Author Archives: Alyx Dellamonica

About Alyx Dellamonica

Alyx Dellamonica lives in Toronto, Ontario, with their wife, author Kelly Robson. They write fiction, poetry, and sometimes plays, both as A.M. Dellamonica and L.X. Beckett. A long-time creative writing teacher and coach, they now work at the UofT writing science articles and other content for the Department of Chemistry. They identify as queer, nonbinary, autistic, Nerdfighter, and BTS Army.

Exquisite Words

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I was powerfully struck by many things in M.K. Hobson’s The Hidden Goddess, but somehow this struck a deep chord. Emily’s talking to a magician who practices credomancy, whose power is all about the practitioner’s self-confidence and the way they’re viewed by others, and this magician tells her:

“I’m also a woman. Failure, struggle and doubt are my constant companions. They are not always pleasant, but they inoculate me against overconfidence. As such, I would not trade them for all the arrogant bravado in the world.”

It’s a nice bit of characterization, and it also speaks to something I feel, in my marrow, as truth. That idea of arrogant bravado–a thing I see as coming from a place of privilege, of developing from experience the expectation that one’s shiniest objects of desire will be dropped in their laps by the Universe–it’s the flip side of being trained to have low expectations.

Like most people, I’ve had my share of good and bad flips of the cosmic coin. The character in this novel who’s expressing this idea, on the other hand, is someone who, because of her ethnicity, gender and the society she lives in, has never had anything handed to her. Everything she is and everything she has she’s made herself, and she knows it could be yanked away by a wisp of bad luck, a mistake or even an accident of timing.

I understood her perfectly in that moment: in two lines, Hobson made her utterly real to me. It is very neatly done.

Exquisite Words

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Here are a couple passages from American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, and the Birth of Hollywood, by Howard Blum, that are witty and really capture character:

It was well known that the detective and Rogers detested each other with the long-standing ill will that only the self-absorbed can find the patience to sustain.

and

Billy despised anarchists. In his long career he had arrested murderers, thieves, swindlers and crooked politicians, but he had a singularly deep, visceral hatred for anarchists. He thought they “lived without any regard for a single decent thing in life.” “They exist in a state of free love, are notoriously unfaithful to their mates thus chosen, and are so crooked that even in this class of rogues, there does not seem to be any hint of honor. That is, their way of looking at the world directly challenged his orderly, patriotic, churchgoing, monogamous, achieving middle-class life. And that, he knew with unshakeable certainty, was an unforgivable crime.

I found the content of this book to be very absorbing and it is a fast read, the kind of history one just rips through. But Blum’s central conceit is to tie together three lives, those of Clarence Darrow, detective William J. Burns and filmmaker D.W. Griffith, and I don’t think that ever quite comes off. Darrow and Burns definitely intertwined, but they glanced off Griffith–he just happened to be around.

Making the quick getaway

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Kelly and I spent Saturday night in Victoria last weekend; I had a meeting for the mentoring gig and rather than spend an entire day getting there and then back on the ferry, we decided to make an Occasion of it.

Before 2001 we used to visit the city periodically–check out Canada’s most magnificent bookstore, poke around, admire the waterfront, hit Craigdarroch Castle. Then when the parents moved to Parksville, all our Vancouver Island to-ing and fro-ing got subsumed into family visiting. We’d catch the ferry to Nanaimo, get a ride to their place, and hang out. They were great trips–I still miss doing that–but all we’ve seen of Victoria since then was a brief sail-by last year when the Alaska cruise we went on with my family happened to pause in Canada.

This wasn’t exactly leisurely either, but kelly-yoyoKelly and I did manage to pack in some foodie tourism. We hit a lounge named Clive’s Classic Lounge, where they made interesting cocktails: their punch was incredible, and I had a thing called a rhubarb fizz that was very tasty. We also had insanely good Vietnamese food at a place called Kim’s on Johnson and a good brekkie at a hipstery joint, Mo:le.

Our big dinner at Il Terazzo was only just okay; the salads gave me high hopes, but the food–while nicely put together–was entirely lacking in special, or nuance. It is also a massive place, a pack ’em in cheek by jowl and let the noise mount venue. Nothing there was terrible, but the end result was, essentially, meh.

There were a couple big events happening in Victoria–a 90K bike race, and a boat festival of some kind. We were lucky to get a room at the Best Western. We were even luckier to get one on the fourth floor, directly across from a nesting seagull. Her egg began cracking as we were checking out of the hotel, and part of me wanted to stay until the thing not only hatched but grew to adulthood and started applying for colleges. It’s a good thing I didn’t–after kicking a hole in the roof, it crawled out of the bottom of the egg. Kelly and I saw some wriggling and one waving leg above the crown of the nest, but the miracle of bird birth didn’t yield any pictures more amazing than this blurry close-up of parent bird peering at the progress of its offspring as it busted out.

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Exquisite Words

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I am charmed by everything Eliot Fintushel does, and that includes his live performance of the entire Book of Revelation, but what I like about the opening of Breakfast with the Ones You Love is that it’s quirky and funny in its rhythms and yet dark–very dark–underneath.

If you want to be safe, a person like myself, you have to kill your face. Otherwise people get their hooks in you, which, who needs it? I already killed my face by the age of twelve. Problem is, my tits invaded. I tried not eating, which I hear stops tits in their tracks, but I couldn’t keep it up. In spite of everything, there is something in you that wants to keep you alive. It’s like a disease that you just can’t shake, no matter how hard you try. At least you can kill your face, see? Me, I can kill people too. I can kill them whenever I want to.

Hobson versus the trolls…

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I’m travelling tomorrow, and not to Wiscon (alas!) so I thought I’d see if a few of you might have time and wit available to shove a fiery-hot rhetorical poker of feminist logic up the hind ends of the trolls gathering on M.K. Hobson’s blog post about her Bustlepunk Manifesto.

I’ll explain, but in that roundabout fashion I sometimes use, because it has Been. A. Week. I couldn’t come straight at a thought right now unless it was covered in dark chocolate frosting.

Many years ago Canada decided to get a $1 coin, along the lines of the Susan B. Anthony, and they put a lovely bird called a loon on one side. As a result, many people call this coin the loon or, more popularly, the loonie.

This worked out reasonably well for someone (presumably the government and the Royal Canadian Mint) and in time they followed up this sterling bit of governance (yes, pun, hahaha) by deciding to go with a two dollar coin. And hey! Some folks speculated we’d call it the doubloon.

If you were me (or my wife) when that suggestion was floated, you went OMG. COOL. Doubloon, doubloon, doubloon. And could not be shut up about it. You would still use the term to this day, even though nobody knows what the hell you’re talking about.

Because the rest of Canada, you see, mistakenly refers to the thing as a toonie. Loonie. Toonie. No! I say! You are wrong! I don’t care if it rhymes, it’s not as elegant! Where’s the historical humor in that?

But I am outvoted. That’s what’s caught the public imagination and until I manage to achieve dominion over you all, toonie it is.

So why am I telling you this?

Some weeks ago I read THE HIDDEN GODDESS by M.K. Hobson for Tor.com, and when time came to write the review, I surfed over to her Bustlepunk Manifesto and refreshed my memory on a few points. Then I wrote the following:

Such books are the softer cousins of steampunk—historic romantic fantasies…

The review occasioned some squeeing over the book in the comments thread (because THE HIDDEN GODDESS rocks!) along with a lot of reaction that boiled down to “Another Punk, oh sigh.”

I’d seen this before. One of the last articles I wrote for Syfy was on the Stitchpunk animated feature 9, and the various other SkiffyPunk terms… what they meant and who was writing them. That article got a lot of the same reaction. Which, in my opinion, boils down to: “Stop calling it punk already! It’s a doubloon.”

We punk stuff in this genre. It happens. If you want it to stop, become cooler than the mutant love child of Doctorow and Scalzi and coin something catchier. That would make good use of the energy you currently spend griping about punk variations. And the weather.

Hobson has posted a thoughtful note today about that line of mine, “softer cousin of steampunk,” by way of mentioning how ‘softer’ in our culture tends to mean ‘girl cooties,’ and how to many a reader ‘girl’ still automatically means ‘lesser’. She wasn’t offended by what I’d said… it was just part of this lovely longer entry about some internet comments discussing the bustlepunk/toonie thing.

Now the comments have become trollage. As far as I can tell, the guys in this comments thread are now lambasting her for her tongue-in-cheek coining of ‘bustlepunk’ and accusing her of … well, of censoring them by letting them comment on her blog, and not politely. And marginalizing herself by acknowledging the feminine stuff in her work. They’ve also kindly letting us know, Dear, that sexism, in the world and in book publishing is so over.

A lot of the comments are entirely missing the point of her initial post, which was thoughtful and laden with good feminist content, stuff that’s well worth thinking about and discussing. Some responses on point would, I’m sure, be very appreciated by Hobson. Or hey–if you’re looking for a Memorial Weekend flamewar, just go with the fiery-hot implements I mentioned.