The first three episodes of The Testaments have been dropped in my part of the world on Disney +. It's an adapatation of Margaret Atwood's novel of the same name, which is a decades later written sequel to her famous dystopian classic The Handmaid's Tale; when it was published, I reviewed it here. Just to make their lives more complicated, though, the show is also a sequel to the tv series The Handmaid's Tale. The first (very good) season of which I watched, but not the later ones, as word of mouth about diminishing quality and lack of time have detained me, but I did osmose this presents a problem because not only is the backstory the showin its later seasons developed for one of the central characters (Aunt Lydia) very different from her backstory in the novel, but the timeline of another central character is different as well. With this in mind, my spoilery reaction to the first three episodes is beneath the cut. Above cut: those first three episodes are well acted and produced and make some interesting choices re: adapting the source material - and I don't mean "interesting" as a euphemism for bad -, but haven't revealed yet how they'll solve the Lydia problem.

( The perils of being a female teenager in Gilead )

Quote of the Day:

"No process is wrong that leads to a first draft of a book."

— Elizabeth McCracken, A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction. HarperCollins, 2025.


My Check-In:

Neverending Project is neverending. ;-)


Tally
( Days 1-7 )

Day 8: annavere, badly_knitted, carenejeans, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, goddess47, luzula, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, trobadora


Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

Carobeth Laird, Encounter with an Angry God: Recollections of my life with John Peabody Harrington (1975)

Skimmed, partial---amidst the readings for one of my classes, I was reminded that an undergrad prof had mentioned Laird years ago. The prof said that Laird's book made Harrington sound both brilliant and "like ... not just a piece of work, but a pile of work."

I'd say that from Laird's text, it seems that Harrington was firmly neurodivergent, unable to connect with Laird, apt to project his mother ineffectually onto her (without understanding that he was doing so or that his repeated errors were painful for Laird), and lucky in benefiting as a white man from the work others did for him and around him. Yes, also quite bright, but the inability alongside it to balance schedule disruption and the undertaking of basic self-care, including regular meals, is awfully familiar from at least one person I've dated previously. He didn't "have to" learn it because others sort of handled it, until they didn't.

Laird downplays her own brilliance in the text, though it's clear that she knew herself. She managed to secure a divorce from Harrington in an era when her father could appear in court on her behalf.

The long-ago undergrad prof was a person with a teenaged child, at the time, and had recently divorced a husband who was a piece of work. Harrington's work was amazing, she said, though a lot of "Harrington's work" is only attributed to him---often by him, unfairly. She had been working on Harrington's work, including his letters, and--- The classroom full of students interested in Celtic studies blinked at her, she realized she'd hared off on a tangent, and we went back to how the late Romans wrote about, or misattributed stuff about, continental Celts. What Harrington worked principally on, and what the undergrad prof doubled in, was indigenous languages, mostly in California.

I was taken with the need to do an Orphan Black rewatch and there's so much I forgot! Tatiana Maslany is so good, which you all knew, and the supporting cast is *chef's kiss*. It makes very few missteps, and watching in marathon fashion means even storylines I disliked originally (CASTOR) work much better. It's on Netflix, so if you are in the mood and don't mind the grossout body horror, it's a good watch.

And this poem seemed fitting:

This Poem Will Get Me On Some Kind of Watchlist
by Jessie Lochrie

I'm dancing at a nightclub
when someone behind me
places a hand on my shoulder.
I assume it's a friend until
the hand slides down my chest.

Boiling with gin and rage
I grab his wrist, whip around,
and punch him in the jaw.
It doesn't land well—
I've never hit anyone before—
so I punch him in the gut,
just for good measure.

I look at him doubled over and spit
Never do that to a woman again,
and then I run. My friends laugh in the cab:
You punched a guy!
but I sit silent and burning.

In Crown Heights, in Union Square,
in South Williamsburg: men leer and
whistle and smack their lips.
I ignore them, or flip them off,
or tell them I'm married.

When they purr que guapa
I yell callate and they all laugh.
I can't tell if they're laughing at me
for being a white girl speaking bad
Spanish, or at the idea that anything
I say might actually shut them up.

In my impotent rage I dream of a world
where I am not public property. I would
start wars for my right to walk down a street
unafraid, a thousand wars for a single day
in which my body belongs to me alone.
An army raised against each cat call. A bullet
for every man who ever told me to smile.

***

Quote of the Day:

Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

— Stephen King


My Check-In:

Alibi sentence. I've been doing some adulting, mostly because another member of the family isn't. Sigh


Tally
( Days 1-6 )

Day 7: annavere, badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, luzula, ofmonstrouswords, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, trobadora, ysilme


Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

Title: Walking On The Moon
Fandom: Ryan Gosling
Movie: First Man
Music: Walking On The Moon by Ruelle
Length: 3:56
Streaming/download at: DW | Tumblr

Today's poem:

An Epistemology of Planets
by Annie Dillard

Mercury

A brook runs on all night;
a book, shut,
still tells itself a story.
So you, out of thought,
you, forgotten Mercury,
still spin and spend the circles of your fury.

Venus

Evenings, after I've eaten
dessert, you rise, you wear
your barest, shining skin.

Later, mornings, you up
and do it again.

Do you think I've forgotten so soon?

Earth

Planets, alone, and grieving,
look who you're running with:
look at our baby-blue planet the earth
and all of the people, waving.

Mars

Mars keeps its dignity,
its networks of cool.
Certain photographs reveal
an air of longing, still.

Jupiter

Swings, spattered
by shadows of Jovian moons:
Io, Europa, Callisto,
the giant, Ganymede.
Companionable, each

nonetheless keeps

the perfect arc of his distance.

Saturn

         It is to you I come in my dream,
you, dancing alone in the dark, light-heart,
       asleep inside your spinning hat!

Uranus

Uranus, cold face,
old rock and ice,
remembers a song
and sings it once
round the dark, twice.

Neptune

Banished, Neptune,
luminous, green,
sleeps, and dreams of the sun.
Awake, he holds her round
as tight as he can.

Pluto

Spends twenty years
wandering in Cancer,
that old celestial
crab. Takes years to touch
carapace, jointed foot
on jointed leg; nudges
mandibles, roving, awed,
in every season.
                          Getting to know
you, still, I find you clear-eyed,
cloistered, clawed.

***

Quote of the Day:

"Imaginary worlds are the best worlds."

— Alicia Valdes-Rodriguez (Substack note)


My Check-In:

I wrote a drabble! Whoo-hoo! 8-)


Tally
( Days 1-6 )

Day 6: badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, goddess47, ofmonstrouswords, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, ysilme

Day 7: china_shop

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

Today's poem:

Great Things Have Happened

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, "Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time." But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn't mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I'm sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

"Is that all?" I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you've never visited
before, when the bread doesn't taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.

--Alden Nowlan

*

Quote of the Day:

"Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion — that’s plot."

— Leigh Brackett


My Check-In:

A bit of work on the Neverending Project, and some poking at drabbles. The prompts are a lot of fun. But I'm out of practice!


Tally
( Days 1-4 )

Day 5: annavere, badly_knitted, brithistorian, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, goddess47, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, trobadora, ysilme

Day 6: china_shop


Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

Happy Easter if you celebrate! Happy Sunday if not.

Here is today's poem:

Sunflower Astronaut
by Charlie Espinosa

[commence imbibition]

I begin my log in the seed capsule. There is little to report.
I am dormant. I am alone. I am drifting through the void.
Sometimes, I wonder what lies beyond the vacuum-sealed walls.
Sometimes, I swear I hear a very faint, very beautiful, song.

I have landed. Surface: moist. Atmosphere: favorable. Competition: unknown.
I discard the shriveled seed coat. Every cell in my body pulses with life.
Enzymes fly like meteorites and I emerge, gasping from my pod.

[commence germination]

There is no need to waste time with instructions.
I open my endosperm sack and gorge on the stored feast of sugar.
Invigorated, my radicle, that intrepid probe, plunges into the depths.
For the first time I taste, no absorb, the rich minerals of the new world.

My cotyledons unfurl like two green sails into the light.
Ah, sweet solar wind, filling my chlorophyll with galactic energy.
Gradually, I establish myself here, growing up and down, in light and dark.

[commence vegetative growth]

Forgive me. I have not been carefully logging my progress.
The divisions, they simply became too numerous to catalogue.
Besides, I was in a kind of trance, conducting the photo-symphony–
Keeping my glucose stocks fat and multiplying my meristems.

The important point is that I am tall with a well-defined stalk and enviable leaves.
There are other sunflowers too, and a rather impudent beast who is fond of digging.
All in all, I have adapted well. I am happy. Though I don’t care for the beast.

[commence ripening]

For months I have studied the sun. My head of bracts tracked its arc like an antenna.
Now I am a sun, with a yellow crown and a hot core of disk florets and pollen.
I, too, emit signals to orbiting bodies who come and go with fertile stardust.
Was this my mission, to set into motion a new solar system?

I merge with another star. My head sags under the weight of our fruits.
The inflorescence fades. The wind scatters my wilted petals over the floor.
It has become difficult to know where I end and where this planet begins.

[commence decomposition]

The digging beast beheaded me and made off with my seeds.
The sparrows peck at what’s left. Somehow, I don’t seem to mind.
Each day, a little darker, a little colder, siphons me away.

I said before I began alone, but now I remember something else:
Being a seed among other seeds encircled in a halo of yellow rays.

*

I made gyoza! #mygyoza They might not look that great but they are delicious!

*

Oops, I got interrupted when responding to check-ins on Day 3 and forgot to finish them. So some of my comments will be out of synch, sorry!


Quote of the Day:

"If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences."

— Eric Hoffer


My Check-In:

More Neverending Project… All the prompts people offered sound intriguing, thanks! And dswdiane, the Princess and the Pea on The Couch is hilarious. I've already got several lines for that! 8-)


Tally

Day 1: badly_knitted, brithistorian, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, goddess47, the_siobhan, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, trobadora, ysilme

Day 2: badly_knitted, brithistorian, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, goddess47, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, trobadora, ysilme

Day 3: badly_knitted, brithistorian, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, goddess47, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, trobadora, ysilme

Day 4: annavere badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, goddess47, sanguinity, trobadora

Day 5: china_shop


Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

Today's poem:

After After
by Kristi Maxwell

This was after we moved into pencil drawings of tree houses on stilts, but before the cows grazed in the diminishing field of the freckle signifying our face.

This was after a refusal of berries too close to rotting, but before self-consciousness about metaphor.

This was after the butter-soaked collard greens, but before we deflated the ache as if it were something reusable and easily stowed.

This was after the pimple you mistook for jam and, obviously, failed to wipe off, but before the last comma, which we obstinately misplaced.

This was after the bite mark, but before the tongue.

This was after the nosegay protecting the nose from the plague-stench, but before the video of the autopsy of the woman with a bra and panties matching your own.

This was after lushness, but before lushness.

This was after the ghosts caught fire and after their flimsy collage of light, but before the building conceived space and before the hard labor and before the dead men.

This was after the green shoe busted and the wool shoe, but before the description of a bus-struck owl.

This was after we knew, but long before saying.

*

Michael Sfard, The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine, and the Legal Battle for Human Rights. ( yikes )

Daniel A. Bell, The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University:( Who goes Party? )

Fashion and Intellectual Property, ed. David Tan, Jeanne C. Fromer, & Dev S. Gangjee: ( around the world )

Rebecca Solnit, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change: ( hope in the ashes )

Nicholas Buccola, One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle over an American Ideal: ( one of them was right )
Blake Scott Ball, Charlie Brown’s America: ( Peanuts )
John J. Sullivan, Midnight in Moscow: A Memoir from the Front Lines of Russia’s War Against the West: ( we lost )

Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World: ( recommended )

Srdja Popovic with Sophia A. McClennen, Pranksters vs. Autocrats: Why Dilemma Actions Advance Nonviolent Activism: ( thinking about resistance )

I've been hosting my vids at Sendspace for download for many years. And even though it's been more than 10 years since I last made a vid, I still want them to be available!

Lately, though, I can't log in - and they are not responding to emails or requests for a new login.

I think the download links are still working (for now), though I suspect this is a harbinger of a platform about to die.

So, I guess I have a question for the ether - anyone else having a similar problem? And anyone have recs for a platform, reasonably priced, where I can host downloads that won't infect people with malware or ads?

Switching to a Highlander icon (see my check-in below). Hope I don't confuse anybody! 8-)

Quote of the Day:

"But you know what? A lousy draft proves nothing. Rough drafts are rough — everybody's are. Being a writer isn't like being a musician. You don't have to get it right every day. The wonderful thing about being a writer is, you only have to get it right once. That's all anyone will ever see. The only bad draft is the one that doesn't get finished."

— Lev Grossman, The Halfway Point: A Pep Talk on his Substack, Last Stop Corbenic.


My Check-In:

More editing and re-arranging and Etc. Etc. Etc. on the Neverending Project.

But, inspired by dswdiane, I was looking at some old Highlander drabbles I never posted, which smushed HL with fairy tales and folktales. So far I've got The Frog Prince, Goldilocks & the Three Bears, Hansel & Gretel, Cinderella and Rapunzel. I'd like to write five more to make an even 1000 words. I could use some prompts. Anyone have any old folk tales or legends you'd like to see in the HL-verse? 8-)


Tally

Day 1: badly_knitted, brithistorian, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, goddess47, the_siobhan, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, trobadora, ysilme

Day 2: badly_knitted, brithistorian, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, goddess47, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, trobadora, ysilme


Day 3: badly_knitted, brithistorian, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, goddess47, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, trobadora, ysilme

Day 4: china_shop


Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

Mind you, the non-fannish world feels like one long Good Friday for humanity these days, but still: time to share the annual joy of our Franconian Easter Wells. (And bridges.)






( Lots more eggs and wells beneath the cut )

In which Boyd becomes even more my favourite among the new characters, Kelly gets herself a mission, and Ed.... but that would be telling.

( Spoilers are on the case )

I've shared music by Woodz on this dw several times before, dating back to 2023 if my tag is comprehensive. I don't think I've ever fully recapped the unlikely marvel that is his career, because it's had so many starts and stops along the way. Yet here we are, and Woodz is now one of the most successful and respected singer-songwriters in Korea right now. It's such a delight to see really good music being appreciated!

( cut for length )

What have you been listening to lately?