katzenfabrik

Today's January meme prompt was from @ThisFoxWrites.twitter: "current favourite piece of music, what it feels like and what it does to/for your brain?" (There are still some empty days for prompts!)

I thought yesterday's prompt was difficult, because it meant writing about fiction by people much better with words than me. Today's is far harder! 
Not only am I musically ungifted, but my music-listening habits are idiosyncratic, so that I'm not really sure what my 'favourite' piece of music (even currently) is.

( Habits. )

Anyway, as I haven't been at work for three weeks (and spent today in meetings), I've not been listening to much music lately. Here, though, is a song I love, which I discovered while almost alone in the office just before Christmas a couple of years ago. I spent that time going through a masterpost of Arctic music and noodling away by myself; it really wasn't so bad.



This is Ukiuq by the Jerry Cans, a band from Nunavut. The song is in Inuktitut—there's an English version too, with a lovely animated video, but I much prefer the translation of the original lyrics over the English ones.

In all the Jerry Cans' work, I love the combination of the fiddle and accordeon with Inuktitut singing and Arctic, indigenous, Inuit themes. Ukiuq is particularly haunting, the violin calling out alone before weaving back through Nancy Mike's rhythmic throat-singing lines, a sound that's captivating and clearly human but, to my ears, less familiar than the strings and drums. There's so much energy here for a song about relationships lost to time and migration, so many human voices raised together for a song about the blizzard and the frozen river. I challenge you to listen to this and not find yourself joining in, if only to yourself: Nalligilaurakku! I used to love them.

(For something more light-hearted, check out the video for Mamaqtuq! CN: seal hunting.)

Today's topic from the January meme comes from @anotherbluestocking. There are still some empty days!

I decided to interpret 'world' as universe rather than planet, and look at fiction where I feel the worldbuilding has something special about it. This is an unordered list!

Machineries of Empire by @yhlee

I obviously had to include my current obsession here. The MoE universe is one in which manipulating spaceships, soldiers or entire populations according to advanced mathematical equations can generate exotic effects—anything from rain that twists the geometry of a battlefield, so that organs are braided through the skin of their owners, to FTL travel and a disembodied form of immortality. Naturally, I love it all. Book one, Ninefox Gambit, contains synaesthetically delirious descriptions of combat with exotic effects that are the equal of anything I've read in SFF; the further books explore the political system of the (Hept|Hex)archate* and its relations with the conquered ethnic groups that make up the empire, as well as with other interstellar nations. @yhlee handles this large-scale political worldbuilding with aplomb while consistently characterising even minor characters with tiny details that illuminate their societies.

*They lost a faction along the way, it was a whole thing.

Welcome to Night Vale

I'm far from up to date with WtNV, but I have listened to the first 60-70 episodes and have the novel on my bookshelves somewhere. The world where Night Vale and its rival city, Desert Bluffs, exist is an uncanny-valley version of our own, where strange conspiracies and mysterious apparitions seem normal, reported on by the cheery local radio host. What I love about it is how the writers make use of the podcast format to conjure up images and then subvert them, to make reality malleable and disorienting. I also love just how queer and queer-friendly it is. This is a world where an eleven-year-old schoolgirl can be an adult man's hand... why would anyone be bothered by Cecil narrating his steps towards romance with Carlos on the radio?

Bas-Lag by China Miéville

Bas-Lag, described in Miéville's novels Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council, is a riotous, crenellated, grotesque, brutal, multifarious world, a Gormenghast writ on an enormous scale; for pure breadth of invention, there's nothing like it. I adore Miéville's verbal gymnastics in these early books and admire how unafraid he is to inflect his creations with politics. Though I disagree with quite a few of his story-telling choices (uggggh, why did you make me spend half a book in the head of that petulant carp Bellis Coldwine, China?), I enjoy every opportunity to explore the corners of this world.

Bonus: The Moors in Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series

This is a bonus because I've only read the first of the Wayward Children novellas, Every Heart a Doorway, which describes but never visits the world into which princessy Jill and mad scientist Jack fell into and, five years later, were ejected from. I loved that book, though, and can't wait to read Down Among the Sticks and Bones and go directly there.

I'm late getting started with the January meme, thanks to spending New Year's in the dateless haze of holidays. Never mind! Here's my entry for the 1st of January, @cloudsinvenice's prompt. (I'm still taking suggestions for any empty days.)

When I was a small human kitten, my parents already had three cats: Monty, Oscar and Boris. I suppose each of them counts equally as my first cat. My family never had dogs, although my paternal relations have had many of them through the years, most memorably my grandmother's big daft Alsation, Fiver. It seems I was fated to become a cat person from birth. (@zarkonnen, on the other hand, never had pets as a child but has been a cat person as long as I've known him. When we finally got @sinister_katze.twitter and @dexter_katze.twitter, he took to cat stewardship like a duck to running away from cats.)

Monty was the oldest of those three original cats. My mum had had him since before she met my dad, and he died when I was seven or eight. Sadly, all I remember of him was that he had to be put down; from my perspective, he went to the vet—to be cured of something, I assumed—and never came home again. This Christmas, I learned more about him.

He was the runt of a litter of barn cats, the only long-haired one, and so tiny and bedraggled that when Mum went to the farm and asked about kittens, they told her they had all been given away. Surprise! One filthy and flea-ridden kitten remained. Mum took him home and, not knowing anything about cats, gave him a bath. For the rest of his life, Monty loved to jump into a full bathtub, if possible when she was in it. Very adaptably, he had just concluded that this was the way to show love in his new household.

Monty was an escape artist and a free spirit. He got out of every cattery Mum tried to board him at when she went on holiday: each time she would come back to apologetic assurances that they'd done all they could to find him, but it just wasn't possible. If she went and sat in her back garden with a bowl of cat food, however, Monty would soon come sauntering back. After a while, she gave up on the catteries and just got a friend to come by and feed him. He'd still be gone when she returned, though, and need to be enticed back home. Monty had time for Mum, the wild outdoors, and nothing else.

In his old age, Monty developed kidney failure. The vet told Mum that he couldn't be allowed outside; there was too much danger that he would pick up a bug that would kill him. There was no way he could enjoy life sick and cooped up in the house, though, she knew. After a lot of painful deliberation that I, as a child, was of course not party to, Mum said goodbye to Monty in the kindest way she could. I'm certain he had a good life and he was very well loved.

Boris was a slinky grey cat who eventually left us for our next door neighbour, Ina, whose house already contained other cats, a lot of birds, and two enormous St Bernards. Well, I guess all St Bernards are enormous when you're eight years old; those things were the size of ponies to me.

Oscar was my very favourite cat. He was a big, tough, black cat, and though not usually rough, he wouldn't stand for physical affection from anybody. For some reason, though, he took to me. One day my mum came down into our kitchen to see preschool-aged me kneeling on the linoleum, playing with an old black cardigan of hers. I was rolling it back and forth across the floor.

"Rolly rolly this way. Rolly rolly that way."

She looked again. It was not a cardigan. It was Oscar, blissed out and allowing himself to be pushed around by the human child he had, inexplicably, become inseparable from.

Oscar didn't come with us on the move from Southampton to Southend when I was nine; we think he nipped over the fence to stay with Boris, Ina and the St Bernards. I'm sure they all had a very stimulating and entertaining life together!

I've really startled myself by keeping up with my "daily" posts as well as I have done since late June! (If you can't see them and want to, lmk in the comments.) On the other hand, my non-journal blogging has been non-existent of late. I just saw this meme on @yhlee's journal and thought I would steal it to rectify this.

The idea is that you pick a date and give me a topic to write about on it. I don't think I know 31 people here, so please feel free to grab more than one date if you like!

Off the top of my head, I can definitely write about topics related to vampires, fandom, feminism, coding, terrible things happening in cold places, cats, Switzerland, science, SFF, world history, German... and lots of other things, I'm sure.

( Long list of dates. )

I stripped out many self-deprecating asides in this post. Go me. :)