Other Voices

 I'm once again lagging behind on podcasts, not in the least because ICHH is reviewing Andor episodes faster than I can watch any TV show, and also I have negative amounts of time in May. But anyway, my pick for the week is their episode "Who We Talk About When We Talk About Borders." 

Lost in the discussion about "hey is it bad to deport little children with brain cancer?" and "is it constitutional to offshore a concentration camp?" is the fact that the border is part of land that does not belong to the US. I mean, none of the US belongs to the US any more than Canada or Mexico is a real thing. This episode focuses on the damage done to Indigenous communities whose traditional territory encompasses both sides of the imaginary line, and the horrors they face, from harassment by the regime's Gestapo, to grave desecration, to environmental war crimes. It also looks at the differing news coverage under the Biden and Trump regimes, and how the plight of both migrants and Indigenous communities can be ignored when it's inconvenient for media to cover.

Just finished: Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Yeah, this ruled. Go read it. It won't take you as long to read as it took me (reading in class during silent reading time, with constant interruptions). It's beautiful, juicy, voluptuous, joyful. You'll love it. I found the exercises at the end a little cringe but everything else was fantastic.

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar. This one also really landed the ending. It spoke to the tense and contradictory position many of my radical academic friends, especially the BIPOC ones, face in the university, and on a broader level, spoke to the class anxieties that any of us in the Professional Managerial Class (god how I hate that term) undergo. And it's just beautifully told.

The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea by Naomi Kritzer. Whoops I haven't been logging the novelettes I've been reading, but I want to give a shoutout to this one, both because it's excellent and also because it continues the themes of the previous two books I mentioned. It's a selkie story about an academic forced to give up her career after she loses all of her research data and her husband gets tenure. She finds herself temporarily in a seaside town, "editing" his work, when the seals that she had been studying years ago return to the coast. This one is so great and has a dark enough streak running through it that it can't be accused of coziness, even though the plot is essentially "woman finds a place where she belongs and people she belongs with."

The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo. This is another Singing Hills novella, so I want to say that if you, like me, loved the other ones, you will also love this. With the caveat that if you liked the other ones because they were relatively gentle stories, you may have the reaction to this one that some Goodreads reviewers did. This instalment takes a sharp turn into Gothic horror, which, personally, I am here for, and it might be my second favourite after When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain. Cleric Chih accompanies a young bride to the decaying estate where she will marry a man three times her age; the title of the novella gives away one twist, but the other is even more brutal and delicious.

The Tusks Of Extinction by Ray Nayler. I actually didn't expect to like this one as much as I did, mostly because the title sucks and it didn't get great reviews. But. It's very cool. It's about a ranger protecting elephants in Kenya. She's murdered by poachers, but before she died, she'd uploaded her consciousness, and a century later, she's downloaded into the brain of a newly de-extincted (de-extinctified?) woolly mammoth. The mammoths have been re-introduced into the Russian steppes, but as the only surviving elephants are in captivity under heavy guard, they've been failing to thrive because mammoth culture has been lost. As the only expert left in elephant behaviour, she has to teach them how to be mammoths.

Okay I am slightly obsessed with the mammoth de-extinction project, which has all kinds of thorny ethical and scientific issues but has non-zero scientific validity, plus I just really want to ride a woolly mammoth before I die. This actually does address the objections in a way that's interesting, and the characters, their grief and trauma, and the plot are all very compelling. 

Currently reading: Bad Cree by Jessica Johns. I've been meaning to read this one for awhile. It's a coming-of-age horror novel about a Cree girl whose dreams begin to manifest upon waking. She had left her home in Alberta to escape the grief of losing her older sister, but in order to find out why she keeps waking up holding, say, a severed crow's head, she is forced to return back to her family. Really good so far.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell. People have been raving about this one to me for ages but I've avoided it because it keeps being described as cozy. Fortunately so far the coziness is about how warm being nestled in your dead father's entrails are. Okay, I'm intrigued.