I sometimes abuse ampersands

I watched The Hunger Games! I was spoiled for most plot developments, except for the most important one, the one that really made this movie for me: namely, nobody had ever told me how meta it is. It is an action movie about the making of action movies. If you had somehow managed to miss the hype, the plot goes like this: in postapocalyptic dystopian America, each of the districts that had once rebelled against the central government and lost has to yearly provide a teenage boy and girl to fight with the kids from other districts until only one is left. The rest of the population is watching these games as the most popular reality TV. And this is the really cool part of the movie: while the kids' plight subplot is interesting and intense (and stars one of the most awesome heroines I've seen in action movies in the last couple of years), it also has the subplot about the producers of the show, and they know the demands of their genre. They know when extra explosions have to be added. They know that romance sells. Ultimately, I believe that the heroine wins not because she objects to relinquish her humanity, thus rebelling against the system, but because she *gets* how the system works, and she outwits them on their own turf, resorting to one of the most venerated tropes of our culture. And that is awesome.
Of course, it is also commentary on our fixation on the bloody parts of our history as foundational traumas, and about the role of women in such narratives (the finale was utterly heart-breaking in this respect, don't want to spoil you but the cliches she has to recreate to validate her choice, oh-), but for me, the idea that narrative competence saves the world was the most awesome part of the movie.

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Last week, I got locked in an ancient cemetery at night and talked to an owl. No matter how awesome your week might have been, I believe you cannot quite beat that. The preface being, my friend came to Boston for a conference; trying to be an awesome tour guide, I remembered that you have the best chances at seeing coyotes and owls in the wild at sunset. Whether my friend wanted to see them or not is up to debate, but, well. The closest wilderness I know of is the Mount Auburn Cemetery, so off we went. Of course, the critters are smart enough to avoid the shrieky me, even though I rushed over rows of centuries-old graves and weather-beat marble angels in the direction of the slightest noise from the bushes, displaying the sort of behaviour that is punished in zombie movies (the dead residents of Mount Auburn Cemetery are all intellectuals and somesuch, so, even if they chose to rise, the dumb materialism of brain-seeking would probably be beyond them) (Me: "But I WANT TO see a coyote!" A long-suffering friend: "Yes, and you are walking over dead bodies to accomplish that.") But then we heard an owl hooting overhead! I tried hooting at it! Screeched, more like, since I cannot hoot. The poor bird realized that the best way to shut me up would be to hoot back at me, so we talked for a while. There was a real connection there XD XD XD

And this is how I found out that even cemeteries close for the night (and that I need to grow up, but that's beyond the point).


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Quick recspam: Seanan McGuire's summary of her new series about ecologically conscious cryptozoologists fighting evil with the power of ballroom dances. For a week, the promise of reading two or three chapters during breakfast was the only thing that could get me out of bed in the morning. Some things in the book seemed somewhat illogical to me, but it is insanely imaginative and playful, and I enjoyed it immensely.

The Bread We Eat in Dreams by Catherynne M. Valente is an awesome short story about an exiled demon that settles close to a Protestant settlement in New England: and not just any demon, but the baker of Hell, the one who makes "the bread we eat in dreams" (and I really liked the story of her previous mythological incarnations). Of course, mayhem ensues.
Catherynne M. Valente has absolutely beautiful writing style; technically, it's not poetry, but I still end up remembering long snippets, like charms.