Cybertron Flower

I spent a delightful day working from home with the sunlight streaming in through all available (open!) windows, watching birds frolic around our new bird feeder. This latest batch of links has a similarly spring-like feeling — not all are cheerful and light-hearted, but there is a common theme of emerging into light and life.

The first three are all Ukrainian, sparked by the complicated emotions around the four anniversary of Russia's fullscale invasion, on 24th February:

The Kyiv Independent team — journalists, videographers, adminstrative staff and more — took readers behind the scenes to show the ingenuity and determination it took to survive this winter's Russian-inflicted energy crisis and carry on bringing their reporting to the world.

From Ukrainian Institute London, a panel discussion on 'culture as security'

And from chef and campaigner Olia Hercules, a video conversation with Dima Deinega, founder of an (excellent) UK-based Ukrainian vodka company, which ended up being one of the most life-affirming discussions I've experienced.

On other topics:

An interview in the Guardian about being a professional chef in Antarctica

Via tozka, the Persephone Letter, which, to quote tozka, They're subtle marketing, more about vibes, focused on sharing things similar to Persephone Books/the people who enjoy them then about blasting sales info or whatever. If I must be marketed to, I'd rather receive it in this manner: rambly, meandering newsletters or blog posts sprinkled with links to interesting things that give a fuller picture of the person or organisation behind it, rather than just a list of things to buy now.

(Incidentally, the Antarctica link came from a similar newsletter, this one from the Vanderlyle restaurant, which takes a similar approach.)

I think that's it for now.

The weekend kicked off in delightful style with the silent disco on Friday night. It was the usual joyful chaos of crowds dancing and singing their hearts out to the cheesiest music imaginable. Usually the three DJs are split thematically, with one channel playing pop, one alternative music, and one hip hop and rnb, but this time they split up across the decades. I think if I counted every song up, the '90s channel probably slightly won out for me, but I was too busy happily jumping around to count. My face literally hurt from smiling so much and so widely. Amusingly, there was a bit of confusion at the beginning when one of the DJs announced that somehow his channel was being transmitted at Ely train station. I have no idea how this would even be possible, but if true, the commuters heading north or south at 8pm would have had a rather disorienting experience.

Although — in deference to the cathedral location and the fact that most attendees are over forty — the event finished at 11pm and I was home about five minutes later, three hours straight of dancing followed by not enough sleep did take its toll, and my two hours at classes in the gym on Saturday morning were even more exhausting than usual. I made it through, hauled myself into town to meet Matthias at the market, and whipped around doing the grocery shopping at top speed in order to escape the impending rain. We made it into our favourite cafe/bar, amazing food truck cheese, sauerkraut and pickle toasties in hand, just as the first drops began to fall.

Spring is finally starting to show its face — dark pink flowers on the quince tree, crocuses blossoming purple in the raised beds, and other bulbs emerging from the ground. I bought a bird feeder, filled it with mixed seeds, and hung it up in the back garden, although I haven't noticed any birds making particular use of it so far. This year, I'm starting my fermentation plans early, and made a test batch of this sauerkraut yesterday. It needs a few days left alone in a dark cupboard, and then I'll test the results.

This morning was swimming, crepes, river and market wander, with coffee from the rig in the market square. I've just returned downstairs after a very lazy yoga class, and I plan to spend the rest of the afternoon slowly winding down, with my crysanthamum flower tea in hand, catching up on Dreamwidth.

I read two books this week, both in their way dealing with trauma recovery, one with staggeringly better results than the other. The difference in quality is so dramatic that it almost feels unfair to compare them, and yet I can't help doing so due to their thematic overlap.

First up was Deerskin, Robin McKinley's retelling of the 'Donkeyskin' fairytale, which was the remaining recommendation from my post requesting fairytale/mythology retellings. This dark and unsettling fairytale has incestuous rape at its heart, and so for obvious reasons doesn't get included very often in anthology collections. McKinley handles this difficult subject matter with perception and sensitivity, telling a story in which physical and mental flight, and space and time (in a sense outside of space and time) experiencing the cyclical and linear growth of the natural world allow her heroine to return back to herself, in healing, bravery, justice and human connection. One thing I always feel McKinley does very well is convey the full richness of all the senses, and this is on full display in Deerskin: the bite of the winter cold, the softness of a new puppy's first fur, the welcome intense taste of food after a long period of hunger, the way fear and trauma are felt in the body, and so on. The whole thing is just staggeringly well done — McKinley at her absolute best.

The second book was A Theory of Dreaming, Ava Reid's follow-up to her dark academia A Study in Drowning. The former was originally intended as a standalone, and certainly drew its characters' stories to a satisfying close, but given it ended up being a breakaway success almost solely due to TikTok word-of-mouth and reviving its author's career, I assume a sequel was more or less inevitable. Dreaming sees its central couple Effie and Preston return to university, uncovering more shocking secrets about the great canonical works of literature that underpin their two warring nations' origin myths, contend with more institutional sexism, classism and xenophobia, and try to shore up their relationship in the face of Effie's ongoing mental illness and trauma. The problem, as always with Reid, is the complete absence of any subtlety; everything is overexplained and beaten into the reader's head with the clunkiness of a hammer blow. Reid is one of the worst culprits for a kind of fearful authorial overexplanation, as if writing in anticipation of a social media mob ready to descend at the slightest hint that depiction might equal endorsement, spelling out her books' central messages over and over again like a streaming-era TV show putting clunky plot and thematic exposition into its dialogue in case its audience gets distracted by mobile phones and misses something crucial. The rarefied ivory tower privilege of her fictionalised university, the unsophisticated exploration of war, the resolution to all the various injustices piled up on Effie — everything is anxiously spelt out, and then spelt out again, and then concluded in the most 'and then everyone applauded' Tumblr post manner imaginable. As with A Study in Drowning, the inspiration from AS Byatt's Possession is clear (and acknowledged), but honestly, that just made me want to reread Possession again.

I have another Ava Reid book making its way to me at some point via library holds, and I know it's likely to irritate me in similar ways. Her first couple of books had promise, but I feel everything since has been a serious step down in quality, and yet I keep trying.

Tonight I'm going out to the next iteration of the silent disco (80s/90s/2000s music — the cheesiest you can imagine), which as always is taking place in the cathedral. There's always a weird moment of disorientation when you enter the cavernous space of this ancient medieval cathedral ... and it's full of dancing people of all ages, dressed in lurid fluoro colours, stage lighting, and DJs.

So my prompt for this week's open thread is:

What examples of activities taking place in wildly incongruous spaces have you encountered?