Francesca Forrest's Blog

This is not typical Asakiyume viewing fare, but when a good friend of mine whom I see only rarely asked me to go see it with her, I said yes, because she often suggests things I wouldn't otherwise see, and they're always worth seeing.

And this was too! It was hilarious, and I enjoyed it a lot. I did have ... I think the thing one says is "notes"? I had some notes. But overall, I thought it was great. But now I need people who have seen it! Wakanomori will never in a million years watch it. Some o...

Today Wakanomori was flying out of Logan Airport, not my favorite place in the world to drive to. Probably in my top three least-favorite places to drive to. Hmmm .... let me distract myself trying to think what might the other two might be ...

No. I will stick on topic. Wakanomori actually drove the car there; I only had to drive it back. He parked in Central Parking, but said I didn't need to come in with him, so we said goodbye right there in the garage and he went in. But then I realized I ne...

The state highway from my town to the next town over has a lot of wooded land on either side. Sometimes bits of it get developed, but it's pretty hilly, so mainly it doesn't. Recently, though, a spot was cleared, and lo and behold, a hidden, abandoned house was revealed, a little mountain cabin with a porch with a roof. It had been totally hidden before.

A sort of Sleeping Beauty situation ... clear away the thorns and there's a castle.

Illustration from Felix Hoffmann's Sleeping Beauty
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Which makes...

"Tread lightly" is an admonition you can run into here and there. Weighty things can change the shape of the universe. To use the image in "Herkimer Inquiries" (a great story; thanks for the rec, sovay ), they're like bowling balls on a mattress.

I sometimes think about that in the context of interactions with people. How weighty people leave impressions on others. Which is also reminding me of the expression in Japanese 影が薄い (kage ga usui), for the opposite phenomenon, literally, to have a pale o...

Last week was the Confraternidad Amazónica in Leticia, a week of celebration of warm relations** between the people living in Colombia, Peru, and Brazil where these three countries meet on the Amazon. All sorts of fun, including parades.

I loved this dress made with Cheetos packages:

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And this child is, I believe, dressed like Cacicus cela, kaurë in Ticuna--a bird known in the stories of many peoples of the region for its cleverness. Also the name of the colonial (in the sense of a colonial organis...

When I went to Leticia in April, I brought some presents, and one of them, for my tutor, was this book, Todo el mundo, a Spanish-language translation of All the World (2009).

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I'm gratified to say that my tutor loved the words and pictures as much as I do. She read the title and immediately translated it into Ticuna. And then she paged through the book.

"Beautiful," she said. "I'm going to translate it into Ticuna."

And my friends, she did.

Here are some sample pages from the book...

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And here are her ...

Look at me posting three times in a week as if it's 2011 or something.

I, like a lot of people on my friends list, read this because of an excellent review by rachelmanija . It really was everything Rachel and others have reported. And it's very short. As I think sabbotabby says, you can read it in like 15 minutes.

To repeat what Rachel summarizes, it's the memories and dreams of a group of now-adult Chilean classmates who were young adolescents during the Pinochet regime, memories and dreams abou...

It smells like woodsmoke today in Massachusetts because in Canada the forests are burning. Borders are a concept, the planet is one planet; those forests' pain is our pain.

Yesterday, I didn't know why the light on all the buildings seemed rosy all day long; I wondered if there was something wrong with my eyes. Then I heard it was the wildfires.

Today the smoke from those faraway fires is low; the sky is strange.
The sun at 8:30 am this morning:

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The skies:

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(The camera originally took this as much mor...

In English-language ballads, you often get a repeated line between verses that doesn't have much (or anything) to do with the narrative of the ballad, like "parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme" in "Scarborough Fair," or "lay the bairn tae the bonnie broom" (Old Blind Dogs version) or "lay the bent to the bonnie broom" (Pentangle version) of "Cruel Sister."

I see this in some folksong traditions in Colombia, but in the song I'm thinking of, "La Verdolaga," it feels like the repeated phrase is carry...

I have a friend (she's on Dreamwidth! She'll recognize herself if she reads this) who in the past has done free volunteer tax help for people come tax season.

It's an amazing help not just because taxes can be a nightmare to figure out for yourself and paying someone else to do them can be pricy but also because the mere fact of another person helping you can be hugely encouraging. And this is true for other miserable bureaucratic tasks as well--anything related to healthcare or unemployment cla...