jamoche

Wednesday night I plowed through most of The Unworthy by Augustina Baztericca, translated from Spanish by Sarah Moses. This is a horror novel about a woman living in an isolated cult after climate change has ravaged most of the planet.

This was one of those books that had me going “okay just one more section and I’ll put it down” and then it was five sections later and I was still there. It just hooked me. I wanted to know more about the cult, I wanted to know more about the narrator’s past, I was so eager to see what was going to come next.

This book goes heavy on gore, mutilation, and cult abuse, so if those are not for you, you may want to give this one a pass. I found it fascinating; the world of the narrator is so grim and tightly controlled, but it’s all that’s left (as far as they know). The book also leans hard on things unspoken: things the narrator knows are so taboo she crosses them out of her own (secret) writings (such as when she wonders if maybe the earth has begun to heal); things she has forcefully blocked from her memory because they hurt so much to think of; the deep current of attraction she feels towards various other women in the cult which is easier to express through violence than sexuality.

In the claustrophobic world of the cult, it becomes so easy for the leadership to pit the women against each other, and they have grown shockingly cruel and violent towards one another in their quest for dominance (each of the “unworthy” dreams of ascending to the holier status of a “Chosen” or “Enlightened”). With virtually no control over their day-to-day, they fantasize about opportunities to punish each other, their only ability to enact their will on the world.

The hints from the beginning that the narrator questions her role in the cult create a delicious tension in the work. Her mere act of writing her experiences down is a violation of cult rules and she frequently keeps her journal pages bound to her chest under her clothes so no one will find them.

The translation was excellent, the writing flows well and Moses captures the descriptions and the narrator’s backtracking on her wording without anything becoming awkward.

The book isn’t long, but I was riveted, and I would like to read more of Baztericca’s work in the future. This was also the second Argentinian horror novel that surprised me with queerness, so another win for Argentinian horror.

last update was 25th March and I'm not going to attempt to remember everything done.

Healing: nipple is still very sore, still using the rubber (teething) rings inside my bra to keep the fabric off it (it is still noticeably swollen compared to the other). The rest of the skin has healed, and I think I've finally finished peeling. Most of my armpit is bald, which as a texture experience feels different from having shaved. I continue to have reasonable and exhausted days and have not correctly balanced how much I can get away with doing.

study: I've got lots of good books that meet my criteria, and I've been poking through them. Other parts of the project are going slower. I am frustrated by my inability to buckle down on one, but I am also aware that I'm working through the tasks that I said I was going to need to do to do it properly. I got an email from the ethics board about corrections, so that will be Monday's task.

weather: there has been a startling amount of rain. There was a cyclone that didn't get this far south, but did push a front through. Jandakot recorded 77.4mm on one day, which is a 51 year maximum for March*, and a total of 87.6mm in the five days of rain. Plus we got 16.2mm to 9amm Wednesday, and 6.8 mm to 9am this morning.

music: I missed the last rehearsals of term for the Monday night group, and that goes back this coming week. I have not practiced anything, not least because bowing was painful for a while. I have made it to two of the Wednesday night rehearsals - one to discover it was the end of term open practice / concert, and one where it was a greatest hits and I didn't get access to the music before the rehearsal, and so sight read everything (I did try a practice on the night before). I failed to go to the sunday recorder group last weekend because apparently when I updated my calendar to the new alternating fortnight I didn't do it right, and I'd been successfully doing it from memory up until now.

con: we are at not enough week's before the con. I have been dropping the ball more than I like and I have to find a solution. I have one I would like, but I don't know whether anyone will take it on. We have some fabulous guests. Plus we have both GUFF and DUFF winners attending. I know Farah Mendelsohn is one, but I can't pull the name of the other out of my head. I'm presenting in the academic stream, and at this point I don't have enough to say. argh.

*I use an aggregator site for my rain information, rather than the BOM, so they are going off their data set; they claim this as 'probably a record maximum'. They report 17.0mm as the March average (1973-2026), the previous monthly maximum as 83.6mm in 1992, and the previous daily maximum as 37.8mm, also in 1992. At the opposite end, 2011 had no rain in March -- that would be the year of the big hail storm, if I remember correctly.

( exercise; numbers )

(Reporting in vaxx-boosted, by the way.)

Have been noting hither and yon stuff about blokes 'looksmaxxing' and 'mogging' (which apparently does not involve cats? is there some reference to tomcats facing off and fluffing out their fur? probably not. Who knows.)

This is yet another of those things That Blokez Do apparently in order to attract the opposite sex and I do not think it is because I am Old, and my tastes were formed in A Different Day, that I feel that there is a significant Failure To Do The Research about What Actually Pulls The Chixx.

Not that this is exactly a new phenomenon, when I was reviewing those books on yoof culture in the 60s/early 70s, I was thinking that various of the paths being pursued by (presumably) cis het men, because Teh Gayz were in separate chapters, did not seem to me necessarily terribly productive - maybe being a great dancer, but not if it was all about him showing off moves, ditto the being A Mod Face.

And after all the idea that women only go for men who look a certain way is to laugh at, cites yet again the instance of The Late Rock Star Historian, who was a scruff who was not perhaps quite at the John Wilkes level of having serious disadvantages in the way of appearance to overcome but was - well, I suppose it depends on the artist you're thinking of and there were painters who would have turned out an excellent oil-painting of him but was hardly of male-model looks. But was if not of universal appeal, considerably popular with the opposite sex.

We are frankly not surprised at reports that young women are eschewing the dating game, because what it turns up is very likely young men blatting on about their self-maintenance regime and probably trying to shill for supplements and peptides.

Am also given to wonder whether the people who follow these creatures are all acolytes of their maxxingmessage, or whether at least some % are treating them as the modern equivalent of the old-style freakshow. (Though for all I know, in the darker reaches of the internet you can find videos of men biting the heads off chickens and so on.)

While I was thinking that it would be preferable for them to contemplate upon the natural world and build bowers for, or offer particularly attractive stones to, the objects of their interest, I also became cynical as to whether female bower birds and penguins are quite so appreciative of these efforts as naturalists would have us suppose. ('Him and his bloody bowers' - 'Not another pebble')

Me: what goin' on?

To Carrie who wouldn't leave the deck this morning until i came out to keep her company as she does her business.

To my accounts as yet another system (reddit), with a totally different identity (and absolutely no link to my phone number, ha, or phone) is hacked. I am sad i can't have MFA on dreamwidth or live journal. This may be enough to trigger me to shut down my LJ account because i just don't know what might happen if i lose control over it, unlike dreamwidth where i trust the ownership.

( Related but a digression )

1. The World Bank thinks better of its old free-market absolutism.

2. Autonomous robo-taxis now driving themselves on British streets

(tags:London UK taxi automation driving )

3. Europe could run out of jet fuel in 6 weeks

(tags:Europe fuel oil airplanes doom )

4. Europe's Anonymous Online Age Verification App Is Here

(tags:Europe age apps )