“The Tangled Lands” by Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias Buckell

This book has been on my list for ages, I don’t remember how it initially came up. It’s an interesting format, the authors go back and forth writing these sections that each focus on different characters and different situations. The sections will reference previous events occasionally but they don’t revisit previous protagonists or anything like that.

The book takes place in Khaim, a city essentially on the verge of collapse. The people used magic in the past and that brought the brambles, a plant that feeds on magic and is brought into existence through its use and then chokes the life out of the ground. The people that touch it get poisoned and if you have too much you fall into an endless sleep. Our first story is about an alchemist that invents a machine to kill bramble. He brings it to the mayor and the chief magician and they are delighted. They then figure out how to repurpose the machine to track down magic users. They can make them glow blue now, and the streets are red with blood of the executed people performing small magics they think they can get away with. The alchemist is locked up to continue working on it, but he eventually escapes with his family.

Khaim is referred to as the Blue City afterwards, and interestingly it’s the ability to completely shut down magic use from fear that gets credited with the city still standing. The next section is about a woman whose father used to be an executioner, and she substitutes for him as he lays dying. While she’s out raiders come, they set her house on fire and kill her husband and father. She goes after them but is defeated by the raiders. However, she’s found by these traders and then joins their caravan. They teach her to fight, she inspires them to recruit women to fight the raiders, and they take the raiders city. However, she is too late to save her kids, who have been indoctrinated into the raiders Way (which is basically that magic is bad because it destroys other people and those that use magic have to be killed or converted) and they have already left on a pilgrimage.

Third story was the hardest for me. It tells the story of Mop and Rain, two kids that are refugees from a city that fell to bramble. They get jobs pulling bramble seeds out of the ground but Rain tragically gets pricked and falls into bramble sleep. Mop doesn’t want to have to kill her but no one is letting him keep her safe so he plans to return for her body that night. He is too late though, so he heads to the brothel to see if she was taken there. She isn’t, so he does a spell and enchants her comb to find her. He’s nearly found by the city, then nearly taken by bramble himself, but a fuss is being made at their overseers house. Turns out that he took her body to do what he wanted with her, but the comb stabbed him in the back killing him. The people then rally together to all take care of Rain, having heard the legend of the girl who protected herself.

Final story is about a blacksmith’s daughter, her family is hired to make armor for the Duke’s son but they aren’t paid enough. They do their best but he isn’t happy. They try to run but are caught up with and the Duke brings in the chief magician who then uses magic to dig a pit, send her parents in there, and cover it with bramble and dirt. The Duke tells the daughter to finish the armor and he’ll free her parents. She instead makes a suit to wear to dig them out but is found out, ends up killing the Duke’s son, and then heading there with the suit. She’s too late, her parents committed suicide when their food ran out, and she goes to bury them. After fighting off guards, she leaves to find a new life.

Alright so the most interesting part of this for me is the use of magic and bramble as an allegory for climate change. The whole idea is that people think that their use is justified and small, but brambles appear randomly in their neighbor’s house or something like that. And as it goes on it’s clear that the upper classes get to do it whenever they want and the lower classes pay for it. The first two sections have more to do with this idea than the latter half, the first story with the fact that those in power are more interested in punishing music users than clearing the bramble really speaks to this. It reflects how people today don’t want to clean up the CO2 and would rather put the blame on someone else. The second story with the raiders and their cult is also really interesting as it’s revealed that their violence is a response to brambles. Same violence, different side of the coin where they want to kill the magic users to stop the bramble from impacting them.

The other major theme that comes through from all of the sections is this class warfare, how the upper classes profit and the lower classes suffer. There are small victories, but all of the stories are just so sad. These people are being constantly taken advantage of because the upper classes know that they can do that. Does it ever get better? Is it worth it? I’m not sure, there are endings to the sections that are vaguely hopeful but it’s hard to say. That’s partially why I felt the third section so strongly, the community coming together at the end feels much more hopeful to me than anything else.

My main issue is that the bramble sleep in some ways is essentially a plot device. The protagonist in the second section falls into bramble when the raiders beat her and she wakes up after a few weeks. Yet Rain is doomed pretty quickly in the third section. It isn’t the most consistent, which is maybe realistic, but it feels as though people wake up when we decide we want them to and don’t if we don’t.

So this is not the most light hearted read, but I think sections are very thought provoking. I do wish that there was a little more discussion relating magic to climate change, that essentially disappears after the first half of the book, but it’s the main interesting point to me. But there are ideas that emerge from these stories that are very applicable to life right now.

This Is Beautiful: New Pointe Shoes

 Alright so I rebought pointe shoes about a year and a half ago, and I knew my shoes were dead for a bit. But I have this thing where I hate shopping and spending money and all that, so I kept going for as long as I could. And it got to the point(e) where I couldn't do anything with the shoes and it was a struggle to hold myself up. I knew the shoes were dead, but I kept thinking about how bad of a dancer I am and that I'm getting worse, not better, etc etc.

All that to say, I bought new shoes about a week ago and it's SO much easier! I actually do not totally suck, if anything the dead shoes probably made me stronger and I can tell that I've improved now. It's really delightful, even though the hit to the bank account was a little rough. But I'm so excited to dance in them, it's a joy again.

“Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” by Camille Laurens

I had been meaning to pick this book up for a while, it was recommended reading from the book Don’t Think Dear and I thought it sounded fascinating. This book tries to tell the true story of Degas’ iconic sculpture “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,” or as I knew it growing up, “Marie in Fourth Position.”

The book covers many aspects of Paris at this time. There’s the treatment of young dancers like Marie, who came from impoverished families trying to sell their daughters to the Paris Opera to make more money. There’s what we know about Marie’s family, she’s the middle daughter of a family where the father is missing. She moved around a lot, likely rent hopping.

Then there’s Degas. His eyesight is going so he is moving from painting to sculpture with specifically wax. He is the odd one out of the Impressionists since he prefers dark scenes and horrifying reality instead of pretty pictures. When this sculpture is unveiled, it shocks and horrifies the public. This was the heyday of phrenology and thinking that personalities, and criminal tendencies especially, were written on a person’s face. The little dancer happens to have exaggerated criminal characteristics, and may not even reflect what the model looked like very well. It isn’t totally clear what Degas intended with this work, he has other sketches of criminals where he exaggerates their features so he may buy into this nonsense, but he also displayed the sculpture like a doll and emphasized her age in its name. He’s calling attention to the fact that she’s a child, barely hit puberty, and she’s in an environment where she’s likely being driven to prostitution to make money.

The book ends with Laurens trying desperately to know what became of Marie. We have her birth date, and the death dates of both her sisters and mother, but we have no idea what became of her. After modeling for Degas and other painters, she misses so many days at the Paris Opera that she’s fired as a dancer. That same month her older sister steals money and they’re caught as the family tries to get away. The older sister spends time in jail after that. And Marie disappears.

Since there is just so little we know about Marie, the book is full of speculation and rumination on the sculpture more so than her life. There’ll be a discussion of some aspect of Paris society or whatever, and then we’ll be back to how that is reflected in the sculpture. Some of it does appear to be grasping at straws, I’m not entirely convinced that Degas wanted this little dancer to reflect all of life and death in her face. But I’m not ungrateful for the thoughts, I think art like this can be molded and remolded to reflect whatever the audience is thinking about.

And I am grateful for Laurens’ tenacity to stick to the facts. There’s a lot of fictionalized accounts of this work. She stubbornly refused to do that, even documenting how hard she was trying to find out information about Marie. The extent of the speculation is pretty clear, she asks questions throughout or talk about what she imagines the interactions between Degas and Marie to be. I wish we knew more about her life as well.

It is so interesting to me how the reception to this work of art has changed. It horrified the people of Paris when it was unveiled, and now every dancer knows it and loves it. This was a fascinating perspective on the work, and a much needed reality check for what it was intended and who it is portraying.

This Is Beautiful: Kind of a Break?

 Last week my mentor was out of town, and this week a lot of activities I do are suspended for a break before the fall. It's nice to get a break from the pressure, and it's nice that it's not all at once, so I get multiple chill weeks. In different ways of course, but still. When my mentor was out I was able to course prep and get stuff done that I wanted to do personally, and then with less activities I have more evenings free during the first week of class. It's nice! I almost prefer it to a complete stop to be honest, still feels like I'm going but it's a little more relaxed.

“Mortality” by Christopher Hitchens

I’m not sure how this book got onto my radar, but it’s another one that has been on my reading list for a while, so I decided to bring it with me on vacation. Pretty light stuff for the beach. Anyways, it consists of seven essays that Hitchens wrote and published in Vanity Fair, then it was collected into a book after he died. I didn’t really know the author’s work all that well, but I thought this was a great collection of thoughts on dying.

Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and writes a lot about his treatment and his feelings as he goes through this, but he also talks about how people treat him. From what I gather he was very outspoken about the failures of religion and he writes about what it’s like for people to pray for him as an atheist and just how weird that is. He also writes about how his voice started to disappear as a result of the treatment and how unfortunate that was for him as a communicator. There was a section where he talks about how he doesn’t “have” a body, he “is” a body and how easy it is to forget that when you’re healthy.

To be honest, I thought this was a very refreshing take on death. I’ve read so much stuff about death from the point of view of a physician and whatnot that I appreciated getting the perspective from a patient. Particularly a patient who clearly knows his craft and is good at writing. It makes for a much more relatable experience for me as a reader who is not a physician, plus I just feel that the market is saturated with doctors trying to share their thoughts about the whole death thing. So it was a quick read, kinda depressing, but I quite enjoyed it.

This Is Beautiful: Independent Course Design

 I got moved to a different course recently and it was a swap from teaching with someone else to teaching on my own again. And even though it's more work, I am excited to be just on my own and having that flexibility again. Last fall I was in a similar situation and I liked the freedom, and now I have the added benefit of building off of a previous instructor's materials. (Thankfully it's not like last fall where I was doing a course from scratch.) I think it'll be a good semester as a result!

“Networking for People Who Hate Networking” by Devora Zack

This book had been on my list for a while, and in theory I need to be looking for a job soon, so seemed like a good time to bring it on vacation with me. It was a quick but kinda entertaining read.

I think I was surprised a little by the fact that the whole premise of the book is that you can tailor your networking strategies to whether you feel more like an introvert or an extrovert (yes there are centroverts as well). There is a lot of emphasis on how these groups of people can learn from each other, and you might not fit into one category seamlessly. But it’s a framework to guide how you think about networking and approach it instead of being scared of it. Zack sprinkles in plenty of anecdotes about people she has worked with or mistakes she’s made. Overall she advocates for being prepared and to devote just a little time to networking instead of burning yourself out on it.

I think this was helpful to read, but I wasn’t particularly surprised by any of it. The main benefit was that it was all wrapped up in snappy ways to remember her strategies. I also feel like as a scientist we definitely network but it’s a little different in that I don’t know anyone with a business card or anything like that. So there are limits to what I can do with this as well, but I think a lot of the big ideas can easily be applied.

Anyways, glad I finally gave it a read, if it wasn’t the most helpful it was short so I didn’t have to invest a ton of time into it.