![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatHanging out in Gardens and Cafes with a Friend
After the podiatrist appointment yesterday at 9 AM, I got a Pumpkin Spice Chai Latte (note next time I'll do almond milk not coconut milk) and a GF Chocolate Cookie (I wanted a Tahini Chocolate Chip GF cookie, but they gave me the GF double Chocolate Chip Walnut cookie instead. I did not discover this until thirty minutes later when I was sitting at the transit garden and deigned to open it and check it out. At least I knew it was still GF. I'd seen both cookies.) Then met up with Wales at the transit garden. The Transit Garden is a community garden that MTA Real Estate agreed to let the community have to plant a garden, as long as they did it on top of the concrete protecting the subway and tracks below. It makes gardening a bit limiting as a result. While I was sitting there, I listened to them debate on how to best repair their garden.
Man: The MTA can't take it away from us can they?
ME: Oh yes they can.
Man: But it's a public space.
Me: They are a public agency and own it. They can also grab the land adjacent to the tracks under eminent domain, they just do need to compensate the owners at a "fair" price for it. But the garden? That's theirs. Unless they sold it to you, which is unlikely.
After meeting up in the Garden, and sitting for a bit, we went off for Wales to grab breakfast, while I checked out my old digs to see if it was under construction. It's not. The construction is behind it - not directly, about three buildings to the west, behind it. A dry cleaner's is behind it. (Wish the dry cleaners existed in that space when I lived there. It might have and I just ignored it.) The building looks like it is in disrepair. Whoever owns it now, doesn't appear to care about it all that much. The roof is crumbling, the white door is dirty and peeling paint, and it just looks depressing. I'm glad I moved. Then we walked to the park and hung out, chatting, until lunch time rolled around and we had Avocado Toast on GF bread at Planted Cafe. Which used to have CBD, but gave up (you need a license) and is now in the cheaper spa business. They have saunas out back and a cold plunge bath. They also do fascials and sound baths. How they do all this in the backyard, I don't know. It's not that big (I looked). I think they must do it upstairs or below? While waiting for our food, a little girl in a pink princess costume visited us and we chatted for a bit. She was between five and six years of age. Children at that age are friendly, more so than their parents.
Have you ever noticed that animals, cats and dogs, and small children are friendlier than adult humans? Maybe it's the innocence? As we age we become increasingly wary of others.
Wales and I went book store hopping, after hanging out in a couple of small parks in her neighborhood and coffee shops. There are a lot of coffee shops in her neighborhood. So many in fact that we were pondering how they all managed to survive. There cannot possibly be that many coffee drinkers in Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
Wales: I really love editing things.
Me: Would you be a beta for me?
Wales: sure.
Me: I'm currently writing something in long-hand, to avoid distractions by the internet. In a kind of journal framework. They are journal entries.
Wales: What is it about?
Me: Well this woman can't access certain memories which have been removed by magic, and she has bracelets that are magically locked, and she's trying to have them -
Wales: Wait is this about human trafficking??
Me: No! The woman had been raised in the magical or Fae world, she's part Fae and part human, and due to an arrangement, she returned to the human world to get to know her father - and after spending time in his world for a while - she gets to choose which one to live in. But he removed her memories. And there's four types of magic in this world: blood, memory, earth and elemental -
Wales has a sour expression on her face of disgust and annoyance.
Wales: I'm sorry, but I really don't like fantasy.
Me: Uh, have you read any?
Wales: Chronicles of Narnia? Is that fantasy?
Me: Yes, a type of fantasy.
Wales: I don't do fantasy. I haven't read Tolkien. I. don't even know what a fae is.
Me: Fairy?
Later.. at the Books Are Magic bookstore. I've admittedly been standing too long on my sore foot, and walking too much on it. Plus my blood sugar is up. So I'm a little irritable.
Wales picks up a book titled "Lovecraft County" with a picture of a Lovecraftian Monster on the front. (It's the book the HBO series was adapted from.)
ME: And you don't like fantasy.
Wales: This isn't fantasy.
Me: Yes, it is. Horror falls under fantasy.
Wales: No it's not. I like books that have a semblance of reality to them. Look when you talked about the Fae, I had no idea what one is. (She goes to the fantasy section and pulls out a book with the title "The Fae" on the cover.) Until I saw this.
I try not to roll my eyes. I've known what the Fae were since I was nine, possibly earlier? Maybe six?
I go outside to sit on a stoop which is painfully close to the ground, to ponder this and rest my sore foot, while Wales buys "Lovecraft Country". I really need to find offline people who share my reading and writing tastes that I can hang with. I've only been hunting around for them for fifty-seven years, and still striking out.
Wales has very mainstream tastes when it comes to books. Actually all the offline friends, acquaintance and otherwise, that I currently have do. She loves dark thrillers like Patricia Highsmith, horror like The Other Black Girl and Kindred, and dark mysteries like Gone Girl. Also non-fiction. And contemporary romance. She'd fit in well with most of my co-workers in this regard.
Weirdly, my brother's tastes are more eclectic. He'll read fantasy, science fiction, etc. And he's gotten me fantasy novels.
Book Stores
We went to two book stores.
One was just your run of a mill mainstream book store. Books are Magic is a family owned independent book store with two branches - one on Smith Street and one in Brooklyn Heights. The owner is novelist Emma Straub and her husband Michael Fusco-Straub. My difficulty with it is its too limited in its selection of science fiction and fantasy, also other non-mainstream genres. This is why I tend to buy mostly online now. That and I prefer indie writers to traditionally published writers.
The other was Liz's Book a Bar - a combination book, tea, coffee and wine bar owned by a Black Business Woman. Also it and the other one - contained magna comics, I was impressed. I remember when you couldn't find them. If they were in color, I'd snatch them up. But alas, no, magna is in black and white - and small. I find them hard to see and read as a result. Also you read them backwards, which confuses my brain. It's easier to read them digitally.
At the book stores - Wales went to the mainstream fiction and non-fiction shelves, while I perused the shelf on philosophy, witchcraft, tarot, occult, magic - I was looking for a compendium or encyclopedia of magical and mythological creatures with drawings. I also jumped over to cook books to find Tasty Simple Recipes - or Sugar Free/Gluten Free recipes. Struck out on both. Perused fantasy/science fiction, then mystery/thriller/horror and finally graphic novels.
I perused Lore Olympus - which I'd read about online. All I knew about it was that it was interestingly drawn webtoon - about the Persephone and Hades romance. I liked the use of colors and the art, so that drew my curiosity. And the books are...very pretty. The art is quite lovely. Brilliant colors and an innovative use of color to drive plot and character. I couldn't read it without my reading glasses - the print was too small. And the books were about $19.99 per volume with six volumes. And just no. Took me awhile to locate the price.
At home, I hunted them down on line, it's a Webtoon, and found a few animated or dubbed versions on You Tube. Netflix is apparently doing an actual animated version. And, hmmm, after the first five episodes, I realized, okay, this is problematic, to say the least. Particularly for a young thirty-something female writer/illustrator.
I'll give you the set-up?
Hades gets stood up by Mimnth, a nympth, to his brother Zeus's party. He's embarrassed, harassed by siblings, and irritable. Then he spots Persephone (whose name I can't spell to save my life). Persephone was raised in the mortal world by her mother, Demeter, the Goddess of Spring. She's young, innocent, virginal. She's rooming with Artemis in the City of the Gods. And borrows a dress of Artemis to go to Zeus's party. Hades spots her and is speechless. And states that her beauty would put Aphrodite to shame or something along those lines. This pisses off Aphrodite - who in a jealous rage, decides to have Eros ruthie Persephone, deposit her in Hades car, and let the hijinks begin. Their plan is drunk Persephone (rather drugged), will embarrass herself, and Hades will take advantage, and they'll want nothing to do with each other.
Ugh. Also Persephone is written like a pretty, naif, who men and beasts fall over themselves for. And Hades is the dark, misunderstood rogue with a heart of gold.
Sigh.
If I hadn't just listened to a real life horror tale about an actress being ruthied in Brooklyn and violently raped as a result by a complete stranger who deigned to help her, and just thought she was "drunk"...I may react to this differently?
I wish contemporary romance writers would stop already with this trope. Drugged female placed in romantic lead's bed - is not a romantic set-up that you want to encourage.
So, I'm glad I didn't spend any money on that. Pretty or not, I don't like the trope at all. There are romance tropes that do not work for me, and that is one of them. Shame though, I liked the artwork. The creator is a better artist than writer/story teller. She should stick with the art.
The other book that I considered was "The Dream House" but I can't remember the author's name. Ah found it, and it's on Kindle Unlimited! Score. I can read it for free.
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
"In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.
And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope―the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman―through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.
Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be."
Interesting, it's about domestic violence in a lesbian relationship - and unpacks the stereotypes of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. I don't tend to like memoirs as a genre, mainly because I'm getting one perspective and it's rarely reliable? But this does look interesting.
We had a lovely time, and Wales pointed out the last book to me. Showed it to me and wanted to buy it. (Wales and I are both straight. So our interest in the book has zip to do with sexual orientation and more to do with the description of narrative styles. I didn't realize it was about lesbians until now - the back of the book was difficult to read without reading glasses on.)
After sharing a hug, I journey back home, about six subway stops away and a six block walk away.
Here's a view from one of those subway stations, and the aqueduct the subway journeys over on - that I see each day of Downtown Brooklyn. That alone is worth taking the G train every day to work.
After the podiatrist appointment yesterday at 9 AM, I got a Pumpkin Spice Chai Latte (note next time I'll do almond milk not coconut milk) and a GF Chocolate Cookie (I wanted a Tahini Chocolate Chip GF cookie, but they gave me the GF double Chocolate Chip Walnut cookie instead. I did not discover this until thirty minutes later when I was sitting at the transit garden and deigned to open it and check it out. At least I knew it was still GF. I'd seen both cookies.) Then met up with Wales at the transit garden. The Transit Garden is a community garden that MTA Real Estate agreed to let the community have to plant a garden, as long as they did it on top of the concrete protecting the subway and tracks below. It makes gardening a bit limiting as a result. While I was sitting there, I listened to them debate on how to best repair their garden.
Man: The MTA can't take it away from us can they?
ME: Oh yes they can.
Man: But it's a public space.
Me: They are a public agency and own it. They can also grab the land adjacent to the tracks under eminent domain, they just do need to compensate the owners at a "fair" price for it. But the garden? That's theirs. Unless they sold it to you, which is unlikely.
After meeting up in the Garden, and sitting for a bit, we went off for Wales to grab breakfast, while I checked out my old digs to see if it was under construction. It's not. The construction is behind it - not directly, about three buildings to the west, behind it. A dry cleaner's is behind it. (Wish the dry cleaners existed in that space when I lived there. It might have and I just ignored it.) The building looks like it is in disrepair. Whoever owns it now, doesn't appear to care about it all that much. The roof is crumbling, the white door is dirty and peeling paint, and it just looks depressing. I'm glad I moved. Then we walked to the park and hung out, chatting, until lunch time rolled around and we had Avocado Toast on GF bread at Planted Cafe. Which used to have CBD, but gave up (you need a license) and is now in the cheaper spa business. They have saunas out back and a cold plunge bath. They also do fascials and sound baths. How they do all this in the backyard, I don't know. It's not that big (I looked). I think they must do it upstairs or below? While waiting for our food, a little girl in a pink princess costume visited us and we chatted for a bit. She was between five and six years of age. Children at that age are friendly, more so than their parents.
Have you ever noticed that animals, cats and dogs, and small children are friendlier than adult humans? Maybe it's the innocence? As we age we become increasingly wary of others.
Wales and I went book store hopping, after hanging out in a couple of small parks in her neighborhood and coffee shops. There are a lot of coffee shops in her neighborhood. So many in fact that we were pondering how they all managed to survive. There cannot possibly be that many coffee drinkers in Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
Wales: I really love editing things.
Me: Would you be a beta for me?
Wales: sure.
Me: I'm currently writing something in long-hand, to avoid distractions by the internet. In a kind of journal framework. They are journal entries.
Wales: What is it about?
Me: Well this woman can't access certain memories which have been removed by magic, and she has bracelets that are magically locked, and she's trying to have them -
Wales: Wait is this about human trafficking??
Me: No! The woman had been raised in the magical or Fae world, she's part Fae and part human, and due to an arrangement, she returned to the human world to get to know her father - and after spending time in his world for a while - she gets to choose which one to live in. But he removed her memories. And there's four types of magic in this world: blood, memory, earth and elemental -
Wales has a sour expression on her face of disgust and annoyance.
Wales: I'm sorry, but I really don't like fantasy.
Me: Uh, have you read any?
Wales: Chronicles of Narnia? Is that fantasy?
Me: Yes, a type of fantasy.
Wales: I don't do fantasy. I haven't read Tolkien. I. don't even know what a fae is.
Me: Fairy?
Later.. at the Books Are Magic bookstore. I've admittedly been standing too long on my sore foot, and walking too much on it. Plus my blood sugar is up. So I'm a little irritable.
Wales picks up a book titled "Lovecraft County" with a picture of a Lovecraftian Monster on the front. (It's the book the HBO series was adapted from.)
ME: And you don't like fantasy.
Wales: This isn't fantasy.
Me: Yes, it is. Horror falls under fantasy.
Wales: No it's not. I like books that have a semblance of reality to them. Look when you talked about the Fae, I had no idea what one is. (She goes to the fantasy section and pulls out a book with the title "The Fae" on the cover.) Until I saw this.
I try not to roll my eyes. I've known what the Fae were since I was nine, possibly earlier? Maybe six?
I go outside to sit on a stoop which is painfully close to the ground, to ponder this and rest my sore foot, while Wales buys "Lovecraft Country". I really need to find offline people who share my reading and writing tastes that I can hang with. I've only been hunting around for them for fifty-seven years, and still striking out.
Wales has very mainstream tastes when it comes to books. Actually all the offline friends, acquaintance and otherwise, that I currently have do. She loves dark thrillers like Patricia Highsmith, horror like The Other Black Girl and Kindred, and dark mysteries like Gone Girl. Also non-fiction. And contemporary romance. She'd fit in well with most of my co-workers in this regard.
Weirdly, my brother's tastes are more eclectic. He'll read fantasy, science fiction, etc. And he's gotten me fantasy novels.
Book Stores
We went to two book stores.
One was just your run of a mill mainstream book store. Books are Magic is a family owned independent book store with two branches - one on Smith Street and one in Brooklyn Heights. The owner is novelist Emma Straub and her husband Michael Fusco-Straub. My difficulty with it is its too limited in its selection of science fiction and fantasy, also other non-mainstream genres. This is why I tend to buy mostly online now. That and I prefer indie writers to traditionally published writers.
The other was Liz's Book a Bar - a combination book, tea, coffee and wine bar owned by a Black Business Woman. Also it and the other one - contained magna comics, I was impressed. I remember when you couldn't find them. If they were in color, I'd snatch them up. But alas, no, magna is in black and white - and small. I find them hard to see and read as a result. Also you read them backwards, which confuses my brain. It's easier to read them digitally.
At the book stores - Wales went to the mainstream fiction and non-fiction shelves, while I perused the shelf on philosophy, witchcraft, tarot, occult, magic - I was looking for a compendium or encyclopedia of magical and mythological creatures with drawings. I also jumped over to cook books to find Tasty Simple Recipes - or Sugar Free/Gluten Free recipes. Struck out on both. Perused fantasy/science fiction, then mystery/thriller/horror and finally graphic novels.
I perused Lore Olympus - which I'd read about online. All I knew about it was that it was interestingly drawn webtoon - about the Persephone and Hades romance. I liked the use of colors and the art, so that drew my curiosity. And the books are...very pretty. The art is quite lovely. Brilliant colors and an innovative use of color to drive plot and character. I couldn't read it without my reading glasses - the print was too small. And the books were about $19.99 per volume with six volumes. And just no. Took me awhile to locate the price.
At home, I hunted them down on line, it's a Webtoon, and found a few animated or dubbed versions on You Tube. Netflix is apparently doing an actual animated version. And, hmmm, after the first five episodes, I realized, okay, this is problematic, to say the least. Particularly for a young thirty-something female writer/illustrator.
I'll give you the set-up?
Hades gets stood up by Mimnth, a nympth, to his brother Zeus's party. He's embarrassed, harassed by siblings, and irritable. Then he spots Persephone (whose name I can't spell to save my life). Persephone was raised in the mortal world by her mother, Demeter, the Goddess of Spring. She's young, innocent, virginal. She's rooming with Artemis in the City of the Gods. And borrows a dress of Artemis to go to Zeus's party. Hades spots her and is speechless. And states that her beauty would put Aphrodite to shame or something along those lines. This pisses off Aphrodite - who in a jealous rage, decides to have Eros ruthie Persephone, deposit her in Hades car, and let the hijinks begin. Their plan is drunk Persephone (rather drugged), will embarrass herself, and Hades will take advantage, and they'll want nothing to do with each other.
Ugh. Also Persephone is written like a pretty, naif, who men and beasts fall over themselves for. And Hades is the dark, misunderstood rogue with a heart of gold.
Sigh.
If I hadn't just listened to a real life horror tale about an actress being ruthied in Brooklyn and violently raped as a result by a complete stranger who deigned to help her, and just thought she was "drunk"...I may react to this differently?
I wish contemporary romance writers would stop already with this trope. Drugged female placed in romantic lead's bed - is not a romantic set-up that you want to encourage.
So, I'm glad I didn't spend any money on that. Pretty or not, I don't like the trope at all. There are romance tropes that do not work for me, and that is one of them. Shame though, I liked the artwork. The creator is a better artist than writer/story teller. She should stick with the art.
The other book that I considered was "The Dream House" but I can't remember the author's name. Ah found it, and it's on Kindle Unlimited! Score. I can read it for free.
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
"In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.
And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope―the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman―through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.
Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be."
Interesting, it's about domestic violence in a lesbian relationship - and unpacks the stereotypes of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. I don't tend to like memoirs as a genre, mainly because I'm getting one perspective and it's rarely reliable? But this does look interesting.
We had a lovely time, and Wales pointed out the last book to me. Showed it to me and wanted to buy it. (Wales and I are both straight. So our interest in the book has zip to do with sexual orientation and more to do with the description of narrative styles. I didn't realize it was about lesbians until now - the back of the book was difficult to read without reading glasses on.)
After sharing a hug, I journey back home, about six subway stops away and a six block walk away.
Here's a view from one of those subway stations, and the aqueduct the subway journeys over on - that I see each day of Downtown Brooklyn. That alone is worth taking the G train every day to work.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-15 10:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-15 10:22 pm (UTC)