Rachel K. Jones does a roundup of recent tweets about WoTF. Thread starts here:
New writers: think twice before entering WOTF. Think twice before listening to pros who brush away your doubts. This is a short thread with receipts from multiple sources about things to consider:
— Rachael K. Jones, M.Ed. (@RachaelKJones) April 16, 2018
J. W. Alden was a WoTF winner. Jump on the thread here:
https://twitter.com/AuthorAlden/status/985894901991854082
(4) READ MOR CHIKIN. I admit it, Larry Correia made me laugh for awhile, before predictably bogging down in culture war clichés. If you can’t abide anything said in defense of Chick-Fil-A, then skip “Fisking the New Yorker in Defense of Delicious Chicken” [Internet Archive link.] As always, his reactions to the original text are in bold.
New York has taken to Chick-fil-A.
HOW DARE THEY?!?
One of the Manhattan locations estimates that it sells a sandwich every six seconds, and the company has announced plans to open as many as a dozen more storefronts in the city.
Keep in mind, New York City has 26,000 restaurants in it. If you ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner at a different place every single day, you’d never be able to try them all because by the time you cycled through, there would be a bunch of new ones in business. Plus you’d weigh 800 pounds and need a livestock hoist to get out of bed. (but that’s what delivery is for, quitter!)
I have to travel to New York a lot for my job. The food is the best part of those trips. For my fellow red state hillbilly vagabonds who’ve not been to the food capitol of the world, there are restaurants everywhere. There are restaurants within restaurants. There are secret burger places literally hidden inside hotel lobbies (behind curtains!). And that’s not even getting into the 8000(!) food trucks and carts. So they have sidewalk food in front of their food.
And it’s all pretty damned good, because there’s so much competition that if one sucks and goes out of business, there’s a hundred others lined up to take their place.
(5) SOCIETY PAGES. Congratulations to Declan Finn who announced he’s engaged to be married.
[Thanks to Carl Slaughter, JJ, Mark Hepworth, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, and Andrew Porter, many of whom contributed these stories, or others that would have made it in if I didn’t run out of time. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Stoic Cynic.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
@Stoic Cynic: You’re *absolutely* correct, I got the two confused. To be clear: Chic-Fil-A did not ever, to the best of my knowledge, aid and abet enemies of the United States for the purpose of smuggling antiquities out of the Middle East.
Niall McAuley: I only just noticed that Chick Fil-A is supposed to sound like the way Americans say chicken fillet.
That reminds me of the (I think) Tumblr conversation I recently saw, in which Australians discovered that in the U.S., lemonade is a drink which is like orange juice, only made with lemons. (Apparently, down under, that sort of lemonade doesn’t exist, and “lemonade” refers to a carbonated soda such as Sprite or 7-Up.) 😀
There were comments like:
“Oh! I’d always wondered how little kids were able to make it by themselves and sell it at roadside stands.”
Lis Carey: I shall have to give some thought to my position on vampires, though! (It has been, since Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, “No, unless you are Octavia Butler come back to us.”
Too funny. Mine is “Thanks, but I won’t be reading your vampire fantasy. And I won’t be reading your vampire science fiction, either, unless your name is Peter Watts.”
While “lemonade” in the UK and Australia refers to carbonated lemon-flavored soda, the familiar-in-the-US version exists there too, and is (according to Wikipedia) called “traditional lemonade” or “cloudy lemonade.” Actual citizens of the UK or Australia may disagree with Wikipedia, of course.
When I was in the UK and described American lemonade, people told me it was called “lemon squash,” which is actually something different, but similar.
Also:
Orange juice is literally orange juice. Squeezed out of oranges. Sometimes concentrated and then reconstituted, but the instant is to be the juice of oranges.
Lemonade is lemon juice, sugar and water. Drinking lemon juice straight is not really refreshing.
Cloudy lemonade is fizzy, in my experience, although generally more lemony than saccharine fake tasting clear stuff like R Whites. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a still lemonade. Brit Filers born before 1989, or in a different region, may have a different experience.
Squash is a children’s drink made from sweetened concentrated syrup that you dilute with water, so probably not very much like USA lemonade from what I understand, although they are still instead of fizzy. Cordials are (usually) fancy grown-up strong squash with more interesting (and not necessarily kid-friendly) flavours.
ETA: Oh, God, the typo’s.
One of my favorite movies is LEMONADE JOE [LIMONADOVY JOE], a 1960s Czech musical fantasy burlesque western based on a 1930s stage play. “Lemonade,” in this context, is a soft drink—in particular, a drink called Kola Loka Lemonade, where ‘Lemonade’ just means a soft drink. I first saw the movie in the early 70s, and watched for it for decades before seeing it again. It was only after the second time that I understood their usage of the word.
The main song from Lemonade Joe turns up in a 1949 puppet animation by Jiri Trnka, who later worked with Gene Deitch on a series of Tom & Jerry cartoons that I only slowly learned to appreciate. The first time I watched this and heard that familiar song, which I had been thinking originated in the 1960s, in a pre-1950 short, I was flat-out astonished.
https://archive.org/details/AriePrerieYouTube360p
It’s harder to see LEMONADE JOE, though I’ve found two versions of it on YouTube, but both are gone now, and only random clips remain (and some kind of local stage production from Czechoslovakia, which doesn’t really represent the wildly inventive movie).
I’m assuming all the weak lemonade drunk at Almack’s in all those Regency novels wasn’t carbonated, since they didn’t start selling the carbonated stuff in London till 1833. That just means England had what we in the US call lemonade back then, no matter what they have now. (Somehow I figured out quickly that the stale biscuits in those books were actually cookies, not like the biscuits you get with your KFC. I saw a play set in Restoration England where the props person didn’t get that memo, however, since they gave Nell Gwyn a plate of big ol’ American biscuits instead of cookies.)
I have tried Chick Fil-A, which was… OK. Shrugs. It’s nothing I would walk across the street for, let alone fight a crowd for. The other one I walk on past is Jimmy John, because they have bad, tasteless sandwiches, had E Coli issues with their sprouts, and the owner loves to kill beautiful animals just to pose with their dead bodies. I do not feel I am I in any way suffering because I’m not eating Chick Fil-A, Jimmy John, or, for that matter, Hooter’s. At the risk of sounding like someone I don’t want to, there are a lot of choices for my food dollar. Why would I pick one of those?
I didn’t mean to suggest my criticism of Way of Kings is that it’s long. It’s not even that it’s slow, really. I’m currently making my way through Kate Elliott’s Crown of Stars series for the first time (finished book 3 a couple of weeks ago), and those are definitely of the long and slow variety too. However, in the books I’ve read so far it never feels like things are at a standstill. There’s no retreading of old ground, characters move around and interact with each other in different capacities, contexts and permutations, the political situation evolves alongside the events we watch the characters participate in, and even when a character from King’s Dragon reappears in Prince of Dogs and explicitly threatens to set back a hero’s emotional journey, both the circumstances and conclusion play out very differently and continue to serve the plot moving forward.
In contrast, I got very little of this out of Way of Kings. There are some very slowly turning gears and mysterious destinies, but a great deal of the actual content is just people having permutations of the same conversation, or random flashbacks of the fallen hero which give us information we already have about his character, or development in sub-quests that have no clear link to an overarching plot. So much of the book is built out of these tension-free, meandering character moments or second-hand exposition, that a lot of the time I felt I was in an RPG like Dragon Age, getting my character to mechanically click through all of the lore dialogue options with my party members at camp to make sure I don’t miss any information – except in a video game, if I get bored at any point I can end the conversation and go move the plot forward instead. This novel gave me no such option.
So yeah, my issue with the Way of Kings isn’t its length, it’s that it feels like the characters spend 70% of their time not moving at all in the figurative or literal sense, and while this would be a problem for a book of 100 pages or 1,000, it does feel *particularly* frustrating that I spent so many valuable reading hours watching the same five dudes interact aimlessly on a plateau.
Also it turns out that the further I get from reading this book, the worse I feel about it. And also I’m probably still going to subject myself to Book 2, because I must understand this series in order to rank it, and I clearly don’t understand it now… :/
@ Andrew M: And then there’s ROTK, where you get 4 endings. Having read the book, I never noticed that until people who hadn’t read the book started complaining about it in the movie! I did notice, though, that the fade-to-black after the Eagles show up to rescue Frodo and Sam lasted about 2 seconds too long, and really did feel like the end of the film… until Frodo wakes up in Minas Tirith.
@ Hampus, Greg: According to multiple surveys, the majority of the LGBTQ community (presumably in America) prefers “queer” as an umbrella term. The people most likely to object to it are TERFs and other exclusionists. Odd coincidence that this came across my feed earlier today.
Re fried chicken: I don’t eat at Chick-Fil-A because they support causes I find obscene; there are plenty of good chicken places around that aren’t run by RWAs. Popeye’s is good, and down here we have a regional chain called Golden Chick that’s also good. Haven’t tried Raising Cane’s because we got a very negative review from a friend who likes fried chicken — she said it was all covered in white glop and you couldn’t taste the chicken at all. If you like white glop (which a lot of people down here do), that’s probably not a downcheck, but it sure is for us. The chain we don’t have here that I miss is Bojangle’s; in addition to good fried chicken, it also has the best biscuits and dirty rice I’ve ever eaten.
@ Jonathan M: Seconding that it was Hobby Lobby smuggling artifacts.
Lemonade UK/Aus is usually a carbonated drink of two species – a clear fizzy drink or a more overtly lemony cloudy drink. Sprite or 7-Up would be seen as being lemonade of the first kind (but usually referred to by name.
Squash or cordial is a normally non fizzy drink made by diluting a syrup/concentrate.
To add to the confusion there is a brand of cloudy lemonade sold in Australia called “Pub squash”.
@ JJ: You should hear one of my friends go on about how it’s impossible to get Sprite in England. If you ask for “lemon-lime soda”, apparently what you get is something on the order of limeade. And in Mexico, “limon” may refer to lemon, lime, or any combination of the two, with or without carbonation.
Lee – Unless Cane’s does this wildly different there I have no clue what white glop they’d even be speaking of. I mean they have their own dipping sauce but it’s not white and it’s optional.
*and at this point I should clarify I’m not sponsored by them though if they offered I’d accept.
Once you’ve diluted a concentrate, you’ve more or less reconstituted it, leaving you with something similar to lemon juice, sugar and water. If it’s a drink that’s sweet and cold and lemon-flavored, and not fizzy, and doesn’t have other stuff added, it’s in the same neighborhood as traditional lemonade.
@ Hampus, Greg: According to multiple surveys, the majority of the LGBTQ community (presumably in America) prefers “queer” as an umbrella term. The people most likely to object to it are TERFs and other exclusionists. Odd coincidence that this came across my feed earlier today
Online surveys aren’t real helpful. Especially if you’re using the linked one.
I looked at this “survey” page and using it to make a statement about whether people prefer ‘queer’ is the height of presumption or deliberately misleading. Hell, they give you their slant on the page:
Groups that do not prefer the use of queer as an umbrella are: straight respondents, exclusionst-identifying respondents, transmedicalists, truscum, sex-negative respondents, and sex work critical respondents.
I’d say they have an agenda.
My problem with the survey is mostly – umbrella term for what?
Mark-kitteh: Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng… gothic romance
Ugh, really? Maybe I’ll take my name off the waiting list for this one.
I think it is important to differentiate between the study (one page) and the quoted conclusions of the study (a totally different page).
I looked at the study and it was a looong questionaire and most likely not even understandable for many, using an enormous amount of specialized words. I doubt they will get answers from more than the most well-studied activists. It is not something I would dare to use as an indicator for general attitudes.
I have lemon juice/lemon shake all the time in Thailand, often I ask for no sugar or not sweet. It’s delicious that way.
In fairness usually what they call lemon, we’d call a lime. And what they call a shake is actually just juice with blended/crushed ice of some sort.
@Lee: has your friend tried asking for “Sprite”? 🙂 we have it – cans and bottles and out of the machines in fast food places, and often out of the funky soda gun things in pubs… if you ask for lemon-lime soda what you’re probably going to end up with is lime cordial with soda water or something along those lines.
When we were in China, everybody in our group knew the Chinese name for Sprite. My daughter might still know it. I’ve forgotten.
@Kip W – Sprite in Chinese is “Xue bi” (X pronounced like “sh”), which roughly translates to “blue snow”.
And yes, it can be ordered at almost every restaurant in the UK that stocks fizzy drinks by asking for “Sprite” – the worst case scenario is that they will tell you they only have 7-Up, the Pepsi brand equivalent. My experience is that “lemonade” will usually get you a Sprite as well, but admittedly I haven’t tested that much recently.
Lime soda is my go-to lunchtime accompaniment these days, though I’m fairly certain limes are less bitter in SE Asia, so it’s closer to a fizzy lemonade than what I’d get if I juiced a lime into soda water back home. I find it significantly superior to Sprite in most ways.
@Various: Chick Fil-A has always seemd a little meh and over-rated. Also, I’m not a fan of the founder’s/company’s hater stances and hater donations. Never mind the frustration with them being closed on Sundays. 😉
@Lee: Oh yes, Bojangle’s biscuits! I’ve only had them a few times, but I recall they were awesome.
@Various, redux: No drink should be called squash. ::shudder:: Ugh, that is a real turn-off for us squash-the-vegetable haters. 😛 Gak!
– – – – –
Y’all are making me hungry and thirsty.
In the UK anyway “fresh lemonade” is usually the good stuff, made with lemon juice, sugar and water. Usually made on the spot.
Re closed on [some]day places… there was a ramen place I loved back in Chiang Mai, and frequently for some reason on thursday I was in a ramen mood. I’m sure you can see where this is going – yep, it closed for one day every week: thursday. It’s like my brain was making me want the exact thing I couldn’t have. (Except there was another ramen place not far away, if I still fancied ramen after realising the first place was closed…)
One of the things that Paddy misses when away from his Green Shamrock Shore is a drink called Red Lemonade.
Which is not really red and contains no lemons:
Carbonated Water, Sugar, Citric Acid, Flavourings, Preservative (Potassium Sorbate), Sweeteners (Aspartame, Saccharin), Colours (Sunset Yellow, Quinoline Yellow, Carmoisine, Green S), Contains a source of Phenylalanine
Kids drink it straight, accompanied by a bag of taytos. Adults may drink it as a mixer for whiskey, accompanied by a bag of taytos, or sometimes just eat the taytos.
(3) It’s way the hell past time. Those Twitter threads were a little hard to follow, but worth it.
I have seen QUILTBAG and queer both used positively for the overall community of not-straight not-cis humans. I think QUILTBAG is a very friendly-sounding term.
Greg is the only US gay person his age that I know who’s triggered by queer, FWIW. While I recognize it’s true for him and many others, none of my other LGBTetc. friends, acquaintances, or people I kinda sorta know mind it. Many prefer or insist on being called “queer” because it covers the whole genderqueer, non-binary, whatever spectrum. The young folk seem to be widely opting for queer.
Some trans* people don’t actually want to be identified as trans* for example, since they don’t think they’ve actually changed or don’t want people to think of them as ever having been publicly known as another gender (Just like they don’t want their dead name used/known). But they might still call themselves queer.
(And unless the care of ovaries and uteri are what’s under discussion, TERFs can go… do unladylike things to themselves.)
@Mark-kitteh: I have been in London on Sunday. There were lots of people everywhere and considering how much money I spent, there must have been plenty of places open. FFS, even small rural towns in the exceedingly religious parts of Scotland had places open on Sunday (again, cf. my Visa bill).
@Kip W: You are the only person I know (for values of know) other than me and my brother who’ve seen that movie. Probably on the same TV station at the same time.
Also, pardon while I laugh at people who don’t pronounce the word “fil-ay”. It’s French, you don’t say the T. If you say it with the T, you’re either using the verb or the engineering term, both of which have two L’s. Boneless chunks of meat are Filet, Fil-A. They shouldn’t have pickle juice and support anti-QUILTBAG legislation whatever they’re called.
Indeed, I often filet a fish or chicken with my fileting knife before I order filet steak.
Iphinome: Not a fan of pickle soaked chicken myself but hey dude, you do you.
lurkertype: They shouldn’t have pickle juice
Okay, wait, Chick-Fil-A’s (which I’ve never had) “secret ingredient” is that the chicken is marinated in pickle juice?
In the UK we always use fillet with a hard T for the piece of meat. Filet (a la French) is what you see on the menu at pretentious restaurants.
“Fil-ay” doesn’t sound like french pronouncuation. “Ay” at the end is typically american. Should be more like filé, shouldn’t it?
Otherwise, I’m not sure why the pronounciation of a french word should decide how the corresponding word in another language should be pronounced.
rob_matic writes: Filet (a la French) is what you see on the menu at pretentious restaurants.
Bah! Menu. Bill of fare, says I.
Google Ngram says “fillet of chicken” started earlier than “filet of chicken” and is more common today, but that the latter has had two higher peaks of popularity in 1975 and 1990. Further research might indicate which fast food chain launched a popular chicken sandwich before those peaks.
Not marinated, as such; they just add a single round pickle cross-section to each small chicken sandwich.
@ Hampus: I think you’re reading the “Ay” as a long I sound. The chain’s name is spelled phonetically, as various people have shown upthread: Chick-Fil-A, which would indeed be pronounced like the French.
@Lee I’m fairly sure Hampus’ point is that even the “ay” sound you are describing is distinct from how French speakers would pronounce the “et” in “filet”. It follows that “USians are saying fillet right because we say it like the French do” isn’t a strong argument, because you don’t and also we are speaking English 🙂
(ETA I have no horse in this race btw! Let a thousand English dialects bloom etc.)
So to sum up the discussion:
It is lemon-AY not lemon-ET ?
Camestros Felapton: Lemonade UK/Aus is usually a carbonated drink of two species
One of the hilarious parts of the Tumblr thread I mentioned was that one of the Australian commenters said, “Oh! Now Beyonce’s song makes sense!”
@JJ
Divided by a common language, etc etc.
@JJ, Ray Radlein:
I never got why people love their chicken so. The fries and the lemonade, that I get, but not the chicken. But that little slice of pickle does so much! Without it, the sandwich would be substandard. I don’t love the chicken, but the sandwiches are decent anyway.
There used to be a McDonald’s sandwich in my neck of the woods which was just chicken and a little pickle. Southern Style Chicken Sandwich or something like that. I’ve been forced to eat their messy “artisanal” replacement, which is okay but hard to drive with, instead. Turns out they still serve the old one in the Atlanta area. Mmm.
Lee:
Here is the french pronounciation, approximately.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0V8RMusjtic
No “ay”-sound.
Hmm, Chick-Fil-eh doesn’t look as catchy.
More like Chik-Fil-Meh, amirite?
@Hampus —
That’s the Canadian branch of the chain.
Lurkertype: I think we had this conversation, yes? For the benefit of others, a recap is not completely out of order. One day in, what, 1971?, Starr Yelland, host of the afternoon movie on Denver’s KLZ-TV7, seemed a bit bemused as he introduced the picture. “This is unusual,” he said. “When we showed this before, we got so many calls about it that we’re going to show it again.” My sister and I, watching on her small black and white set in the basement, found our interest piqued, and we watched as this amazing picture unfolded. I intended to jeer at it, but it was just too innovative for me to keep it up for long.
I read the movie listings every week for years hoping to find it again. Then, on a trip to Colorado, my pal Randy excitedly told me he’d found this movie at the library, and it came out that he had been watching it that day as well (in Denver—we were in Fort Collins at the time) and had been looking for it ever since, too.
I ordered the movie on VHS, that being what was available, and when it finally came, I was so excited—but there was something rattling inside the cassette, and I had to send it back and wait for another, but I finally got it. I got to hear the original voices (KLZ played a dub) and see new footage (they cut for time slot and maybe sexiness) and realize that it was all tinted black and white.
The movie is beautifully cast, staged, and imagined, with convincing extras and surreal bits here and there, like when Joe heroically poses on a cliff’s edge, looking way, way down into the canyon, and then leans about 200% farther over, utterly defying gravity as we know it. I also like when the snakily villainous Hogo Fogo listens silently as saloon owner Doug Badman talks about how tired he is of all the corruption and violence. As Badman looks away, Fogo unobtrusively opens a poison ring over Badman’s drink and empties some powder into it. Then he (Fogo) swirls the drink for a moment, swallows it, and belches.
The violence is pure cartoon fodder. One person gets stabbed with a corkscrew, which takes a while, as you can imagine. Tex Avery would have approved.
As I said yesterday, there are clips of the movie at YouTube, and that’s about it. Here’s Oldrich Lipsky, the movie’s Hogo Fogo, in a 1959 performance of “Mackie Messer” from the Threepenny Opera, which is my favorite version of the song ever:
@Hampus: as discussed recently on Making Light, boundaries between phonemes, or even whether a spectrum of possible sounds is one phoneme or two, are extremely subjective. See, for instance, the existence of one liquid in Japanese, causing assorted crude ~Western jokes based on confusing ‘l’ and ‘r’. (The liquid itself varies widely; go see Tampopo and notice people referring to noodles as llamen or ramen or ….) The sample you provide does not convince me — especially given that it sounds like a compound (crudely, “eh-ee”), very much like the long-a pronunciation I grew up with (US mid-Atlantic coastal); to my ears it’s certainly not (e.g.) the German “closed e” (consider “den” vs “denn”). (No, I’m not a linguist; I’ve simply lived through a wide variety of designated pronunciation gurus — some musical, many native — over 47 seasons of singing choruses in public.)
@Kip W: that is one weird video.
Clip Hitchcock:
That is okay, I’m very used to americans listening to french with distrust.
@ Chip Hitchcock:
Or multiple British people being astounded that I could hear the difference in them pronouncing “porn” and “pawn”, while they couldn’t.
We pronounce them differently?
@rob_matic
We certainly do in Scotland.
Fair point, now that I think about it.
IANAL (I am not a linguist) but I am definitely going to be mumbling “porn… pawn… porn… pawn” to myself all day trying to identify the differences in pronunciation. Lucky I’m working from home at the moment!
Arifel: The internet is for pawns!