Consonants and vowels all together, equally

I went to a concert over the weekend. Vermont isn't exactly a hotbed of Culture, but Montpelier has hosted an annual classical music series for 26 years. Last year the director and founder of the program retired, and this concert introduced the new directors, a husband and wife who play piano and flute respectively. For this performance they collaborated with musicians from Palaver Strings, a Maine-based ensemble.

The first piece was by Filip Holacky, a contemporary Czech composer. This quartet for flute, violin, cello, and piano was composed in 2022. They said this was the US premiere of the piece, but then they also said that they had performed part of it for music students at the middle school the previous day, so I guess a premiere is what you make of it. The piece is certainly contemporary in sound, but clearly takes some Romantic inspiration, so it fit well enough with the Romantic-era pieces that followed.



( Maurice Ravel, String Quartet in F major (1903) )

After the intermission, there was a pivot to lesser-known works by women.

( Germaine Tailleferre, String Quartet (1919) )

( Clemence de Grandval, Suite for Flute and Piano (1876) )

This book by Zimbabwean physician Khameer Kidia (he/they) has a thesis that's simple to state but vast in scope and implications. Western mental health care systems treat people's mental illnesses as problems that originate within the brain or perhaps from one particular traumatic event, when in reality much of mental illness is directly caused or greatly exacerbated by exploitative socioeconomic phenomena: income inequality, crushing debt, pressure-cooker work and school environments, racism, colonialism, oppression based on gender and sexuality, isolation from sources of support, and other systemic stressors that lead to anxiety, depression, burnout, and the kind of total mental health collapses that we used to call "nervous breakdowns."

In short, our systems assume that the world is fine and some people, for reasons science can't quite pin down, are just mentally broken. But actually the world is not fine, and it is rational for us to experience mental distress in response to that. In focusing on fixing individuals rather than the structures we live in, mental health systems aren't seeing the forest for the trees.

My experience of the book is that it sits right in the middle of a lot of other authors I've read who focus on particular threads of the things he's talking about, and Kidia's book knits them all together. Some of them are authors he directly cites, such as David Graeber on exploitative economics (and boy do I need to re-read Debt) and Robin Wall Kimmerer on manufactured scarcity. I was also reminded of what I've read from Atul Gawande on medical hyperspecialization and how it bounces patients from doctor to doctor who look at their problems through a microscope and don't see the whole picture, and what Uché Blackstock wrote about how patient outcomes improve when they see doctors who understand and empathize with the marginalization they experience. The book also resonated with my personal experiences of having to jump through the system's hoops of labeling and pathologization to access life-saving care as a trans person, and then being told that high rates of trans suicide prove that being trans is a mental illness; this merry-go-round of victim-blaming couldn't make it clearer to me that Kidia is onto something.

So the book made a lot of sense to me and put into better focus many things I'd already been thinking about. That said, I don't know how persuasive it would be for someone who was resistant to its core ideas—and maybe that's not the intended audience anyway. There were also some points in it that I wasn't so sure about, even as a reader who is receptive to Kidia's general worldview.

( cut for length )

Anyway, I found the book a valuable read despite some questionable points here and there. Hat tip to lirazel for the recommendation!

This satirical puzzle game by Chilean developer Dan Gonzales starts with the classic Trolley Problem: A trolley is about to run over five people tied to the track. You can pull a lever to switch the track to instead run over one person, or you can do nothing.

Whichever option you choose, the game proceeds to offer a sequence of increasingly ridiculous minigames that start out as straightforward Trolley Problem variants and quickly escalate into total absurdity, satirizing other cultural memes (run over the mime or the clown?) and thought experiments (kill the five to keep the box with Schrödinger's cat in it closed, or switch the track to open it?) as well as games from Tamagotchi to Crazy Taxi to Wolfenstein 3D—well, it wouldn't be a philosophical debate without eventually invoking Godwin's Law, now would it?

The success of the game depends heavily on your sense of humor and how open you are to a game that is going to take pleasure in needling you. I found it hilarious, so I loved it. I don't know if I've ever laughed so much playing a game before. Even going through my screenshots to put together this post, I was chuckling.

( cut for length )

The Trolley Solution is on Steam for $9.99 USD. There's also a free demo, which gives a good sense of what the game's humor is like.

This is part two of my review of Le Guin's second short story collection. (Here's part 1.)

I find it interesting how this collection shows Le Guin grappling with some repeated themes from different angles. She was obviously thinking a lot about mental health and what sanity means in an insane world, sometimes approaching the question satirically ("SQ", "Intracom"), sometimes earnestly ("The Diary of the Rose"), sometimes surreally ("Schrödinger's Cat", "The Water Is Wide").

This back half of the book also features several stories that explore women's identities and how their self-worth is (or isn't) constructed under patriarchy: "Intracom" which is trying to break some new ground in talking about motherhood even though I don't think it ultimately works; "The Pathways of Desire" which explores the impact of the white male gaze both speculatively and mundanely; "Gwilan's Harp" and "Malheur County" which work with similar ideas about women defining themselves by what they can do for others, in a fantasy and a contemporary setting respectively; and culminating in the poignant alt-history "Sur" in which an all-female expedition reaches the South Pole a year before Amundsen. When stories like this still work, it can be bittersweet, because it means we're still fighting some of the same battles.

"Intracom" (1974)

The crew of a spaceship turn out to be fragments of the personality of someone who is coming to grips with being pregnant. This story doesn't work for me. It takes so long to reveal what it's doing that the reader will have figured it out ages ago, the Star Trek parody is tiresome (though maybe this ground felt less well-trodden in 1974), and while the narrative is superficially satirizing sexism, on a deeper level it's endorsing it. The way plural identity is presented makes the protagonist sound crazy (hysterical, you might say) and the internalized misogyny is all the more brutal for not being taken seriously. There is a streak of very 1970s "haha those wacky women amirite?" that makes it read like Cathy in space.

"The Eye Altering" (1974)

People born on a colony planet can adapt to it in ways that the Earthborn colonists can't. This story almost works, but the ending is way, way overexplained! I'm surprised because Le Guin usually didn't have this problem, she trusted readers to get things without having their hands held.

"Mazes" (1975)

Animal experimentation from the rat's perspective, who sees its captor as a giant, sadistic alien. This just states a premise, it doesn't really go anywhere. If the intention was didactic, to convey the message that animal cruelty in the name of science is bad, I'm sympathetic to that, but I don't see how this presentation could be convincing to anyone who hadn't already gotten there on their own.

"The Pathways of Desire" (1979)

A planet that appears curiously idealized in a very straight-white-male-fantasy way turns out to be literally the creation of a straight white male's imagination. I like this story and it holds up surprisingly well. I think this is partly because the stifling predominance of straight-white-male imagination in SF is still a present issue, and partly because Le Guin's approach is so thoughtful. She loops in Buddhist concepts of desire as something that keeps you bound to the world, unenlightened; here unexamined desire creates the world as a siren-like trap. The anthropologist protagonists, a woman and man of color, are able to recognize what's going on, but their white male colleague, though well-intentioned, embraces the fantasy world unthinkingly, and his lack of insight destroys him.

I like how the margins of the world where the creator's interest waned (older women and men who were of little interest to the adolescent creator's erotic orientalist imagination) are able to evolve beyond the simplistic fantasy and take on a more complex reality. As in the real world, rich subcultures develop when the privileged aren't looking. The metaphor is a pidgin evolving into a creole—a simple language made up of words foisted on you by a colonialist power doesn't stay simple, it naturally elaborates on itself to fit the purposes of the people.

The characters question whether any of this matters, because they can just leave this planet and return to "the real world" where reality isn't shaped by white patriarchy. Of course, the reader (in 1979 or 2026) can't do that.

"Gwilan's Harp" (1977)

A gifted harper's instrument breaks, leading her down a different path. This captivatingly beautiful fable explores female worth and identity. She thought playing the harp (a skill inherited from her mother, importantly) was who she was, but after she couldn't do that anymore, she survived. Then she thought being a wife was who she was, but after her husband died, she survived that too. She isn't defined by her talents or relationships, there's something deeper to her than that. I don't think this is intended to be an Earthsea story, but it evokes the contemplative philosophy and folkloric resonance of Earthsea.

"Malheur County" (1979)

A litfic character piece about a woman who tries to connect with her dead daughter's young widower, but doesn't really succeed. This revisits some similar themes as "Gwilan's Harp" in a contemporary context with a more negative outlook. The protagonist doesn't gain the insight Gwilan does, that she is more than a mother, wife, mother-in-law, or grandmother. Without those roles, she finds no meaning in her life. I don't hate this story. The fact that it takes place in the Bay Area and uses some settings I recognize (the Berkeley Rose Garden!) adds some interest for me. But I am not the right audience for "life sucks" litfic.

"The Water Is Wide" (1976)

A sister visits her brother who's been hospitalized for mental health reasons. The story starts out mundane and becomes increasingly surreal. Similarly to "SQ" and "The Diary of the Rose", this one poses questions about what a societal judgement of sanity means in an insane world. The brother appears to be suffering from overwhelming empathy with the suffering of others, and not being allowed to express the grief he feels is what's driven him over the edge.

"The Wife's Story" (1982)

A reverse werewolf story. Reminiscent of "Mazes" in that it casts the human as the alien monster, and in that it doesn't do much with the premise other than present it.

"Some Approaches to the Problem of the Shortage of Time" (1979)

Previously published under the title "Where Does the Time Go?" It's an epistolary piece featuring academic and popular articles about a literal time shortage and theories on the cause. This story cracks me up. I have a soft spot for stories that you know were inspired by the universal feeling of time slipping away, and I love how this one turns it into a pointed satire of political battles over conservation. Time is a precious natural resource! Where is it all going?! Draining away through a tiny hole in the space-time continuum? Or chemically bonding to the artifacts of our industrial age? "...a single gas-powered lawnmower moving at less than 3 mph can petrolise three solid hours of a Sunday afternoon in an area of one city block." XD

"Sur" (1982)

Alternate history in which an expedition of South American women reach the South Pole a year before Amundsen's expedition. I like this story. I find it charming, if bittersweet. I think it represents the everpresent secret history of women's friendships and accomplishments, almost always devalued and ignored in their time, but sometimes possible to unearth in retrospect. The in-universe account of the voyage, written by one of the women, straddles the fence between staying hidden and coming out of the shadows. She urges anyone who finds it not to tell Amundsen, because knowing he'd been beaten to the punch would bruise his ego, and I think the character is sincere in that—but she also keeps speculating that her grandchildren or "someone's grandchildren" might be interested to learn about her achievement someday. The grandchildren of this character would be of Le Guin's own children's generation.