text:
How does Joel know where to meet Clementine? [duplicate]
How do Clementine and Joel know that they have to meet in Montauk again? (3 answers)
How does Joel know he needs to meet Clementine at Montauk in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Clementine tells Joel in one of his memories that he should meet her at Montauk. This is Joel's memory. Hence he's telling himself to meet Clementine at Montauk. The next day, because of the subliminal information in his head, he meets her on the train to Montauk. How does Joel know that Clementine is going to be on the train? He's never met her there before. How does he remember something he's not yet done?
Edit: This question assumes that Clementine was always going to be there at Montauk. She has had her memory erased a week earlier. The question is how does Joel know this information about Montauk.
plot-explanation eternal-sunshine-of-spotless-mind
JohnJohn
@Erik, the point of view in that question is errored. Clementine is living her life after her memory erase. The question is not how she knows she needs to be in Montauk. It's about how Joel knows that information. His going to Montauk is the day right after his memory erase. The entire movie is Joel's point of view and his memories. This question can't be about how Clementine knows about Montauk. – John Feb 11 '16 at 11:49
In order for two people to meet they both have to go to the same location at the same time. The movie is about their relationship so IMO questions about either one's thoughts/motives are fair game. Plus not all the movie is from Joel's point of view. – Erik Feb 11 '16 at 15:33
Sure, here Joel goes to the place where Clementine is. All else is speculation. – John Feb 11 '16 at 15:35
While it's not immediately clear on a first viewing, the pre-credits scene occurs chronologically after the majority of the scenes in the movie; Joel and Clem have already had their breakup, and have both erased each other from their own (conscious) memories. Note that Clementine's hairstyle is the same in the pre-credits scene as it is at the end of the movie: a blue color that's grown out substantially.
So the simplest answer is that their first meeting, when Joel's friends invite him to a beach party and Clementine is there, is in Montauk. If you accept this as true, then it makes sense that this location would have a special subconscious significance for both of them, and that they would be drawn to the same beach even after having erased their memories. However, one does have to accept Joel's memory as accurate for this to work; we only ever see their "first" meeting as part of Joel's memory, rather than in "real life".
However, there's another possible interpretation (which is why I put "first" in quotes above.) The final shot of the movie is a repeated shot of Joel and Clem playing in the snow at Montauk. Some people have interpreted this scene to mean that Joel and Clem have actually met multiple times before, and have erased each other from their memories more than just the one time we see in the movie. Viewed from this perspective, the ending is quite fatalistic: it seems to imply that people are trapped in destructive patterns in their lives, and that there's not a way to escape them. (To be fair, Joel says he's "OK" with that in the last spoken line of the movie.) If you buy this interpretation, then they have met in Montauk multiple times before the events of the movie, and so their subconscious draws them there even if they don't know why.
Michael SeifertMichael Seifert
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Editor's Note: I'm very excited to introduce Dev Chatterji, PharmD, BCPS. He's a clinical pharmacy specialist in Infectious Disease and Internal Medicine and he's a former Residency Program Director.
In fact, he has the special distinction of being MY former Residency Program Director (which makes him both incredibly patient and able to live through times of severe frustration and emotional distress).
Dr. Chatterji, has mentored dozens (if not hundreds) of students and residents over the years. And he's found certain character traits in both that lead to success. In today's post he's going to share those insights with you. So that you can apply the lessons he's learned in his many, many years of experience (he's pretty old ;) ). No matter where you are in pharmacy school, residency, or practice, you will find something useful in this post. Enjoy!
What Makes a Successful Pharmacy Resident?
Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of being an RPD has likely been asked that exact question in some form or another.
It's one of my favorite questions to get asked by aspiring pharmacy residents…NOT!!
I say this because it's a very difficult question to answer. If you asked 5 RPDs or 5 preceptors what an ideal candidate is you'd get different answers from all of them. Even within the same institution.
And what about the resident's idea of success. What an RPD may consider a successful resident could be very different from what the actual resident thinks.
A resident may go through their PGY1 thinking they got what they wanted out of their training (like Brandon did). While their preceptors may think that the resident was kind of 'blah' (like Brandon was).
Put another way, my definition of "success" may be very different than yours.
So before I delve into traits and characteristics that I believe make a successful resident, keep in mind that these are only thoughts and opinions from one individual's perspective.
First let's talk about ownership. Your residency year is a unique time in your training where you are exposed to a variety of disease states and clinical situations.
As a resident you must take it upon YOURSELF to acquire the knowledge and skills to effectively practice in the various environments you will be exposed to (ambulatory care, internal medicine, critical care, ID, oncology, transplant, etc...).
You should NOT expect to be instructed step-by-step on how to work up a patient. Likewise, don't expect to be given key articles or guidelines to read. A successful resident is self-aware and reflective. They recognize their gaps, try to improve them, and only then turn to a preceptor for guidance and reinforcement.
Now let's talk about sense of responsibility. One thing that new pharmacy residents struggle with is transitioning from "student" to "pharmacist." Since residents are still under the umbrella of being a trainee, the first few months of residency are not all that different from their P4 year. So new residents often don't really feel like a licensed pharmacist...and they lack a sense of all the responsibilities that come with that license.
I will admit that much of this stems from the residency program itself not always giving new residents full autonomy. Part of the beauty of residency training is that you are sort of in a 'protected' environment that allows you to acquire and practice certain skills.
But there's a down side to this. Since you aren't always given full responsibility, it's hard to develop a strong sense of responsibility. You'll never learn to ride a bike if you don't take the training wheels off.
My advice to incoming residents is to first remember that you are no longer in school. Nor are you on rotations. This is a job!
If you go in with the mentality that there is a checkbox of things your preceptor has asked you to do (work up patients, look up 'xyz' drug information questions, attend rounds, do a case presentation, etc...) and you are just completing these tasks to 'complete the assignment', then you are not really understanding the point of residency training and will not be a successful resident.
I know what you're thinking. How do semi-vague concepts like "ownership" and "responsibility" apply to practice? I'm glad you asked.
I think the overall goal of PGY1 residency training is to teach residents a 'skill set' - AN APPROACH TO PRACTICE in any given pharmacy environment.
If you look at ASHP's Residency Learning System (RLS) and view the goals/objectives of residency training, you will notice that they are very broad. This is intentional. It allows the objectives to be applied to any type of residency setting (hospital based, clinic or outpatient based, managed care, etc...).
Therefore, the basic skills you obtain (how to approach a patient, what to look for and monitor from a pharmacy perspective, prospective medication review, etc...) can be replicated in any practice setting.
I've reinforced to residents over and over again to not forget their basic pharmacy foundation skills. These need to be taken with you to each rotation. For example, during your rotation with the Bone Marrow Transplant Service, your patients still need to have their med rec done.
Many residents will freeze during what they consider to be a complex and intimidating setting (such as Critical Care, Transplant, and Oncology). They forget to apply general medicine/pharmacy skills they've already picked up from other rotations.
The skills and clinical knowledge you learned during your Internal Medicine or Ambulatory Care rotation still apply to your ICU patients. This 'skill set' that you learn is continuously evolving. The reason you go through different rotations is to practice and apply that skill set with different patient populations.
I'm not saying you should focus on a patient's anti-hypertensive regimen and attempt to master the JNC-8 guidelines during an Infectious Disease Rotation. This is just a reminder to look at ALL aspects of pharmaceutical care regardless of the setting you are in.
You don't have to enter residency training as an expert in every therapeutic area. But you do need a strong knowledge foundation that you've honed and developed over 4 years of pharmacy school. Successful pharmacy residents work diligently throughout school and tend to come in knowing the basics. This makes it easier to build upon their foundation with each new residency rotation.
The opposite is also true. If your classroom experience and APPE rotations does not provide you with the clinical basics, it's very difficult to adjust to the fast-paced, high acuity residency training environment.
Put forth your best effort to learn and retain the information in school. Don't learn and dump. Read things that reinforce what you learned in the classroom (Editor's note: I recommend tl;dr pharmacy) so you're not trying to play a losing game of catch up when you start your PGY1.
Again, touching on the idea of ownership, a resident needs to "know what they don't know" and proactively work to remedy any knowledge gaps that exist.
A successful pharmacy resident displays satisfaction and gratification in being a pharmacist. It's difficult to find success if you don't have pride in what you're doing or if you feel unfulfilled by the work.
Again, if you're trying to complete a checklist of activities instead of embracing the whole concept of pharmaceutical care of the patient, then it's likely you'll be a 'blah' resident instead of a successful one.
You're part of a small group of people that dedicate their professional life to helping others. To improving health. Maybe even saving or prolonging a life. You get to do this every day you go to work. Be proud of the difference you can make in someone else's life.
Going hand in hand with having pride in the profession is having a true understanding of the pharmacist's role in practice. It's practically impossible to acquire pharmacy-based practice skills if you don't understand what pharmacy's role on the healthcare team is.
If you want to improve the quality of care you provide, potentially establish a new service, or enhance pharmacy relations with other healthcare providers, you must first know your role. You contribute a unique skill set to the medical team.
No one has the level of medication training that you bring to the table. Use that to contribute to the overall care of the patient. Look for renal adjustments and drug interactions. Look for unnecessary or duplicate drugs. Because you most likely are the only one that will.
Most of whom have advanced training in their area of specialty. Nurses, dieticians, pharmacists, PT/OT, respiratory therapist, and of course let's not forget the physicians.
This is great in that you have a group of highly trained professionals taking care of people's lives. However, this also means there's a plethora of different personalities. Learning to work with those personalities is a huge barrier to overcome and an essential skill to learn.
The most important part of working in a multi-disciplinary team is being able to communicate effectively. You have to get across your point while at the same time understanding everyone else's.
One of the unnamed 'jobs' you have as a pharmacy resident is being a liaison for the department. A lot programs are relatively new and still building their clinical pharmacy program and the direct patient care pharmacy services they provide.
As a resident, you may be the guinea pig in piloting a new service at your institution. A key component of that is being able to communicate on the behalf of the department to show the importance (and essentialness) of that new pharmacy service.
Having good PR (public relation) skills and being an effective communicator are required to accomplish that. Your ability to effectively work and communicate with diverse personalities and cultures is indispensable to being a successful clinician.
The last essential trait of a successful pharmacy resident is being dependable. Employers gravitate toward employees (remember, this IS a job and you ARE an employee) that demonstrate it.
But what exactly is "dependability?" In essence, someone who is dependable takes responsibility of their assigned task(s) and meets all deadlines with little need for reminders.
My final bit of advice…. Be balanced! It's a busy year, but you need to take opportunities for R & R when you can and integrate them into your year.
There are ways to relax and digress without having your residency responsibilities suffer, so find a way to do both! Don't ignore your friends and family. Exercise. Treat yo self.
Trust me, you'll be more successful (and happier) if you do.


text:
Danielle Del Sol named director of Preservation Resource Center
Following a six-month national search, the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans has selected Danielle Del Sol to lead the historic preservation and economic development organization.
Del Sol is an alumna of the Tulane School of Architecture Master of Preservation Studies program and currently teaches as an adjunct lecturer.
Before her selection, Del Sol was editor of the PRC's acclaimed and award-winning Preservation in Print magazine. She joined the publication as an intern in 2010 while pursuing her master's degree at Tulane School of Architecture.
She assumes her new duties now as only the fourth executive director in the nonprofit's 44-year history, succeeding Patricia Gay, who retired last summer after nearly four decades leading the organization.
PRC Board President Graham M. Ralston said the PRC's reputation attracted the interest of many strong candidates nationally, but "Del Sol's 'vision and passion' for both the PRC and New Orleans were ultimately key deciding factors in her selection."
Del Sol said she recognizes that her new duties begin at an auspicious time. "As we celebrate the city's 300th anniversary, we have the opportunity to explain the changing roles in which historic preservation will help address vital community needs such as affordable housing, quality of life and disaster resilience – and we will work hard to encourage and sponsor dialogue amongst diverse groups of the city's residents.
"Preservation offers distinctive approaches to these problems that can help our city leaders find the best, most well-rounded and holistic answers," said Del Sol. "I'm thrilled for the opportunity to lead PRC at this milestone juncture in the city's history."
MPS - Master in Preservation Studies


text:
from azure.mgmt.containerinstance.models import AzureFileVolume, Volume

from airflow.hooks.base import BaseHook

class AzureContainerVolumeHook(BaseHook):
    """
    A hook which wraps an Azure Volume.

    :param  wasb_conn_id: :ref:`Wasb connection id<howto/connection:wasb>` of an Azure storage
        account of which file shares should be mounted.
    :type wasb_conn_id: str
    """

    def __init__(self, wasb_conn_id: str = 'wasb_default') -> None:
        super().__init__()
        self.conn_id = wasb_conn_id

    def get_storagekey(self) -> str:
        """Get Azure File Volume storage key"""
        conn = self.get_connection(self.conn_id)
        service_options = conn.extra_dejson

        if 'connection_string' in service_options:
            for keyvalue in service_options['connection_string'].split(";"):
                key, value = keyvalue.split("=", 1)
                if key == "AccountKey":
                    return value
        return conn.password

    def get_file_volume(
        self, mount_name: str, share_name: str, storage_account_name: str, read_only: bool = False
    ) -> Volume:
        """Get Azure File Volume"""
        return Volume(
            name=mount_name,
            azure_file=AzureFileVolume(
                share_name=share_name,
                storage_account_name=storage_account_name,
                read_only=read_only,
                storage_account_key=self.get_storagekey(),
            ),
        )

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Big News Bear
About Ipso
Old Shows
Old Sayings
Ten Years of Ipso!
It's not just a business. It's an advertising business.
Erin is on phones & brekky this week.
Keep Sioux Falls Boring with Kiosk Thursday.
We said this way back in 2017, but no one had much to say about it. https://t.co/AteqCBxxIF
"What I've gained through this practice are insights on our community, its passions and pain-points, and the wealth… https://t.co/RJ8E0s2ttK
You can't get a brown pen these days.
These days we're in a place technologically where we should be able to get a handle on the Black Plague pretty easily.
It's not why we got into business, but we're fast at changing photos on websites.
Everything connects to ideas
Exploring Place and Space / Familiar and Unfamiliar
Famous: Class of 2019
Living Unsettled in Barcelona
"Brewing Independence is here!"
EDITORIAL: The Fresh Produce weblog is unnecessary
F.P. writers make pretty good video
Guest Column: "KioskThursday.com offers guilt-free online shopping experience"
F.P. SHOCKER: "We made up Kiosk Thursday"
F.P. Hires Freelancers for Radio Ads
BIG NEWS BEAR EDITORIAL BOARD
Recently, there has been much talk in the community about the launch of Fresh Produce's new weblog, a page that was quietly (sneakily?) added to the company's website earlier this week.
"It has always been this publication's policy to stay 'above the fray'"
Big News Bear has remained largely silent about the talk of a company weblog, partly because it has always been this publication's policy to stay "above the fray" in these types of situations, and partly because, quite frankly, we didn't expect anything would actually come of it.
For a company like Fresh Produce—a company that meticulously curates its online brand presence—the addition of a weblog to a website that already contains one incredibly popular publication will almost certainly only serve to confuse readers and raise questions that are not even worth thinking about, like, "Isn't Big News Bear itself a blog? Why do they need another one?"
"So far, the Fresh Produce weblog has only posted like two things."
Now, as trust in the free press is strained as it never has been before, it is more important than ever before that Fresh Produce speak with one voice. That voice must be Big News Bear.
Big News Bear could have done this.
For the past seven years, Big News Bear has been a trusted source of Fresh Produce-related news, travel writing, investigative reporting, and even literary criticism. In recent months, the publication has also become an open platform for a variety of different voices within the community. Plus, there were a bunch of other Big News Bear stories from previous iterations of the Fresh Produce website that weren't even migrated over to the new one, because it would have been so much work. So far, the Fresh Produce weblog has only posted like two things.
"Trust in the free press is strained as it never has been before"
So while Big News Bear wishes the Fresh Produce blog well, we do not think that it should exist, because everything was fine before and things should not change.
©2020 Fresh Produce. All Rights Reserved.


Located within the grounds of Wimbledon Common, The Wimbledon Windmill Museum offers exhibits involving windmills. It depicts the story of windmills from their early origins up to the present day by using models, examples of machinery and tools of the trade.
Accordingly, the museum also features scouting memorabilia, being a prominent location in the history of the scout movement. Robert Baden-Powell wrote part of his work Scouting for Boys while staying at The Windmill.
The museum is run entirely by volunteers. Therefore opening times are limited to weekends only. So, the normal opening times are Saturday 2PM – 5 PM and Sundays 11AM-5PM. Also the museum will be open in 2017 from Saturday 25th March until Sunday 29th October. So, for 2017 the Bicentenary Year there will be no admission charges.
Wimbledon Windmill was built in 1817 by Charles March. He was a Roehampton carpenter. After an initial application in 1799 by a John Watney was rejected on the grounds that he did not submit plans when requested. So, the mill ceased operation in 1864 when Earl Spencer, the local Lord of the Manor decided to enclose the common for his own use and evicted the miller. He was the person who promptly removed all his machinery to prevent his mill being used in direct competition to his other mills in Kingston. Earl Spencer was strongly opposed. Then in 1871, local residents successfully saw that the Wimbledon and Putney Commons Act was passed and handed the care of the commons to elected and appointed conservators.
During World War II, when army camps were based on the common, the mill was camouflaged with green. It is to reduce its visibility to German bombers. But was repainted at the end of the war. More recently, a sail fell off in August 2015 damaging the base. However in November 2016, after a complete renovation, the museum opened again. The museum is supported by volunteers and open on weekends only from late March until the end of October.
This blog post was published by Plumbing Company Wimbledon.


text:
It Doesn't Have To Be Right…
… it just has to sound plausible
Tag Archives: nk jemisin
by iansales	4 Comments
Reading diary 2018, #5
Bit of a cheat this one, as most of the books are either short or graphic novels – well, one graphic novel, two short collections, and a novella. One has also been shortlisted for the BSFA Award.
Author's Choice Monthly 7: Neon Twilight, Edward Bryant (1990 USA). I had one of my semi-regular outbreaks of completist-itis, and since I owned about half of the Author's Choice Monthly issues, I decided I needed to have the rest. A full set. Even though many of the authors in the series I'm far from a fan of. Like Mike Resnick. Ed Bryant I knew nothing about. The name rang a vague bell, but if I've read anything by him in the past, I don't recall doing so. Bryant's introduction explains he's better known as a horror writer, although he did write heartland sf once – and it's three of the latter stories which are collected here. All three are set in the same space opera universe – the first story he set there, a later one when he decided to use the setting for a commissioned story, and a third written specifically for this short collection. They are… okay. The stories are set in some sort of interstellar polity – it's all a bit vague – in which disputes are settled through ceremonial wars, in which mercenaries in fighters battle each other. And those who survive, and have the highest kills, become popular heroes. The second story was written for an anthology set in Fred Saberhagen's Berserker universe, so the mercenaries have to fight off a giant machine intelligence bent on killing everyone. And they do it using the previously unknown telekinetic powers of one settled world's indigenes. The whole fighter/mercenary thing takes some swallowing, because there's nothing remotely plausible about using fighters in space combat, despite their prevalence in science fiction. The whole folk hero thing doesn't really parse either – after all, who remembers the aces from the Vietnam War? From any war? These Author's Choice Monthly have proven to be very much of variable quality. But they're a set, so I'm going to buy them all and read them all, damn it. Even if they're crap.
The Obelisk Gate, NK Jemisin (2016, USA). Do I need to explain that this is the second book in Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy – preceded by The Fifth Season and followed by The Stone Sky – which, like The Fifth Season, won the Hugo, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if The Stone Sky also won the Hugo this year… Making it the only trilogy to ever win the Hugo for all three instalments in consecutive years. Which says more about the Hugo Awards, to be honest, than it does the books. Social media these days is completely fucking useless for finding out what's worth reading – and the Hugo Award never has been – as it's all tribalism and self-promotion, but I'd heard enough rumbles about The Fifth Season to prompt me to buy it when it was £1.99, and I was pleasantly surprised enough (see here) to stick this second book on my wishlist. And so was given it as a Christmas present. It is a truth universally acknowledged, to borrow a phrase, that the second books of trilogies are generally the least satisfactory. After the tricks Jemisin had used in The Fifth Season, I had, to be honest, expected more of The Obelisk Gate. It is pretty much a straight follow-on. However, where the best part of the first book was its time-stacked narratives, that's a not a technique that can be continued once revealed. The Obelisk Gate doesn't even try. It's a linear narrative covering events chronologically following on from The Fifth Season. It rings a few changes – which are to its credit – inasmuch as it introduces a separate narrative for Essun's daughter, who was abducted by her father and proves to be an extremely powerful orogene; and it also breaks its narratives with first-person sections which directly address the reader whose narrator is not initially obvious. The worldbuilding is basically more of the same from the first book. The level of brutality remains high, although much of the invention was frontloaded in the first book. This is good solid genre fiction, a cut above the average, which can be read as both science fiction or fantasy. Are they the best two genre fiction novels published in 2015 and 2016? Of course they're not. The Fifth Season probably deserved its Hugo – and certainly did given the shortlist – but The Obelisk Gate's Hugo was not so deserved (although, given the rest of the shortlist…). I'll certainly read The Stone Sky, and I hope it picks up a bit after The Obelisk Gate – although I suspect that since the shape of trilogy is now becoming so much clearer, it won't do. The strength of The Fifth Season was that its shape was there to be discovered. But we shall see.
Author's Choice Monthly 29: Moonstone & Tiger-Eye, Suzy McKee Charnas (1992 USA). There are only two stories in this collection, both technically novelettes (I say "technically" because novelette is the most useless fiction category on the planet and we should really stop using it). The first, 'Scorched Supper on New Niger' I first read in Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years, and I liked it enough to moan that Charnas had never revisited the setting. It was apparently her first piece of short fiction, since she'd only written, and was known for, novels prior to it. On reread, I'm less enamoured of 'Scorched Supper on New Niger'. It's heartland hard sf/space opera, the sort of stuff Cherryh, among countless others, is famous for, written in the first person, with an engaging narrator. But. The use of Nigerian culture feels a bit heavy-handed. It's good to see something other than middle America as a cultural template in a science fiction story, but when you make use of someone else's culture it has to be done very carefully. Her female narrator also has agency. In 1980, when this story first appeared, that wasn't very common. The setting is all a bit identikit – Nigerians notwithstanding – and it's still a shame Charnas never revisited it. The second novelette is 'Evil Thoughts', from 1990. A woman and her younger significant other have moved into a new house. Mushrooms keep appearing on their lawn, and the crazy lady just up the streets, with two yappy dogs, tells her they are "evil thoughts". And the woman destroys the mushrooms, so the evil thoughts have nowhere to go… The story doesn't make much of its conceit, and seems more concerned with the anxieties of the woman caused by other people's thoughts on her having a younger partner. Disappointing.
Crosswind Volume 1, Gail Simone & Cat Staggs (2018, USA). Juniper is a Seattle housewife who is abused by her husband. Cason is a hitman for a mob boss in Chicago (I think), who seems somewhat more thoughtful and intelligent than is common for the breed. For reasons explained later, the two magically swap bodies. Cason finds himself in Juniper's body; Juniper is now a male hitman. It's hardly an original conceit – there's a novel from 1931 which has exactly the same premise! – and it's been used plenty of times since, both in cinema and written fiction. Simone and Stagg have bought a modern sensibility to the story, inasmuch as they were careful to consult trans readers in order to depict their characters' experiences in an appropriately sensitive way. And yet… they marry this with a brutal mobster plot. Certainly, represent trans people as accurately and sensitively as posssible, but why do we need to have a story which features domestic violence and mobster brutality? Those earlier body swap stories? They were comedies. In Crosswind, it's good the way the two principals adapt to their new situation… But I could have done without the clichéd violence – and using violence, by "Juniper", to resolve the chauvinism she'd been experiencing? I'm not sure that's a good message: woman experiencing chauvinism, can only be resolved by a man taking over the woman's body and behaving like a man? Disappointing.
Exit West, Mohsin Hamid (2017, Pakistan). I'd not even heard of this, although I suspect it would have eventually come to my notice, when I saw it on the BSFA novel shortlist. Which was a surprise. No one I knew on social media had been talking about it. Who were the people who nominated it, enough of them for it to make the shortlist? Which, okay, might only have been half a dozen, given how poorly subscribed the BSFA is these days, and how few people bother to engage with the awards. Anyway, I picked up a copy, and pretty much read it on a train journey to and from Leeds. And… It's good. It's very good. In an unnamed Middle East city which is clearly modelled on Damascus, Saeed and Nadia meet. She wears an abeya from neck to toe although she is not religious; he does not believe in sex before marriage. A developing relationship in an Islamic society, in which moderates and fundamentalists coexist, is first upset by civil war, and then by the appearance of doors, existing doors, which now miraculously lead to doors in other, richer and Western, nations. And so refugees flood through them, and there's no controlling them because they are never en route, or passing through somewhere else. Saeed and Nadia take advantage of this, and first move to Mykonos, and then to the UK, and finally to San Francisco. The premise is not thought through especially well, and the various Western nations' responses to an unstoppable wave of refugees seems implausibly, well, accommodating – especially the UK, given the UK's current policy of handling immigrants, as set out by Thereas May when she was Home Secretary, not to mention the whole Brexit fiasco… But Hamid focuses his story on the relationship between the two principals. On the one hand, Exit West makes an obvious point. And it's a beautifully written novel – I really do like Hamid's spare explicatory prose. But Exit West simply presents its premise, which doesn't really hold up to scrutiny, and never really interrogates it. Nor does it really interrogate the West's response to immigrants, especially unannounced or unwanted ones. If you want to read a novel which does an excellent job of commenting on that, then read Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone. It is the much superior novel. But Erpenbeck wasn't shortlisted for the BSFA Award – unsurprisingly, as her novel is not genre – amd Hamid was, and both tackle a subject important to our time. Much as I liked Exit West, I didn't think it entirely successful. It'll be getting the third slot on my BSFA Award ballot.
The Martian Job, Jaine Fenn (2017, UK). The title is a deliberate nod to the famous British 1960s movie, and the story even uses its own variant of Michael Caine's famous line. But the plots don't map precisely, nor the set pieces, and Fenn's novella certainly ends in a completely different fashion. The famous car chase through the streets of Turin in Minis becomes a race through the tunnels of old Martian colonies in "tunnelbuggies", and, yes, there's a heist which kicks it all off… Lizzie Choi is a corporate administrator for one of the most powerful companies on Earth, the Moon and Mars, in a future doiminated by the Chinese. She has a criminal background, but walked away from it. Unfortunately, when her brother dies on Mars, she's named as next of kin by her mother, currently in prison on the Moon, and so the company find out about her chequered past. Which results in her travelling to Mars to finish off the job her brother had begun: stealing the Eye of Heaven, the largest opal ever found and the property of her ex-employers. It's all first person, and Choi is an engaging narrator and very much at the centre of the action. The Martian Job does a lot of things well, which mostly means deploys its tropes with assurance – not that any of the tropes are especially original. The references to The Italian Job are fun, but little more than easter eggs. The ending isn't much if a surprise – it's optimistic and well primed. This is solid feel-good sf, which might well be about a crime and feature criminals, but is not gratuitously brutal or right-wing. It's a pleasure to read.
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die count: 131
Categories: book review, books, reading diary 2018 | Tags: cat staggs, gail simone, jaine fenn, mohsin hamid, nk jemisin, suzy mckee charnas | Permalink.
by iansales	Leave a comment
New Year spend
Christmas comes but once a year, but you can click on the "buy" button or wander into a bookstore on any day of the year…
To start, some Christmas presents. Having been impressed by Charnock's other novels, especially Dreams Before the Start of Time (see here), I'm looking forward to reading her debut, A Calculated Life. I "discovered" Henry Green only a year or two, but I'm steadily working my way through his oeuvre; Pack My Bag is an autobiography, written because Green didn't think he'd survive WWII (he did). I bought the first book of the Broken Earth trilogy, The Fifth Season, because it was on offer for £2.00, and thought it quite good; so I bunged The Obelisk Gate on my wish list.
Further additions to some bandes dessinées series I've been reading for several years. Volume 20 The Order of the Stones and Volume 21 The Time Opener are actually the end of the Valerian and Laureline series; there's a volume 22, but it looks more like a B-sides sort of collection. Orbital 7: Implosion is the start of a new two-part story, although it does follow on from Orbital 6: Resistance.
Some recent science fiction. I've been a fan of Matthews's Under Jurisdiction series since reading the first one, An Exchange of Hostages, so I was pleased when they started again recently; Fleet Insurgent is a collection of short stories and novelettes set in the universe. Not every novella tor.com has published has been to my taste – in fact, most of them haven't been – but Acadie is good solid contemporary sf, with a neat twist; also, the author is a friend and I like his writing. The Smoke is Simon Ings's last novel, and I'm reviewing it for Interzone.
A selection of first editions. A few years ago I started reading some examples of post-war fiction by British women writers, and I've been a fan of the writing of both Olivia Manning and Elizabeth Taylor for several years, but I've always wanted to try something beyond the handful of writers I read back then – hence, Devices & Desires by E Arnot Robertson, not to be confused with, er, Devices & Desires by Susan Ertz (see here). Many years ago I read a handful of novels by Philip Boast – they were all very similar, with plots based around secret histories of the UK, chiefly secret religious histories, but I really liked them and fancied reading more by him; The Assassinators is his debut novel and was a lucky, and cheap, find on eBay. Eye Among the Blind was Rob Holdstock's first novel, and I've been intending to pick up a first edition copy for ages… so I was especially happy to find a signed one. The Two of Them I found cheap on eBay from a UK-based seller.
Some charity shop finds. I've never read any Ali Smith, although I've heard many people speak approvingly of her work; Autumn even looks like it might be genre. I keep an eye open for McCarthy's novels when I find them, so Suttree was a happy find. And while I can take or leave Clarke, The Ghost from the Grand Banks is about underwater exporation, so it'll be interesting seeing what Sir Arthur made of it.
I'm not sure how to describe this one. I found it on eBay, from a German seller, and since I'm a fan of James Benning's films I couldn't resist it. Although titled (FC) Two Cabins by JB, it seems to include essays on other works by Benning and not just that one. I didn't pay anywhere near the price currently being asked on Amazon…
Categories: book haul, books | Tags: ali smith, anne charnock, arthur c clarke, cormac mccarthy, dave hutchinson, e arnot robertson, henry green, james benning, joanna russ, julie ault, nk jemisin, philip boast, robert holdstock, simon ings, susan r matthews | Permalink.
by iansales	1 Comment
Reading diary, #56
After a run of male authors in my last Reading diary, it's a run of female writers… including one novel I had never planned to read. These days, "Hugo Award winner" is more likely to make me put a book down than actually pick it up. Um, looking back over the history of the award, I can't say I've ever really used it as a guide to my genre reading and have always felt it has picked far more duds than actual classics.
The Milkman, Michael Martineck (2014, USA). Michael is a friend of many years, around two decades in fact, although we only met for the first time in person at the Worldcon in Helsinki this August. And it's just as well I know Michael as The Milkman posits a horrible corporatised world and does so with a completely straight face. But I know Michael does not believe the politics the book presents… because they really are quite nasty. The story is told from several viewpoints. A young woman is murdered outside a bar, but there are no clues to the crime. The corporate police officer tasked with solving the crime – assuming it can be done economically – finds himself hitting a brick wall. A film-maker is paid to make a documentary about the Milkman, a mysterious figure who analyses milk from corporate dairy farms and posts his results on an anonymous website. And then there's the Milkman himself, who's a low-level bureaucrat who, with his network of co-conspirators, tests milk as a hobby. The Milkman does a good job of presenting a world in which everything is owned by one of three corporations, and manages to use it effectively in a mystery/thriller plot. Personally, I'd have liked more commentary on the world – I mean, it's a horrible place to be, and presenting arguments from the characters that it's preferable to the "old world" made the novel sound approving. It's a political novel, and when it comes to political novels the author needs to wear their politics on their sleeve. You can't let the reader draw their own conclusions, because they might well draw the wrong ones. There's enough right-wing sf out there – the entire genre is essentially right-wing – and commentary against it is sorely needed in science fiction. Much as I enjoyed The Milkman, it felt too ambivalent toward its world – despite the final scenes set among those who had opted out – and I'd liked it to have been a little more overt in its politics.
Lust, Elfriede Jelinek (1989, Austria). I'm a big fan of Michael Haneke's films, and after seeing his The Piano Teacher, and learning that it was an adaptation of a novel by a Nobel laureate, I bought the book and read it and thought it very good. And then recently I thought it about time I read more Jelinek, so I picked up a copy of Lust, as it was quite short. It was perhaps not the wisest book to read on my daily commute, given the title. But never mind. The story is a brutal depiction of a marriage in wich the wife is treated as chattel by her husband. And when she eventually breaks free and finds herself a lover, he proves just as bad. What I had not remembered from The Piano Teacher, and perhaps that was down to the translator, but Lust was one long string of wordgames and puns and plays on words. It was relentless. Given its subject, it should come as no surprise the wordplay mostly focuses on sex, and especially on the male sex organ. I have no idea how this worked in German, or in the Austrian dialect in which Jelinek writes, but in English it felt to me like a dilution of the novel's central point. The wife is entirely subject to the husband, she exists to satisfy his sexual desires, just as much as she is there to look after him and their spoilt son. Some of the expressions used, "shot his bolt", for example, feel too… childish, schoolboyish, and while I get that the breadth and variety are what's important, it does seem to detract from the brutality. This is an ugly book, about an ugly subject, so perhaps the wordplay is intended to add to that ugliness and it works much better in German. But this is definitely a book that provokes a reaction, and I'll be reading more Jelinek.
Valerian & Laureline 19: At the Edge of the Great Void (2004, France). Cinebook are churning these out at a much faster rate after the Besson film, which is all to the good. At the Edge of the Great Void kicks off a new story-arc, which I think is the last for the duo. Valerian and Laureline are posing as itinerant traders on the edge of the Great Void because they feel the key to restoring Earth lies within it. But their plans are scuppered when Valerian is arrested. Fortunately, Laureline has made some friends, and with their help, she arranges an escape for Valerian, and the two of them join the crew of a ship heading into the Great Void. The story is mostly set-up – it introduces a new alien race, the Limboz, and drops hints about a plot by the Triumvirate, villains from an earlier story, and some sentient stones, the Woloch, who are clearly intended to provide the plot for the next few episodes. I've yet to see to Besson's film, although I expect to be disappointed. The Valerian and Laureline series is massively inventive – there's a good argument, although likely wrong, that it influenced Star Wars – and there's a very dry wit in the interaction between the two main characters. But the stories are also very cut-down, so much so it often feels like bits of the plot have been left on the cutting-room floor. It's like the opposite of decompression. Which, er, would be compression. I suspect it's an artefact of the series' original magazine appearances and limited page-count.
The Fifth Season, NK Jemisin (2015, USA). I had no plans to read this, for all that it won a raft of awards, and was shortlisted for many more (including, according to the back cover, the James Tiptree Jr Award, which, er, doesn't have a shortlist – it has an honour list, and I should know as I've been on it). Anyway, there was no real buzz around The Fifth Season, as there had been for God's War and Ancillary Justice, probably because The Fifth Season was Jemisin's sixth novel – and, on top of that, it was fantasy, which is of zero interest to me. But some people said it was actually science fiction, not fantasy, and I heard some good things about it and, I admit it, the clincher was the fact it was going for £2 from a near-monopolitistic online retailer… So I bought it. And… It certainly smells like science fiction rather than fantasy; and if its sessapinae and orogeny is hand-wavy bullshit, it's no more so than FTL, or indeed most of sf's common tropes. It's not worth summarising the plot, as much of it is linked to the world-building. The Fifth Season is set late in Earth's history, when the planet is unstable, and "fifth seasons", periods of intense seismic and/or volcanic activity, often bringing on nuclear winters, occur every few centuries. A new one has just kicked off as the book opens. There are three narratives, each following a female character – an orogene (ie, a person who can, among other things, control siesmic events) who has been in hiding for many years; a young girl with ability who is sold to an imperial order of trained orogenes; and a "four-ring" orogene of that order who is tasked with accompanying a "ten-ring" orogene to clear a town's harbour of coral. The first narrative is written in the second person; the other two are more traditional. Initially, I thought the novel better than average – the prose was doing the job, but the world-building was interesting, if a little overdone (but we've all been there, nothing brings in the nerds like an excess of world-building detail). It was brutal in places – ho hum, it's all that genre fiction does these days. So… enjoying it, but, on balance, unlikely to bother with the rest of the trilogy. And then I realised the book was using time-stacked narratives. Those three main characters were the same woman during different periods of her life. And things started to slot together like a piece of IKEA furniture. Now it was a much more interesting novel. Now, I might actually read the sequels. Did it deserve to win the Hugo? Given the shortlist… probably. I've read the Leckie, but the trilogy pretty much nose-dived after the first book. The other three shortlisted works do not appeal at all. If it hadn't been for the £2 price point, I'd probably never have bothered reading The Fifth Season. Maybe if I'd stumbled across a copy in a charity shop, I might have given it a go. But I am glad I read it.
The Best of Leigh Brackett, Leigh Brackett (1986, USA). I'm no stranger to Brackett's fiction, having been a fan for a number of years – ever since reading the collection, Sea-Kings of Mars, in the Fantasy Masterworks series, in fact. The stories in that collection are not fantasy, of course. But Sea-Kings of Mars was not the only book in the Fantasy Masterworks series that was actually science fiction. There are ten stories in The Best of Leigh Brackett, and they're all, well, typical Brackett. Some I had read before. They're set on planets and moons of the Solar System which share names with the planets and moons we know but otherwise bear no resemblance – Mars is a desert world, inhabited by ancient dying races; Venus is a jungle world, also, er, inhabited by dying ancient races; the moons of Jupiter are inhabited; as is Mercury… In fact, Brackett pretty much turned every planet and moon on the Solar System into the sort of exotic location used in a Humphrey Bogart movie. It's always the same – a dying race, a dead culture, a degraded society, and a jaded hero from Earth – pretty much always the US – who overcomes local taboos and superstitions to win the prize. It's pure Hollywood, so it's no surprise Brackett worked extensively in movies, her best-known scripts being Rio Bravo (my favourite western) and The Empire Strikes Back. Leigh Brackett and CL Moore were female pioneers in sf – not the only ones, by any means, and it could be argued Gertrude Barrows Bennett was more of a pioneer – but Moore and Brackette were big names in the genre fiction back in the 1940s, and while their style of science fiction is no longer popular, there's no doubt they were very good at what they did. Perhaps too good, in some respects – some of stories in The Best of Leigh Brackett are dismayingly misogynist. It's nothing unusual when you compare it to, say, EE 'Doc' Smith (it continues to amuse me that 'Doc' is always presented in quotes), but I'd expected better of Bracket – and she has indeed done better in other stories. Despite the title, The Best of Leigh Brackett does not contain any of her more celebrated stories, except perhaps 'The Jewel of Bas' – but since those stories appear in plenty of other Brackett collections, that's to its advantage. I'd also dispute the stories here were her best – I thought the aforementioned Sea-Kings of Mars a better selection. Nonetheless, Brackett is always worth reading.
Categories: book review, books, reading diary 2017 | Tags: elfriede jelinek, jean-claude mézières, leigh brackett, michael martineck, nk jemisin, pierre christin | Permalink.
Loyal friends
Ernest Hemingway apparently once said, "there is no friend as loyal as a book", which is one of those pithy aphorisms that doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. I've certainly been abandoned by books, mid-read, on planes and trains – most recently, on my flight back home from the Worldcon in Helsinki. It wasn't a very good book anyway. Here are a few books – some good, some I have yet to find out – that have joined the collection. Now that we have an IKEA store in Sheffield, I must see about buying some more bookshelves… assuming I can find a free wall in the flat to stand them against…
Several years ago, I bought loads of books about space, but the last couple of years I've bought few. I was tempted by Chris Hadfield's An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth when it was published, but didn't bother. Which is just as well, as I have now found myself a signed copy, and it was cheap. Haynes have done quite a few space-related Owner's Workshop Manuals. Some of them have been pretty good. I haven't read Astronaut yet, however. Midland Publishing published a whole range of Secret Projects books, and I have several of them. They've started reprinting them recently, but with redesigned cover art. And they're numbering the volumes as well, although they don't seem to be publishing them in order. Luftwaffe Secret Projects: Strategic Bombers 1939 – 1945 is the first of two volumes of Luftwaffe aircraft that never made it beyond prototype or even off the drawing-board.
These four rulebooks were a reward for signing up to The Great Rift kickstarter. Very nice-looking, they are too.
I keep an eye open on eBay for copies of the Phoenix Editions of DH Lawrence's books – they were published from the 1950s to 1970s – but some are easier to find than others. I now have The Complete Short Stories Volume Two and Volume Three, but not yet Volume One. You Must Remember Us… was a lucky find.
Some lucky first edition finds on eBay. Urgent Copy is a collection of essays by Burgess, One Hand Clapping is one of half a dozen or so novels Burgess wrote under the name Joseph Kells. Yes, that is a first edition of Lawrence Durrell's hard-to-find fourth novel, Cefalû. With dust jacket too. A rewritten version was later published as The Dark Labyrinth. And High Tide for Hanging is one of half a dozen crime novels DG Compton wrote under the name Guy Compton before turning to science fiction. The book was apparently in the library of the Windhoek Hotel in South Africa.
The Fifth Season was only £2 from a large online retailer, so I thought it worth a go. At the Edge of the Great Void is the nineteenth volume in the Valerian and Laureline series. I have yet to see the film. Emergence is the third and final book of The Corporation Wars. The Incomer is another one for my The Women's Press SF collection. And I loved Girl Reading when I read it a couple of years ago, but I had a tatty copy bought from a charity shop. I now have a signed copy.
Categories: book haul, books | Tags: anthony burgess, chris hadfield, dg compton, haynes manual, jean-claude mézières, joseph kells, katie ward, ken macleod, lawrence durrell, margaret elphinstone, nk jemisin, pierre christin, traveller | Permalink.
Doing the Hugos 1
I did this last year, so why not again this year? Once again, I'm not a member of the Worldcon, so I didn't nominate any of the works which appear on the various shortlists, nor will I be able to vote on them. But the shortlists are public, many of the novellas, novelettes and short stories are available online to read, and I have opinions which I am happy to share.
First up, the short stories. These are stories of less than 7,500 words, previously published in the US or online in the preceding year. The 2010 shortlist looks like this (click on the titles to read each story):
'The Bride of Frankenstein' (PDF), Mike Resnick (Asimov's December 2009)
Nope. I don't get it. After John Kessel's clever Austen / Frankenstein pastiche, 'Pride and Prometheus', appeared on last year's Hugo novelette shortlist, this year we have another entry riffing on Frankenstein. But this time it's a simplistic short story by Mike Resnick. The narrator is married to Victor Frankenstein, but it is not a loving marriage. But, with the help of the monster, Frankenstein's wife undergoes a change of heart. It's hard to know when the story's set – the narrator is married to Victor Frankenstein, but complains the castle has no electricity. So not the early 1800s, then. It's implied that Gone with the Wind has just been published, so the story could be set in the late 1930s. Except the narrator uses the term "family unit". 'The Bride of Frankenstein' works as a lightweight throwaway piece – and it's a little better than last year's dreadfully old-fashioned 'Article of Faith' – but are we seriously supposed to believe it's one of the two best stories published in Asimov's during 2009, and one of the five best stories published anywhere in 2009? I refuse to believe that science fiction is so moribund.
'Bridesicle' (PDF), Will McIntosh (Asimov's January 2009)
In the future of this story, those who have died and been frozen are revived by lonely people looking for love. Which could be considered a neat commentary on immigrant brides. But McIntosh adds more. He makes his eponymous Mira gay, so even if a man does fall in love with her and pay for her to be brought back to life, she's never going to return his sentiments. And, in this future, the personalities of dead people can be uploaded into living people's minds – these are known as "hitchers". Mira is woken at intervals over a couple of centuries, makes friends with a man who later admits he could never afford to revive her, and also learns that her lover is a corpsicle in the same facility. I wanted to like this story more than I did. It's well-written – although one or two phrases were a tad too much: "her jaw squealed like a sea bird's cry", for example – and Mira is a well-drawn protagonist. But it feels too busy. Either the "bridesicle" idea or "hitchers" alone would be enough. Having both seems to me to weaken the story, and so it turns into a future romance. 'Bridesicle' is not an embarrassing choice for the shortlist, but it doesn't feel strong enough to win a Hugo.
'The Moment', Lawrence M Schoen (Footprints, Hadley Rille Books)
I'll admit to being surprised at seeing this on the shortlist. But only because it appeared in a themed anthology from a small press. I wouldn't have thought such a book would have received a wide enough readership to generate enough nominations for one of its stories to be shortlisted. But it did. And the story is… Well, it's not bad. It's a series of linked vignettes, showing the history of the galaxy through visitors to a human footprint on the Moon. Given the last line of the story, I don't think the footprint is meant to be Neil Armstrong's (and, of course, the famous photograph was taken by Aldrin of his own bootprint), or indeed made by any of the Apollo astronauts. The story is a bit of smeerp overdose, full of silly made-up words. It's also somewhat over-written. Having now read it, I'm still surprised to see it on the shortlist. I don't actually think it's good enough for an award.
'Non-Zero Probabilities', NK Jemisin (Clarkesworld September 2009)
This story is so much better than the preceding three that it feels like a much better story than I initially thought it was. In fact, prior to the Hugo nominations being announced last month, this and the Johnson story from Clarkesworld were the only two of the shortlist I'd actually read. Adele lives in a New York in which wildly improbably events – disasters, mostly – happen regularly. It's a slice-of-life sort of story, with some lovely writing and a clever central conceit. It's not the sort of genre fiction I normally choose to read, or enjoy all that much, so I wouldn't have nominated it myself. But yes, it's good enough to be on the shortlist.
'Spar', Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld October 2009)
And you'd think this story would be the sort of genre fiction I would read since it has aliens and spaceships in it. But. It's a mood piece. It has no rigour. It feels like a writing exercise, not a story. I didn't like it when I first read it, I don't like it on rereading it. And I can't understand why it was nominated, never mind received enough nominations to make it onto the shortlist. Johnson, of course, was on the Hugo short story shortlist last year – for '26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss' – so she clearly has her fans. I'm not one of them. Nor am I fan of the type of genre fiction she writes.
I thought last year's Hugo shortlist for short stories was poor, and I'd hoped this year's would be better. It isn't. Two authors are back again – Resnick and Johnson – which only shows how incestuous the Hugo Awards are. I mean, there are a huge number of people writing genre short fiction, so I find it really sad that the same old names keep on appearing. This year, I think the Jemisin should win, with the McIntosh as runner-up. I expect the Johnson will win.
My take on the novelette shortlist will follow soon. It at least looks better than the above shortlist. Um, the same was true last year. Perhaps the best sf now being written is at novelette-length…
Categories: 2010 hugo award, science fiction, short stories | Tags: kij johnson, lawrence m schoen, mike resnick, nk jemisin, will mcintosh | Permalink.
Find Me In…
Postscripts 20/21 Edison's Frankenstein
M-Brane SF Quarterly
Catastrophia
British Fantasy Society Journal: New Horizons
Vivisepulture
The Monster Book for Girls
Where Are We Going?
The Maginot Line
Because of What Happened
Litro Magazine
Postscripts 32/33 Far Voyager
The New Accelerator
A la deriva en el mar de las Lluvias y otros relatos
Interzone #262
Ian Sales's 2010s – A Son of the Rock -- Jack Deighton on 100 books, part 5
iansales on Moving pictures 2019, #34
Mark on Moving pictures 2019, #34
Redhead on Best of the year 2019
Scrum_Jet on Best of the year 2019
@AdamCSharp @lproven have you seen Norwegian Ninja? 7 hours ago
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@davidmbarnett same here - although I've had more negative ones for the audiobooks than I did for the print ones, e… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 19 hours ago
@davidmbarnett oh I don't know; you seen how toxic Goodreads is getting? :-) 19 hours ago
@davidmbarnett "90ies"? really? :-) 19 hours ago
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Bijelo Polje is located in the northern part of Montenegro, north of Bjelasica Mountains on the bank of Lim River. Bijelo Polje is the cultural, administrative and economic center of the northern part of Montenegro.
Bijelo Polje has a favorable geographic position; it is situated in the crossroads of the main roads: the Beograd – Podgorica highway and the Belgrade-Bar railway also run through this the town.
The Church of St. Peter and St. Paul is situated in the center of Bijelo Polje. The church was built at the end of the 12th century, in the place of a smaller church from the 10th century.
During its history it was destroyed and reconstructed at several occasions.
The natural attractions around Bijelo Polje are Bjelasica Mountain, Biogradska Gora National Park, Tara River and Djalovica Cave.