Reading

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Wednesday Reads the Side Catalogue

My recent reading features two short works by Tamsyn Muir, author of the Locked Tomb series.

I liked both of these books a lot: they seemed to me to feature Muir's strengths without some of the excesses of the Tomb books.

(I am aware that these excesses are precisely the source of delight for fans. I appreciate the meticulous artistry of the series; it's just that the particular qualities of deferral, substitution, and abrasion that are the formal and tonal preoccupation of these books, and that Muir wields so expertly and so persistently, are just not quite my tempo.)

The first book was Muir's 2022 novella, Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower.

This is a revisionist princess-in-the-tower story, so the pleasure comes not from a surprise twist but from seeing how the genre is executed. Very well, I thought.

(That said, there were two or three times I did exclaim out loud, "oh no!" etc. So it's not twistless.)

I liked it enough that when it was done I felt wistful about not being with the characters any more.

(Not in a sentimental way. Or yes, in a sentimental way, but not in a cute way. Or yes cute, but not cozy. Difficult and heartbroken and ridiculous. That way.)

The second was a long short story, or maybe novelette? called Undercover, blurbed thus (in part): "A fresh-faced newcomer arrives in an isolated, gang-run town and soon finds herself taking a job nobody else wants: bodyguard to a ghoul. Not just your average mindless, half-rotted shuffler, though. Lucille is a dancer who can still put on her own lipstick and whose shows are half burlesque, half gladiator match."

What's more, I think it is better that that sounds.

sabotabby, I felt like you might enjoy both of these. Like you might start out thinking "Why did Frac think I would like this?" but then fairly rapidly think "OH" instead.

Anyway, that appears to be most of Muir's non-tomb catalogue, which is too bad. I wish there were more.

§rf§

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Wednesday the underdesk exercise thing arrived (but needs putting together)

What I read

Finished A World to Win, and decided not to go straight on to next.

Read Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art (Dance to the Music of Time #8) (1966), which is a very different angle on WW2 as Nick Jenkins is stuck in a backwater with Widmerpool. A particularly grim episode in its much quieter register.

Started Elaine Castillo, Moderation (2025) which started out fairly strongly, then hit a saggy point, and then I discovered I'd been a bit misled over its genre position, and anyway didn't feel much like continuing.

Picked off the shelf Susan Kelly, And Soon I'll Come to Kill You (Liz Connors #5) (1991), from the period when I was reading a lot more crime novels like this. It's not bad - at least Our Heroine has a plausible reason for getting mixed up in criminal matters, as a journalist specialising in crime reporting, but she has the almost obigatory for period/genre cop boyfriend. This one was probably a bit atypical of the series as a whole as it involved someone with a grudge against her (there are several suspects for Reasons to do with past reporting etc) stalking her with malign intent.

Andrea Long Chu, Females (2025), because I'd found Authority interesting and read something about this but while I am all for rediscovery of the out-there voices of the 'second wave', riffing off V Solanas was just a bit niche.

Laurie R King, Knave of Diamonds (Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes, #19) (2025) - Kobo deal at the weekend - seriously phoning it in - scraping the bottom of the barrel -

On the go

Val McDermid, A Darker Domain (Inspector Karen Pirie #2) (2008) for some reason Kobo were doing a serious promotional deal on the McDermid Pirie series at the weekend so I thought, why not?

Up next

New Slightly Foxed perhaps.

Finally actually working with data

Some mornings 05:20 feels earlier than others, and 6 hours of sleep doesn't feel like enough...

Luckily, it was an interesting day at work, so I managed to stay awake. I had a 9:00 fika with my former colleagues with the research data group at the library, followed with a meeting of the Radiocarbon Isotope Data task group for SEAD. We went over the various data files we got from the Radiocarbon Isotope researchers who are looking to get their data into our database and looked at a variety of available tools for dealing with data and cleaning it up before ingestion into a database. The meeting ended with me taking on the assignment of figuring out the locations of the various sites listed in their spreadsheet. The researchers must have geographical coordinates somewhere, as the spreadsheet includes a copy of their figure 1, showing the locations on a map. However, neither that paper, nor any of the others I could find in the citation chain provided any location details. Therefore, I did the easy thing and sent an email to the author.

After work I tried mailing back to the museum the pot handel I accidentally brought home from Lofoten with me. But the guy couldn't make it trackable, so I didn't send it.

Now it isn't even 19:00, and I am super tired, and I have done my yoga for the day, so I am seriously considering just heading to bed directly after posting this.

To-do note I jotted down this morning: sew a magnet to my backpack, and to my hat, so that the hat can just sit in place, rather than bounce around on the end of the string. Repeat for the other hat.

Back

I'm back, sort of. We did a week of vacation after WorldCon, then got sick on the last day, so I'm still recovering. Covid tests were negative, so I think it's just a bad cold. It probably wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't had to do a full day of travel from 6:00 am to 10:30 pm to get home.

More later, but one of my favorite things was the really wonderful piece that N.K. Jemisin wrote about me for the program book.

***

Big thing I wanted to mention here: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/martha-wells-murderbot-and-more-tor-books

This is a 14 ebook Humble Bundle from Tor, (DRM-free as usual) and you can select a portion of the price to donate to World Central Kitchen.

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Sinopticon by Xueting Christine Ni

A celebration of Chinese science fiction.

Sinopticon by Xueting Christine Ni

Tolkien Studies 21: an announcement

On behalf of myself and my co-editors, Michael D.C. Drout and Yvette Kisor, here are the expected contents of volume 21 of the journal Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review. This issue will be dated 2024; we know we're behind. All of the works are now in the hands of our publisher, West Virginia University Press, and the volume is scheduled to be published in softcover and on Project MUSE in a few months. - David Bratman, co-editor

Tolkien Studies 21 (2024)

**

Alexandra Bolintineanu, "Tolkien's Elegiac Trees: Enta Geweorc and the Ents Across Time"
Patrick J. Murphy, "The Riddles of The Hobbit, the Academic History of the Exeter Book, and the Invention of Tolkien's Ring"
Anika Jensen, "'I Wonder If Any Song Will Ever Mention It': Locating Precarious Time in The Lord of the Rings"
Eduardo Boheme Kumamoto, "The Allegiant Translator: J.R.R. Tolkien, Burton Raffel, and Verse Translation"
John Garth and Peter Gilliver, "The Wanderer's Return: New Findings on Tolkien in Oxford 1918-19"
Claudio A. Testi, "From 'The Tree' to 'Leaf by Niggle': Up to the Mountains and Beyond"
Peizhen Wu and Michael D.C. Drout, "'The Course of Actual Composition': Analysis of some aspects of the revision history of The Lord of the Rings using 'Lexomic' digital methods"

**
Notes and Documents

Łukasz Neubauer, "The 'Origin of Gandalf': Josef Madlener's Der Berggeist and the Transboundary Mountain Spirit Rübezahl as Purported Sources of Inspiration for Tolkien's Wizard"
Matthew Thompson-Handell, "Reconsidering the Early Critical Response to The Lord of the Rings"

**
Book Reviews

Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth, by Robert Stuart, reviewed by Yvette Kisor
Representing Midle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology, by Robert T. Tally, Jr., reviewed by Douglas C. Kane
Pity, Power, and Tolkien's Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many, by Thomas P. Hillman, reviewed by Clare Moore
Theology and Tolkien: Practical Theology, ed. Douglas Estes, reviewed by Nick Polk
How to Misunderstand Tolkien: The Critics and the Fantasy Master, by Bruno Bacelli, reviewed by Lori Campbell-Tanner

Cami D. Agan, David Bratman, The Rev. Tom Emanuel, Jonathan Evans, Jason Fisher, and John Magoun, "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2021"
David Bratman, "Bibliography (in English) for 2022"
Errata: TS 18

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Interesting Links for 27-08-2025

1. Scotland's birth rate falls to lowest level since 1855: (tags:scotland babies )
2. Local Restaurant Exhausted as Google AI Keeps Telling Customers About Daily Specials That Don't Exist: (tags:ai google fraud restaurant viaPatrickHadfield )
3. Judge sides with trans-inclusive sorority: They can admit trans women if they want: (tags:transgender women law USA GoodNews )

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books

Reading Wednesday

Just finished; Nothing, my life has been clown shoes lately.

Currently reading: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams. This is so horrifying. Obviously, the genocide and destruction of the political process is the most horrifying thing about it, but the neat thing about evil is that it's fractal, and the interpersonal stuff is much more visceral. Like Joel Kaplan sexually harassing Sarah shortly after she's almost died in childbirth (because, yeah, you can be one of the top people at Facebook at the height of its success and almost die in childbirth. America!). Or the weird obsession Sheryl Sandberg has with getting women to nap with their heads in her lap on her private jet. These people are so creepy and awful, and nightmarish as you think Mark Zuckerberg is, this memoir depicts him as much worse than that.

Which isn't to say that Sarah is great—she paints herself as a naïve idealist, but the scale of awful at this company is such that after a certain point, you kind of roll your eyes every time she notices that it's bad. But that's storytelling for you. Highly recommended.

Wanton and dissipation

Them: If you’re familiar with the meanings of wanton and dissipation, could you please describe them in a way that will help me never confuse them with other words or forget their meaning?

Me: Oh, there is no way the comments to this post are going to be helpful.

And I was half right! I was just about the only person to give the asked-for definition of "dissipation". As predicted, everybody else used the science sense rather than the moral decay sense. What surprised me is that they also all defined the word "wanton" in terms of violence rather than sexual promiscuity.

Anyway, I said myself that dissipation (meaning debauchery) is an old-fashioned term and that I'm not quite sure how I even know that one off the top of my head, but then the next day I was re-reading Ancillary Justice and there it is, right in the first few chapters. Seivarden is in a bad state due to her dissipated lifestyle, and that's the word used to describe it. Huh. (But I think I already knew that word before I read the book for the first time.)

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( Read more... )

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Happy birthday,

hazelk!

BISQC, day 2

Today at the Banff International String Quartet Competition, which I'm watching livestream, the other five competitors who didn't play yesterday got their turns to play one Haydn quartet and one work from the 21st century.

The Haydns spanned the range of aesthetic approach. The Cong Quartet (so named because they're from Hong Kong - I guess if they spelled it "Kong" people would think they were from Skull Island) played Op. 33/2, known as the "Joke" Quartet for its infamous fake-out ending, and they played it jokily. They got into the rhythmic swing of the work, all the way through and not just in the finale, and found the lively Haydn spirit there. The Poeisis Quartet in Op. 71/2 also caught the playfulness and spark of the music, though their approach was not especially witty, unlike the Cong or yesterday's Nerida.

The other three were more serious. Quartet KAIRI brought crispness and clarity to Op. 74/1. Their playing was rich, smooth, and resonant, even buttery. The Arete Quartet played the relatively early Op. 20/2 as if it were less a Sturm & Drang work than a Baroque one, clean and elegant, the more so as it has a fugue for a finale, here hushed and intricate. But by far the most serious-minded, sober and plain performance was Quatuor Magenta (pronounced MAH-zhen-tah - they're French) in Op. 76/3. This is the "Emperor" Quartet, the one whose slow movement is variations on a Haydn theme written as a hymn to the Holy Roman Emperor, and which eventually became "Deutschland über alles," as a result of which hardly anyone plays the quartet any more. So due credit to a French ensemble - of four women, yet - for taking it up.

Of the 21st century works, none really appealed to me, though at least they all sounded different, unlike the last festival where they all seemed much of a muchness. The most enjoyable was the Cong's performance of Quartet No. 7 by Lawrence Dillon. A clever and strongly rhythmic work, with lots of whining calls for individual instruments above the chattering of the group. Something similar was the case with Magenta in Pascal Dusapin's Quartet No. 5 - yes, that's the third time this piece has come up in two days. Magenta's rendition seemed more haunting and abstract than the Elmire's yesterday.

Kairi did Floral Fairy by Toshio Hosokawa, which put a wispy sound with lots of harmonics at the service of an abrupt, random, detached style that was far too reminiscent of Webern. This is the sort of modernism that I'd hoped was dead by now. And I can't say much more for Many Many Cadences by Sky Macklay, from Poeisis. With some variances later on, this consists of an endless repetition of a jerky descending motif ending in the tonic, so yeah it's a cadence though it doesn't approach it through a conventional harmonic sequence. And even less for the Arete's choice of Jörg Widmann's Hunting Quartet, which we also heard yesterday, the only difference being that, for this work requiring waving bows around a lot, the Arete's violins and viola, unlike yesterday's Viatores, stood up to play this piece.

Next up is a round from the romantic-era repertoire, with the nine quartets playing seven different pieces. This will also be spread over two days, but I probably won't write it up until it finishes on Thursday.

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personal

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I'm trying to not be desperately irrationally angry about things but my mom just used my baking strainer for her farro because she thought it was hers and didn't apologize about it. I used it the other day when I was baking, and my mom will just move all my stuff out of the dish drainer and for some reason she thought it was hers and now she's used it and I'm really angry about it. I ONLY use it for baking, I have a separate, sturdier one for draining pasta and stuff. And now it's been used for heavier grains and also cross contaminated with wheat and I'm really not okay with this. she didn't know. but also she didn't question why it was in the dish drainer with all of my baking supplies and she hadn't used it in days and just

arg

(I know it was mine because the strainer is coming apart in a specific spot)

I washed it once but I'm going to wash it again because I can't even deal with how much wheat there could be in all the little crevices. maybe I should just buy a new one. but I had trouble finding one with a good weave which is why I haven't gotten a new one before this

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how do your gardens grow

possibly the most constructive thing I have actually done today is hunt tomatoes

-- no wait that's a lie, I also investigated an apple tree. (Unremarkable eating apples.)

But! Tomatoes!

a lap full of tomatoes, in reds and oranges and greens and golds and purpleish

Pictured varieties: Purple Ukraine, Blue Fire, misc green stripey, Orange Banana, Moneymaker. Buried so you can't see it is a Feo di Rio Gordo. I did not get the whole rainbow I was aiming for this year (alas the Yellow Pearshaped all failed, as did the Known green stripey), but I'm nonetheless pleased!

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summer clearly winds to a close

I took my electric scooter over to the dentist today, and learned the hard way that it is too cold to be out with only a thin cashmere sweater as an outer layer if one is moving at 20 km/hr. Brrr.

Other accomplishments of the day include work, laundry, getting the dried black currants off of the old, kinda broken plastic trays they had stuck to, and ordering a new, larger, food dehydrator with stainless steel trays. It will be interesting to see how well it works.

I am also pleased that whatever caused the muscle aling the right side of my spine to hurt yesterday and this morning seems to have adjusted itself, as it is feeling much better.

Current Mood: embarrassed

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drama: glass heart

Clarification about the actors in Glass Heart

The other day, my phrasing when I tried to describe what the Glass Heart actors are doing was not at all as clear as it should've been!

So: It's not that the main cast in this show are faking playing the instruments. It's that none of them are musicians at all, and they learned to play the specific material for the show well enough to visually pass not only as being able to play but as being very good (the male lead is explicitly a musical genius), with full shots of them doing bits of it rather than having body doubles or clever cuts or anything, AND doing some pretty heavy-lifting acting at the same time. (What I don't know is whether their performances pass as looking professional to actual professional musicians, but one of the supporting cast is an actual singer and seems pretty impressed with it.)

The making-of feature I linked in my last post is specifically about that aspect of the show/their performances.

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Making coffee in the microwave

There's a scene in The Thick of It where someone (I think it's either Glen or Alex Macqueen's character Julius Nicholson) is looking for a radio to put the test match on, and Ollie scofffs that they should just listen online, and Glen says listening to radio online is like making coffee in the microwave.

I immediately loved this.

I can't tell you how it's perfect but it feels perfect.

Anyway my radio stopped working so I'm listening on my phone now and I think about this line all the goddam time.

As with coffee in the microwave, I'd probably rather have none at all than deal with this. It's bad because with the radio I could flip an actual tactile switch, I didn't even have to take my eyes off my work, and now I have to pick up the distraction rectangle and tap tap a bunch on its unhelpful featureless glass carapace to get the music back on, and by the time I've done that I am probably playing games or answering messages.

D had already looked up dab radios when mine started dying, but today he just sent me a link to one and said "I can buy this from Argos, we can pick it up today."

I was torn between finding this very charming and worrying that I'd become so annoying he just bought me a radio to stop my whining about it, heh.

Current Music: Lo! Peninsula, "Chasing Tidal Waves"

The shadows on the walls don't recognize me anymore

All these terrible people whose weight the earth cannot afford, doing their best to take the rest of us with them to their Armageddon with the most toys, and not a one of them will ever be a tenth of a thousandth as cool as the living tradition of an epic poem performed with chugging guitar riffs: Exhibit A, Ereimang's "(Kwakta Lamjel)" (2023). All you fascists bound to be boring.

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The just-making-it-up school of medical science

Woman on social media claiming that "Cancer is trying to heal, not kill.... A cancerous tumor is basically a bag the human body creates to collect toxins that are contaminating the bloodstream." (Apparently this goes back to 2021? still in circulation because I spotted it in the wild today.)

Apart from anything else here, I'm trying to think how this actually works - okay, it collects the toxins, but she was also saying you shouldn't have operations or get involved with, you know, that nasty actual medicine? In particular that biopsies are Really Really Bad and cause the tumour to explode and spread toxins throughout the body. (This notion derives from one book by a struck-off doc relating to his theories about needle biopsies in the specific case of prostate cancer.)

But what is the mechanism once it's collected the toxins? does it just sit there? does it detach and float away? really one has questions. Does one want a bag of toxins just hanging about on one's body? (Maybe a wartcharmer might be called for?)

I was reminded of the theory, current for centuries, that there was 'good' pus which aided in the healing of wounds, so surgeons were all 'yay laudable pus'.

I wonder if anyone, ever, had the theory re TB, that the consumptive coughing up blood was getting rid of 'bad blood'*, jolly good, restored health is on the way....

*I'm sure I've previously mention my paternal grandmother who was reassuring about my copious and not infrequent nosebleeds in childhood and adolescence on the grounds that it was getting rid of 'the bad blood'. Yes, historian of medicine wishes I'd done an oral history interview about these lingering remnants of humoural theory.

RPG Designer Goes Missing After Crowdfunding Award-Winning Game

"As many of you have noticed, Max has been absent for nearly two months"

Barnard's Star news

Small, hot world discovered