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[DJing/Setlist] The 80s Night, Friendship A.R.C., Whitby, Mon 28th Apr 2025
The playlist is below ...
( The 80s Night (1900-2300) )
Next event is Monday 3rd November, again at the Friendship ARC on Church Street.
...on the way over Aunt S said, “The people we’re about to meet may tell you shocking things about me.”
“Shocking things like how you’ve aided your niece-nephew in perverting the social order and defying nature itself?” I asked.
“Oh, is that what you’re doing?” Aunt S said. “The social order seems intact to me. And if it’s your goal to defy nature, you might have to put in a bit more work.” [p. 172]
A young person -- 'I'd rather be Victor than Victorine' -- is evicted from the family home, and moves to Paris with their Aunt Sophie. In a run-down boarding house they encounter art student Julien, who is also Julie and who doesn't want to be trapped into being 'one or the other when I've always been both'.
( Read more... )The sky was blue, and three ravens sat on the wall above me, each looking deeply judgmental.
“Poor showing,” Terror said.
“Is this really the one we’re putting our faith in?” Dawn asked.
“I ate the mother mouse,” Ratcatcher said. “Haven’t had time to tell you yet.” [loc. 2302]
Second in the 'Emperor's Assassin' series, which I discovered while reading this volume is a trilogy with the finale due in autumn 2025 (aargh). Airón and Tallu are married, and Airón is beginning to understand Tallu's plan -- and the fate awaiting the last Emperor.( Read more... )
I felt as taut as a bowstring pulled, ready to release the arrow and realizing that I had to build the target I needed to hit. [loc. 1690]
Airón, prince of the Northern Empire, has been raised as an assassin: his twin sister Eonai is to marry the Emperor of the fearsome Imperium, after which Airón will kill his new brother-in-law. He doesn't expect to survive, but the Imperium must be destroyed. Except it all goes horribly wrong when Eonai and Airón are presented to Tallu, 'a viper' reportedly responsible for the deaths of his parents and younger sibling. Because Tallu decides that he will, instead, marry Airón...
( Read more... )He got sent to a cell... went before the judge, did three months of community service at the Garches hospital, was all the same spared extradition—a random impulse would never extinguish his luck.[p. 96]
Translated from the French, this novel is the first I have read by a Malagasy author. It interweaves Malagasy heritage and history with the story of Ietsy Razak, privileged son of a wealthy family, named after the 'first man' in Malagasy myth. ( Read more... )
It’s also cuttingly symbolic of our hunt for Late Bronze Age women that the eponymous lions of the Lion Gate have been systematically misgendered as male – when they’re actually a fierce and gorgeous pair of female lions. (If you visit Mycenae, I encourage you to annoy as many people as you can by pointing out that this is, in fact, the ‘Lioness Gate’.) [loc. 5624]
An examination of the role of women in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and in the wider realm of Greek myth. In her introduction, Emily Hauser says she's exploring 'what new discoveries about the real women of history can do to help us understand Homer – not what Homer can tell us about the Late Bronze Age' [loc. 819]. And she points out that, although women are treated as secondary, as property, as lesser, they are essential to the stories. The Iliad begins with two men quarrelling over an enslaved woman (Briseis): the Odyssey ends with Odysseus going home (via Calypso, Circe and Nausicaa) to Penelope.
( Read more... )At the end of the day, when the shops closed, the city felt like the bottom of a glass that too many people had been drinking from. [loc. 1830]
Set in a village on the outskirts of Nottingham ('the UK city where you're statistically most likely to be assaulted by a stranger') in the early Eighties, this is the story of Benji, an only child aged seven, who spends his time playing with the ZX Spectrum at school, building a nuclear fallout shelter in the woods, listening to The Teardrop Explodes and waiting for the aliens to come and return him to his home planet. (He glimpsed the aliens, which can shapeshift, during a hospital stay some years earlier.)
Benji's parents are outsiders in the village, due to their Penguin paperbacks and modern jazz records, despite his dad having been born less than ten miles away. Benji, though he has plenty of friends and is happy at school, is a bit of an outsider too. He is aware of, though doesn't understand, the sense of social change and industrial decay, the rise of Thatcherism and the rage of the underclass.
But that's an undercurrent, considerably less foregrounded than the crew of shapeshifting aliens from the planet Vozkoz, who need to abduct a particular human whose essence is the only thing that can save their world. Another plot thread involves neighbour Colin, who builds robots out of scrap and whom Benji is convinced (after research conducted with the library's microfiche archive) is actually Bruce Lacey, as featured in the Fairport Convention song 'Mr Lacey'. (You can hear the robots at around the 2-minute mark in that video.)
Intercut with Benji's narrative are various uncaptioned photographs, and diverse other voices: Benji's parents, a headmistress, Benji's cousin, an alpaca, Colin, a drunken fuckwit, some daffodils... All contribute something to the story, though it's Benji's voice, and the events of that one year, that pull it all together. I enjoyed it immensely and nostalgically, and I loved Cox's inventiveness and the discursive winding of the story. The fantastical elements were (mostly*) cleverly woven in and, frankly, made just as much more sense as nuclear war or Margaret Thatcher. And there's a strong sense of affection blooming through the novel: a love of life with all its imperfections.
*I don't believe you could buy six blank cassettes for 49p in 1983, even in Nottinghamshire.
I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can’t believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant. But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old. [p. 114]
Reread after The Enigma Game, which features a younger and considerably more cheerful Julie. (My review from 2013.) This is still a very harrowing read, even though I know what happens.
( Read more... )People being nice to you after someone has made you feel like a criminal or an enemy is just like sticking cardboard in your window after a bomb has blasted all the glass out of it. The hole is stopped up, but the glass is still smashed and you can’t see through the window any more. Everything in the room is uglier and darker. [loc. 2523]
Louisa Adair is fifteen and orphaned: it's 1940, her English mother died in the Balham bombing, and shortly afterwards her Jamaican father was killed when his merchant navy ship was torpedoed. (He couldn't enlist in the Royal Navy because he wasn't born in Europe.) She telephones to answer an advertisement for someone to look after an elderly aunt -- the advertiser, Mrs Campbell, can't tell from Louisa's 'polite English accent' that she's biracial -- and finds herself escorting the redoubtable 'Jane Warner' (actually Johanna von Arnim, a former opera singer) from an internment camp on the Isle of Man to a pub in a small Scottish village.
( Read more... )He should have recognised the danger when the king insisted on a formal introduction every time they met, forcing his sullen attendants to recite the diplomatic courtesies again and again, always with the pretense of never having heard them before, always with that same look of gleeful idiocy on his face. Beyond petty, beyond tedious, it was ridiculous. What kind of a king makes a mockery of himself? Melheret wished he'd seen the answer sooner... Only a king who was very sure of himself could afford to be laughed at. ['Melheret's Earrings, p.124]
A collection of short stories woven in and around the canon of the Queen's Thief series (which I have recently devoured and fallen in love with) plus maps, essays on archaeology and historical inspirations, and some beautiful illustrations. I'd read some of the stories and essays before, appended to the novels, but it is nice to have them all in one place. Even if that place is a hardcover book...
( Read more... )