2003-01-28
Holly Lisle: Fire in the Mist
After the odd mix of good and awfull things that was my last read, "Fire in the Mist" was a refreshingly nice, balanced, and thoroughly entertaining book. So nice in fact, that I am determined to get my hands on the other two of Lisle's novels set on the world of "Arhel", and possibly dip my toes into one or two other worlds of hers (the "Secret Texts" series looks promising). This is easier said than done though, as her three "Arhel" novels seem to be out of print.
Damn.
The story starts with Faia Rissedotte, a young shepardess of a mountain folk, leaving her village to guide her flock of sheep to the summer pastures in the mountains. When foreboding makes her return after just a few weeks, she finds that all the people she knew throughout her life, her entire home village, has been wiped by a plague. In her mourning and desperation she proceeds to burn the village to the ground with "faerie fires", a normally weak magical guiding flame. The backlash caused by the sheer amount of energy spent this way causes several bad things to happen and makes the magical universities notice Faia and her talent. Before arriving at a more or less happy end, she will learn of magic, encounter friends and enemies not all of them recognizable as what they are at first glance, and do a lot more of her own culture's shepard's magic in a desparate effort to correct the consequences of that backlash...
Holly Lisle's terse writing style and apt characterizations make this book better than average. The plot is not exactly extravagant, and most of its twists are more or less predictable, but this is a book about people, and the characters are well done and fleshed out in memorable detail. The cultural clashes resulting from people like Faia and Medwind Song, a high ranking teacher at the Mages' university and the other protagonist of the tale, coming from cultures vastly different (especially in all matters sexual) from the one in which the university and the surrounding city are embedded, add some nicely barbed humour to the mix.
Besides the somewhat weak plot, a minor gripe really, the only other complaint I would level at the book is the lack of world building background. The world feels incredibly detailed, with an interesting history and background that could probably fill a book or two on its own, but we get to see entirely too little of that for my taste. Of course, with the writing being as terse as it is, detailed excursions into the history of the world would probably have been more distracting than anything else, but a few more splashes here and there would have been nice, I think.
While the book lacks the poignant high points of Lackey's "The Lark and the Wren", it also lacks its infuriating weaknesses, which overall makes it a much more enjoyable read that made me turn the last page with satisfaction and a nice little appetite for more.
Go read it!
PS: enetation is acting up again, and the comment counts seem not to be working at the moment.
2003-01-27
419
Yes, I know I promised no more Iraq war things on this blog, but this is just too good to pass up on.
Enjoy! I sure got a laugh out of it.
2003-01-26
Blogging HodgePodge
Blogging will likely remain light over the next days, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, work is keeping me busy: the project is progressing slower than one might wish, and a few additional problems on the customer's end need urgent addressing, diverting precious man hours elsewhere...
Then, life has been mostly uneventful as of late, the only recent events which caught my interest have to do with the US War on Some Terrorists, the joint French/German reluctance to participate in it, and the consternation this seems to have caused Ole Rumsy. But I'm determined not to make this into a War Blog of any kind, so I won't go there.
Since I don't have much to write about, I have increased my reading pensum. I still have more than two years worth of Debra Hyde's amazing Diary before me, but I'm slowly catching up. I've also read through a few more books in the Baen Free Library, and one or two reviews are forming up in my head.
The rest of my mind is busy digesting the sequence of major emotional upheavals in Layne's life. It's amazing how intensely her writing draws me into her emotional world again and again. So, although you're probably coming from her, or so my referrer logs tell me, go read her, and marvel at her personal strength, her growth, and her incredible capacity to share!
The one thing I can happily report is that sex is getting better again, not kinkier yet, just better. But my wife is letting me gently explore a few places of her body where I wasn't allowed to venture before, and even explores, though somewhat cautiously, their counterparts on my body. Consequently, my libido is on the increase, which leaves me somewhat less time for things like blogging. ;-)
PS: Can someone please explain why I consistently keep on trying to write 'bloggin' instead of 'blogging'?
2003-01-23
Metablogging
Reflecting my rising comfort level with blogging as such, and with this particular neighbourhood of the blogosphere in particular, my lookout at this blog has changed in small increments. The equally small incremental changes I did to my template over this period are a reflection of this. I'm still not 100% content with it, so expect more minor twiddling around with html to occur in the future.
[Update: the archives should now be accessible with Javascript disabled.]
The more noteworthy changes are the addition of a small about page featuring some of the very few (due to lack of a scanner or digital camera) digital images I have of myself and a bit of information about myself, and the addition of Debra Hyde's Pursed Lips in the link list. Her site features a blog, a diary, stories, and a lot more, much of it containing some form of sexual content, mostly S/M. (So don't click there and then come back whining that I didn't warn you.)
The main reasons for this latest addition are that for one thing, it's a nice sex positive site, and that her diary is what prompted my Good, Bad, Ugly post a few weeks ago: Some of the articles in her diary resonated deeply with me, so deeply in fact that it became impossible for me to avoid acknowledging the kinkier aspects of my sexuality like I had done frequently in the past. I'm still not sure what will come of this, but an increase in self-awareness is always welcome.
2003-01-21
Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Michael Flynn: Fallen Angels
I've already written a short blurb about this book deeply buried somewhere in the comments in Layne's archives, but this one deserves more.
The book is dedicated to science fiction fandom, but it is more than that, it is in fact an all out hommage to SF fandom. So, if you're a geek or an active member of the fandom, read it, you'll probably like it. And if you're not, read it anyway. You may or may not like it, but it will hopefully also give you a few things to think about. While classified as Science Fiction, not much of the science in this book is actually fiction, which makes the background story, set in the not too distant future of Earth all the more plausible and frightening:
Two astronauts from the Space Habitat, the last bastion of science and freedom on a world controlled by politically correct environmentalists and new age junkies are shot down while scooping the atmosphere for nitrogen and crash on the North Dakota glacier. They are saved from the manhunt started by the anti-technologist government by members of the underground SF fandom, which has been outlawed by those in control. When it becomes clear that the two aren't safe anywhere in the US, a country where technology is all but illegal, an effort is started to get them back into space while constantly dodging their pursuers...
While I can't say much about Pournelle and Flynn, Niven is not exactly renowned for his plotting and characterizations. And although there is not one single aspect of the book that is outstanding, somehow the whole manages to be more than the sum of its parts. The characters are OK, the plot, though predictable in places, has a few mild surprises and twists, and the humour is geeky and really funy sometimes, while the real attraction for me is the background story. In short, it's a fun read with a few things and ideas that make you put the book down and think about them for a while before continuing.
Recommended Reading!
2003-01-20
Shortest Visit Ever
My relationship to my sister has always been somewhat rocky, probably owing to the fact that we are just about as different as it is possible to be: I was dad's son, she was mom's daughter; where I am practical and down to earth, she's a daydreamer the likes of which I've never met again in my life; where I have an indepent mind that finds most social conventions irritating at best, she's rooted fast in the mores of our society and totally dependent on what others think of her... So when she announced her intentions to come visit us a week after my birthday, accompanied by her friend, a french SCUBA diving teacher she met somewhere in the mediterranean, I was prepared for quite a strenuous weekend.
On Friday and Saturday she stayed with my dad and his wife in Berlin, as she usually does when coming here. The plan was to come for coffee on Sunday, then after a few hours to go back to Berlin to meet for a few drinks with one of her friends whom she hadn't seen for few months. But of course things went differently, as they always do when my sister is involved.
Having spent rather more time than planned in the Museum for Natural History in Berlin, she turned up here at 6 p.m. in a hectic flurry. She introduced me and his boyfriend to each other, pressed a birthday present into my hand (a Tangram set that will likely leave me occupied for some time), then went off to our weekend house, which is about a mile off from where we are living right know, announcing that she had deposited a few things there she urgently needed to fetch right now, and dragging her friend off with her.
Knowing that the locks at our condo were rusty and a little on the stubborn side, I had hardly the time to grab the keys and follow them. After some swearing on my part we got the door open and she dug into the stuff she had deposited there over the winter, emerging after an extensive search with a few books with photographies of New Zealand and Australia?! My quizzical looks were answered with a shrug, and off she went again. After stopping shortly to drop me off at our house, she immediately drove on to Berlin, telling me that otherwise they would be too late for meeting up with her friend.
And that was that. The time she spent with me during that visit must have been a record low. But that wasn't the most disturbing thing in all of this.
Nope, that was reserved for her relationship to her friend. He seemed to be a nice enough guy: friendly, low-key, calm, a little shy - a nice counter point to her usually hectic self. But get this:
He stayed with her over christmas, then went back to France for two weeks. During that time we had a phone conversation where she told me how much she loves him and how badly she's missing him although he would be back in about a week. After then spending another two weeks together in her 15 square meter room in the city where she's visiting university, she drags him all across Germany for visits to her two best friends, her dad, and her brother. And when I asked her whether she's going to Crete this summer (where he is employed throughout the season), she tells me that she won't, that she'll end the relationship because she doesn't see a future for him and her together. WTF?!
I have always suspected that she has unresolved issues with intimacy, strong feelings and long term relationships (and every time I try to steer our talks in this direction she closes up tight and becomes totally evasive and unreadable). But this answer had stunned even me, who isn't easily shocked by anything.
I just hope she doesn't hurt him and herself too much with this...
2003-01-15
Retort of a Nudist
I usually like what Ryan has to say. Although he is frequently a bit too aggressive and macho for my taste, he more often than not is if not right then at least thought provoking. So consider my disappointment when I found his column "The Naked Truth about Nudism" merely boring, childish, and filled with exactly the prejudices one would expect in the average member of a society about which Marlene Dietrich once remarked "In America, sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world it is a fact." (The same, btw. can be said about nudity.)
But then, I have grown up in East Germany where at least throughout the late 70's and 80's casual nudity and nude beaches were facts of life. In fact, you would probably have been hard pressed to find a single beach around here where you wouldn't see at least one woman sunbathing topless and no-one giving a pair of donkey's kidneys about it.
Family holidays by the sea where spent in the vicinity of nude beaches as far back as I can remember. And let's be frank about it - swimming clothes are just about the most idiotically useless pieces of clothing I can think of. They don't protect you from anything that some self confidence and a healthy relationship to your body can't take care of much better, and for free. And they have one substantial drawback: you can't towel them dry. Imagine then my consternation when on the first beach I visited in the US I found a big ugly sign threatening a hefty penalty on everyone who had the audacity to change clothes on the beach! WTF?! I would have liked to follow that order by not wearing anything to begin with, but got the impression that this wouldn't have sat well with the authorities. Besides, the sign may have forbidden that as well, I can't remember.
OK, so you might say I'm something of a nudist myself. But there are nudists, and then there are Nudists, organized Nudists even, a small subset of the former at least here in Germany. An adjacent village holds one of the oldest Nudist Colonies in Germany and I visited it once with my dad who had in earlier years spent his holidays in that colony several times. The visit was enlightening and disillusioning - I found the Nudists' aversion to anything sexual just as perverted as the US American tendency to equate nudity and sex, and to obsess about both.
From what I've seen over the years I would say that the subset of the nudists who aren't also Nudists shrinks in proportion with how uptight and prude the society they live in is. And when you think about it, that is only natural: the more hostile a society is towards nudists, the greater their need for mutual protection and defense, and hence their drive to organize, if only loosely. This might also explain those "nakeder than thou" looks Ryan noticed - they are really a psychological defense mechanism necessary for survival in a hostile climate. I noticed a few Nudists featuring that look on their face during my visit of the Nudist colony, but those were only a few people. Most of the Nudists carried themselves with the natural grace one would associate with self-confidence and a healthy relationship to the (nude) human body.
To get back to the article which inspired me to write this, I'd like to add the following: I won't say anything about Ryan's expectation to find a beach full of Playboy models or the society which produces people who think like that because that really speaks for itself. But I find his fascination with the dangly bits, uh, interesting. Ryan, if it disturbed you that much, you could just have closed your eyes or looked away, you know? And one more thing. Has it ever occured to you that these people really were scorning you, and for a reason? This being the fact that they were fed up with adolescent males without any inclination towards nudism whose behaviour made it perfectly clear that they were coming to that beach for one reason only, to ogle the flesh. Because, you know, nudists aren't exhibitionists, they are just nudists.
Furrfu indeed.
Single, Dating, Engaged, Married
Ryan's column about nudists is still sitting uneasily with me, but my retort will have to wait a day or two, because I promised Layne to clarify my offhand comment that I find engagement periods an odd idea.
The relationship I maintain with social conventions can only be called strenuous at best. Marriage is a social convention, and one that only really works well for those who want to spend their life with exactly one partner of the opposite sex. If your internal wiring falls out of this narrow range of socially acceptable behaviour because you are, say, homosexual or - heaven forbid - polyamorous, you are well and truly screwed. And while I fall mainly into the socially acceptable range, I find the arbitrary discrimination galling and infuriating: either have all long-term relationships sanctioned by the state, or none of them.
Dating is so riddled with rituals, customs and conventions that don't make the slightest bit of sense to me that I have often wished to find my future wife like Erik found his.
Engagement seems to me to be mainly the nonsensically formalized, fuzzy transition period between when you're just informally dating someone and the heavily formalized, state-sanctioned institution of marriage.
And that is exactly where the oddness of an engagement period lies for me: If you've been informally living together for some time already, then I don't see any sense in an additional engagement period, you might just as well get married right away. If, on the other hand you're doing it the formal way, and only live together after you did the whole dance of the proposition on his knees with a ring followed by an official announcement to the families, well, then why not go the additional step and get married right away? The difference in formality seems negligible to me...
What I'm so clumsily trying to get at is that I see the need for only two phases between dating and marriage: a period where you live together informally to see if things really work out in the long run. This period should IMHO be formalized as little as possible to avoid the pressure to keep things running when this doesn't pan out. When after this you're sure you've found the right one, you're basically ready to marry, so what use would then an additional formal engagement be?
Formal engagements served their purposes when marriages were arranged between families for political or economic reasons, I guess. Nowadays, I find the idea quaint, odd and rather unnecessary. It is entirely possible and even likely that I am missing something important here, as I said I only maintain a strenuous contact with social conventions. So, where's the sense of a formal engagement?
[note to self: Don't try to blog when you're dead tired. It just won't come out right!]
2003-01-12
Happy Birthday
Privacy be damned, one of the reasons I started this blog was to get things off my chest and get some feedback. And while I'm still unsure about where I'm heading with this, one thing is clear: if too much hiding around stands in the way of accomplishing things, I'll have to hide less.
So in that spirit, I got 29 years old during that wonderful spell of winter weather that seems to be slated to end in a day or two. I'm not a fan of big parties and such, but even for this introverted guy, things were a little underwhelming this time around: my father neither came for a visit, nor did he even write a card or called - talk about disappointing. But none of our friends, in fact no-one we know except for our neighbours seems to have remembered the day, and I'm not even aware of having offended anyone. Oh well.
[Update: both my dad and my sister finally called, a little late, but it's better than nothing. The continued silence from our friends is making me nervous, though...]
[Update 2: emails from our friends are coming in, it seems everyone is a few days late this year.]
At least the continued cold means we were able to declare these last few days our ice scating weekend, yay! Feeling the cold, clean air in my face, seeing the houses and trees rush by as we glide almost effortlessly across the lake, creates one of those wonderful moments when I can forget everything around me and just be. And it is these moments with my wife which give me the strength to work on our relationship, forgive my capricious heart, and most important for me now, help her fight her own problems. So I am grateful for moments like these, which means I am almost content to not have had a great many birthday visitors this weekend.
But still...
2003-01-09
Love Hurts
Over the last few days I relatively successfully kept myself busy with work, reading, sex and relationship research, and massaging my wife's utterly tensed-up feet and back. I even seem to have managed to locate a bright, women-friendly, though somewhat solemn looking, sex shop. It's still not quite what I had in mind (a few years ago a report on TV featured a small, well-stocked shop somewhere in Berlin that was run by an aggresively cheerful, kinky, knowledgeable and utterly uninhibited lesbian couple, if only I could find that), but it's a start. It seems though, that my stupid heart was not content with being shoved in the background just like that.
Since late last evening it is reminding me again in no uncertain terms that in addition to loving my wife I am still hopelessly in love with someone else. Granted, the bouts of utter panic haven't come back, which is something of a relief, but the insistent, throbbing reminder in the back of my mind is not much better in the long run: It frays my concentration, making anything more complex than listening to music or reading a book (and that includes my job) next to impossible. So don't expect glimpes of literary genius (as if!) or even more or less coherent postings around here in the next few days...
In totally unrelated news, all Minnesotans who are suffering from the current spell of warmth and are yearning for their customary cold winter instead, are cordially invited to come to eastern Germany - last night we had a whopping -21°C (should be about -6°F), and right now it's about -10°C (-14°F). And I love every minute of it. :-)
On a less positive note, while until now citizens of the US had it better than the rest of the world in that they could not legally be held in the custody of the US for as long as some military dick head wished, this apparently has changed. Now, when the Shrub in a whimsy declares you an "Enemy Combatant" you lose all your rights, constitutionally guaranteed or otherwise, regardless of whether you are a US citizen or not. Tell me again how this is better than what that russian guy whose name translated as "the steely" did about 50 years ago? (Yes, that was hyperbole, and yes, I'm still relatively serious about it.)
2003-01-07
Instead of comments
This should have been an answer to a comment by Daintily Dirty, but enetation sucks, sucks, sucks! I need a comment system that works, and my preferred choice, HaloScan is not accepting new customers at the moment. Anyone know of a viable alternative? Please!?
Anyway, DD, this is mainly for you:
I was born in 1974, and my wife is 3 months my senior, so our own little sexual revolution is happening in a similar personal time frame as yours did. (Rest assured that I will read through your blog archives this evening: every little bit of info and advice is greatly appreciated.) The fact that we actually did talk about it and reached some constructive agreement, is still a minor miracle to me, and I fervently hope such talks will become easier over time...
Surfing the web together sounds like a good idea, but definitely needs some preparation beforehand: there is an amazing amount of really good sex info out on the net. Most of it is in english though, which I read fluently but my wife does not - and I feel I need her to be on equal footing there. The irony of ironies is that I know about female friendly sex shops in, among other places, New York, San Francisco, and Toronto, but none on our side of the pond... :-(
So the first hurdle will be finding similarly high quality information in our native tongue, and a female friendly sex shop somewhere within driving distance (all the sex shops I know around here are of the main stream variety, with basically male only customers and staff who hardly knows a dildo from a vibrator and couldn't tell silicone from rubber if their life depended on it). We'll need a place that is not too fetish-oriented, and hence intimidating, for her, staffed by preferably female people who know what they are talking about and are willing to offer some guidance for a pair of newbies - I know theses places exist, but I'm afraid they won't be easy to find.
The alternative would be for us to read up on stuff without expert guidance, and then to mail order, probably from the US or Canada, which is not my preferred approach, but may be workable. We'll see.
2003-01-04
The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
Let's do this not quite in order, so I can end on a positive note...
The Bad: There aren't many weather conditions that palpably affect my mood: seemingly endless days of grey overcast skies and rain, those first days of spring when the sun seems to be determined to gently coax the first delicate green out of the still sleeping and reluctant vegetation, and those glorious sunny, snow-white winter days. And you can trust the weather to change for the worse the day I wax lyrical about it! In other words: We are back to grey skies, rain, not a single patch of snow in sight and some more freezing later on. More snow and blue skies are promised for the next few days. We'll see about this, until then we're stuck with that poor, shoddy excuse for a winter.
The Ugly: Well, not ugly per se, but with our marriage not being in its most stable phase this certainly has the potential for ugliness. To cut a long story short that I am not prepared to share right now, I finally had to acknowledge to myself, to really let it sink in, that I may be far kinkier than I believed, than I was ready to admit to myself even. What's the problem with that added kinkiness, you ask? The root of the problem lies in the fact that even before, I was by far the kinkier of us two. Before we got together, she had never had any idea that sex could be about more than kissing, caressing, and fucking, had never even thought about masturbating. I'll never forget the look on her face when I first tried to go down on her (I'd never heard or read about it, never to my knowledge seen it done before, but I knew it was something I wanted to do and we both would enjoy). It was an utterly thunderstruck look, mingled with some disgust that anyone, and least of all me, would be depraved enough to kiss her "dirties down there".
So this self-discovery has just significantly enlarged the already existing kinkiness differential in our relationship...
The Good: Something she told me last evening triggered something in me, and I set out to do one of those things that are still incredibly hard for me, and that I as a result am loath to do: we talked about our relationship, about the declining enjoyment of our sex, and most importantly, what to do about it.
When in the course of our discussion I reminded her of that first attempt at cunnilingus, she in turn reminded me of the end result of that fateful evening: I was patient, but persistent, in my pursuit of lapping labia, she came to enjoy it, and oral sex has become the most reliable way for us to get her to orgasm. With this in mind, and based on her suggestion that this procedure might bear repeating for other things as well, we plotted the course of our future sex life: I would gently guide her to the world of kink, using Nancy Friday's "Sexual Fantasies" books as a first introduction, we would talk about the kinks that particularly rock my boat or might hold promise in rocking hers, and then take it from there. I would like to introduce her to masturbation and sex toys as well, but we'll see about this when the time comes, after all we are not in any particular hurry.
(If you're wondering about the choice of literature: I'd like to use those two books for the simple reason that they are the only ones in our household library dealing with the topics in question in a way that would make them useable for the adventure at hand, and that acquiring other books which would perhaps be better suited for the task would probably require a lot of searching and looking around, and probably a nontrivial expense as well.)
2003-01-01
Walking in the Winter Wonder Land
I love winter. I really do. This regularly earns me raised eyebrows and comments about my commute and bad road conditions or the cold or all that snow that needs to be shovelled off the walk ways and cars. But I don't mind any of this, not really. This year's cold season didn't start off too well, though - first it was freezing cold with temperatures 10-15°C below zero and not a snow flake in sight, then we got 4 weeks of rain with temperatures hovering just about the freezing point, covering everything with half an inch of ice and making every look out of the window an exercise in depression control.
But yesterday was one of those days that makes up for everything: blue sky and sunshine above a world covered in snow, if only 2 inches of it. So we took a two hour walk around the local lake, basking in the glory of the winter wonder land around us. The unearthly beauty of the dark green pines, the frozen lake and the snow below a deep blue sky captured me totally, as it always does, making me forget the bad weather of the previous weeks and the emotional misery I'm living through. For those two hours it was just us, the snow, the forest, the sun and a few wild birds for which I am infinitely grateful.
The rest of New Year's Eve was a torture of being polite and keeping smiling for me as we spent it with my parents-in-law and their neighbours. Even my wife was drained and grumpy when we went to bed at half past two in the morning. Here's hoping that in a year's time our living situation will have changed sufficiently to the better to allow us to hold our own small New Year's Eve party the way we like it: nothing special, just us and a few close friends, passing the time chatting, playing games, catching up on our respective holiday trips, the things you do with friends.
But that's 364 days, and a lot of work, from now. Time enough, perhaps, to heal my broken heart, for Layne to find a way to live together with her love, for Arrancia to find someone to give her an honest-to-goodness New Year's Kiss, and for all kinds of other good things to happen...
A happy new year to all of us!
|
