What I read
Finished Love at All Ages - think I said most of what I felt moved to say last week, but there was also a certain amount of Mrs Morland whingeing and bitching about the Burdens of Being a Popular Writer (when she wasn't being Amazingly Dotty), whoa, Ange, biting the hand or what?
Sarah Brooks, The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands (2024), which I picked up some while ago on promotion and then I think I saw someone writing something about it. I liked the idea but somehow wasn't overwhelmingly enthused?
Read the latest Literary Review.
Since there is a forthcoming online discussion, dug out my 1974 mass market paperback edition of Joanna Russ, The Female Man - I think this was even before excursions to Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed, somehow I had learnt of Fantast, a mailorder operation with duplicated catalogues every few months that purveyed an odd selection of US books. It's quite hard to recall the original impact. Possibly I now prefer her essays?
Carol Atherton, Reading Lessons: The Books We Read at School, the Conversations They Spark, and Why They Matter (2024) - EngLit teacher meditates over books that she had taught, her own reading of them, their impact in the classroom, general issues around teaching Lit, etc - this came up in my Recommended for You in Kobo + on promotion. Quite interesting but how the teaching of EngLit has changed since My Day....
Lee Child, The Hard Way (Jack Reacher, #10) (2006) - every so often I read an interview with or something about Lee Child who sounds very much a Good Guy so I thought I might try one of these and this one was currently on promotion. It's less action and more twisty following intricate plot than I anticipated with lots of sudden reversal, and lots and lots of details. I don't think I'm going to go away and devour all the Reacher books but I can think of circumstances where they might be a preferable option given limited reading materials available.
On the go
I literally just finished that so there is nothing on the go, except one or two things I suppose I am technically still reading.
Up next
Dunno.
It is my fifteenth anniversary with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks and I am spending it with various doctors instead of my husband and our traditional restaurant. We had a better wedding the first plague year.
rushthatspeaks and I am spending it with various doctors instead of my husband and our traditional restaurant. We had a better wedding the first plague year.I have a project I want to do in the garden. I've been wanting to do it for a month now, but Husband told me to wait until now because that would give me a better chance of success.
I want to make a new bed with native plants for pollinators. A plant nursery that I have ordered from before offers just such a thing. A collection of plants and a plan for how to avoid putting the tallest one in front and the smallest one behind them (which I would 100% otherwise have done!). I call it the kit bed. :)
So first thing to do is basically just dig a big hole in the lawn. Husband said it was now late enough in the year and we've had some rain that I can think about starting.
Therefore it is of course going to rain solidly all afternoon and we're under a blue (lowest level, but still) weather warning for heavy rain and thunder.
*sigh*
I want to make a new bed with native plants for pollinators. A plant nursery that I have ordered from before offers just such a thing. A collection of plants and a plan for how to avoid putting the tallest one in front and the smallest one behind them (which I would 100% otherwise have done!). I call it the kit bed. :)
So first thing to do is basically just dig a big hole in the lawn. Husband said it was now late enough in the year and we've had some rain that I can think about starting.
Therefore it is of course going to rain solidly all afternoon and we're under a blue (lowest level, but still) weather warning for heavy rain and thunder.
*sigh*
For some reason, concatenation of open tabs on this theme.
Sociability was intrinsic to British politics in the eighteenth-century:
Although women were prevented by custom from voting, holding most patronage appointments or taking seats in the Lords (even if they were peeresses in their own rights), politics ran through the lives of women from politically active families — and their political activities largely took place through the social arena, whether it was in London or in the provinces. Like their male counterparts, they used social situations to gather and disseminate political news and gossip, discuss men and measures, facilitate networking and build or maintain factional allegiances, or seek patronage for themselves or their clients.
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This Is What Being in Your Twenties Was Like in 18th-Century London:
Browne wrote that he needed money to pay rent—and to purchase stockings, breeches, wigs and other items he deemed necessary for his life in London. “Cloaths which [I] have now are but mean in Comparison [with] what they wear here,” he wrote in one letter.
Financial worries didn’t stop Browne from enjoying his time in the city. “Despite telling his father how short of cash he was, Browne maintained a lively social life, meeting friends and eating and drinking around Fleet Street, close to the Inns of Court,” per the Guardian.
According to the National Trust, Browne’s descriptions of his social life evoke the scenes captured by William Hogarth.
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The Friendship Book of Anne Wagner (1795-1834):
What is a friendship book? As Dr Lynley Anne Herbert relates in her post for us on a seventeenth-century specimen, it is a lot like an early version of social media, a place to record friendships and social connections.
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This one is actually Victorian (and I think I may have mentioned before?): Peter McLagan (1823-1900): Scotland’s first Black MP - notes that he was not even the first Black MP to sit in the Commons.
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And this is actually a bit random: apparently the Niels Bohr Library & Archives 'is a repository and hub for information in the history of physics, astronomy, geophysics, and allied fields' rather than exclusively Bohring. Anyway, an interview with the staff there about what they do.
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I wish merely to register my pleasure that when I went looking for the uncredited actor playing the dean of the law school in the early scenes of Winterset (1936), I found that Murray Kinnell had the kind of Wikipedia biographer who includes short reviews with their subject's stage and screen resume. "An unusual role for Kinnell as a derelict one-time gentleman; the film opened in July 1931." "'No man is a hero to his valet', as Kinnell's character in this murder mystery could testify." "Kinnell as yet another butler, though this time with an unexpected flourish." I am much more used to finding this kind of partisanship on social media: with no prior attachment to an actor whom I did not notice previously in a handful of pre-Codes, just its enthusiasm makes me want to see these lovingly noted small parts even when a non-zero quantity of Charlie Chan seems to be involved. I hope Kinnell would have appreciated his future, however microscopic fandom.
(sovay Sep. 8th, 2025 03:55 pm)
sovay Sep. 8th, 2025 03:55 pm)Unless I lost track of one in the phone tree, I have just spent my afternoon calling five different doctor's offices, garnished with one bookstore and one library, and I would still like a refund on selected and considerable tracts of physical existence. In other news, while I have always had an inevitable affection for the mild-mannered character acting of Donald Meek, I have not seen him anywhere near recently enough to explain his appearance in last night's dreams, especially not the one with the used book store crumbling literally on the edge of some awful revelation. Over the last three days, I mainlined a rewatch of the first two seasons of Turn: Washington's Spies (2014–17) and just before bed had started re-reading Paul French's Midnight in Peking (2011), which in the years since I originally read and much later wrote about it has garnered at least one nonfiction rebuttal and more contextually interested explorations, because nothing engages the human instinct for rabbit holes like a cold murder case. No offense to Donald Meek, I'm not sure where he came in.
P.S. Stop the presses, Benny Safdie and Dwayne Johnson will be adapting Daniel Pinkwater's Lizard Music (1976)? They had better get the Surrealism.
P.S. Stop the presses, Benny Safdie and Dwayne Johnson will be adapting Daniel Pinkwater's Lizard Music (1976)? They had better get the Surrealism.
Yesterday evening I was trying to print something out and printer status popup kept telling me that there was a paper jam.
No sign of actual paper jam when I pulled out the paper tray, also looked behind printer cartridge, etc etc.
Did a little light internet searching and discovered that Lo, 'Tis A Knowne Thingge, and here are several fiddly things you can do which might fix it.
By which time I thought I would leave it until the morrow.
So, on the morrow (today) I had Other Things To Do First, so I only got round to turning on the printer just to see what it would do just now.
Whereupon it spontaneously printed a scruffy and mangled page - WTF, had this been somehow lurking hidden and unseen? - and then presented itself as ready for duty.
And lo and behold, mirabile dictu, it has printed A Thing for me.
Just a moment while I go to the foot of our stairs.
Of course, whether this happy state of affairs will continue to pertain is in the lap of Hardy's Purblind Doomsters.
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Bread held from last week held out for several days, and then there were leftover rolls.
Friday night supper: (as previously mentioned) sardegnera, with Milano and Napoli salami.
Saturday breakfast rolls: adaptable soft rolls recipe. 70/30 strong white/wholemeal flour, dried cranberries, maple syrup, turned out nicely.
Today's lunch: I'd actually ordered lamb ribs, got lamb cutlets as a substitution, did with them much the same: marinated overnight in olive oil + white wine with crushed garlic, salt, 5-pepper blend, thyme and rosemary, today sauteed chopped onion in oil and briefly browned the drained cutlets, poured on the marinade, heated up and then covered and put into a very moderate oven for 2 and a half hours - very nice; served with sticky rice in coconut milk with lime leaves, white-braised tenderstem broccoli tips, extra fine green beans and red bell pepper, and stirfried tat soi.
For reasons as yet unknown to medical science, although I am doing my best to get medical science to find them out, I am in the acutely worst shape I have been in since the summer of 2023 and it is devouring all of my time. Have some links.
1. In music still in situ on my computer, I have had the Punters' "Jim Harris" (1997) since 2005 when I believe it to have been one of the fruits of a now-deceased music community on LJ. It is not a variant on Child 243; it was contemporarily written by Peter Leonard of Isle Valen about a local schooner fender-bender in 1934. I discovered last year that it's got a Roud number and I have never gotten over the way its last verse turns from traditionally recounted maritime mini-disaster to Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi:
It's all right when the wheel is going up, but when she turns for to go down
You all might meet with the same sad fate as Jim Harris in Paradise Sound
The folk tradition being what it is, this song is naturally the only thing I know abour its eponymous captain, which is rough.
2. I should not have read this article about the Instagram filter valley of the current rejuvenative craze for deep-plane face-lifts no matter what because one of the reasons I have trouble being read as younger than my age is that I have worked very hard to reach this one, but toward the end of the piece I hit an anonymously quoted surgeon, "When you look at someone else with an elite face-lift . . . all you should be thinking is, How did you age better than me? The goal is you want to look genetically dominant to other people," and at the notion that eugenics should be aspirationally mixed with ageism, I just wanted that surgeon to be operated upon by Dr. Einstein after an all-night open-bar horror marathon. I felt better after dialing up the grainily inimitable footage of Pamela Blair's "Dance: Ten; Looks: Three" (1975).
3. Thanks to listening to Arthur Askey, I became curious about the origins of the musical have-a-banana phrase which diffused decades ago from music hall into general pop culture and apparently the best guess is a Rocky Horror-style audience improvisation that has now endured as a meme for more than a century. Good for it.
I just want to sleep and read books and write about movies. Who's even asking for a small fortune?
1. In music still in situ on my computer, I have had the Punters' "Jim Harris" (1997) since 2005 when I believe it to have been one of the fruits of a now-deceased music community on LJ. It is not a variant on Child 243; it was contemporarily written by Peter Leonard of Isle Valen about a local schooner fender-bender in 1934. I discovered last year that it's got a Roud number and I have never gotten over the way its last verse turns from traditionally recounted maritime mini-disaster to Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi:
It's all right when the wheel is going up, but when she turns for to go down
You all might meet with the same sad fate as Jim Harris in Paradise Sound
The folk tradition being what it is, this song is naturally the only thing I know abour its eponymous captain, which is rough.
2. I should not have read this article about the Instagram filter valley of the current rejuvenative craze for deep-plane face-lifts no matter what because one of the reasons I have trouble being read as younger than my age is that I have worked very hard to reach this one, but toward the end of the piece I hit an anonymously quoted surgeon, "When you look at someone else with an elite face-lift . . . all you should be thinking is, How did you age better than me? The goal is you want to look genetically dominant to other people," and at the notion that eugenics should be aspirationally mixed with ageism, I just wanted that surgeon to be operated upon by Dr. Einstein after an all-night open-bar horror marathon. I felt better after dialing up the grainily inimitable footage of Pamela Blair's "Dance: Ten; Looks: Three" (1975).
3. Thanks to listening to Arthur Askey, I became curious about the origins of the musical have-a-banana phrase which diffused decades ago from music hall into general pop culture and apparently the best guess is a Rocky Horror-style audience improvisation that has now endured as a meme for more than a century. Good for it.
I just want to sleep and read books and write about movies. Who's even asking for a small fortune?
Kafka, thou shouldst be living at this hour? Non-smoker fined £433 for dropping cigarette butt in Manchester: Steve Jones was hundreds of miles away in Maidstone arranging family funeral at time of alleged offence:
He told the council it was a case of mistaken identity and he had not dropped any litter, but the prosecution went ahead regardless in his absence, and he received a collection order in the post for £433, which included a fine and costs. In July, he was sent a pack of evidence by Manchester city council, including a letter that said: “You have been charged with an offence of dropping litter”, and that a single justice procedure notice had been issued by the local authority in March.
....
Jones contacted the council to explain their error, and his email correspondence with council officers “went back and forth and back and forth for ages”, he said, “and then they had to go and find the guy’s camera evidence and that took a few days, and then eventually they realised that it wasn’t me”.... Jones said he initially struggled to get the council to provide a written apology, but had thought the matter was closed after he received an email apologising for the “administrative error”. However, Jones then received a further letter in the post, dated 28 August, saying he had been convicted and fined. “I just find it incredible that I’ve been convicted in my absence,” he said. ‘“I mean, that sounds really serious.”
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Noted rather far down in this piece on new owners forcing a traditionally nudist resort to 'go textile' (infaaaamy) there is a mention of a homicide on the property.
Which evoked in me the question, has there ever been a murder mystery set in a nudist resort? I have read ones involving all sorts of weird cults, and the occasional health spa, but I don't think actual naturism has featured.
Which led to the further question, which fictional shamus would you pick to strip off and boldly go to investigate in such a circumstance?
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Talking of textiles, this is rather lovely: A secret garden’: National Theatre turns roof into riot of colour with dye plants. Textile artists are reshaping how the theatre makes its costumes with the aim of replacing harsh synthetic dyes
I'm slightly raising my eyebrows at the whole 'luvverly nachral dyes' thing though (as opposed to those narsty post-aniline synthetics that cause 'dyer's nose') is that I've read at least one murder mystery in which dying featured, though I think it might have been the mordants employed to set the colours rather than the actual dyes themselves which were dangerous.
Including being gaslit by the Royal Mail, like, I know they sent me a text yesterday and a text this am saying they were delivering A Parcel, but when I went to look as the window was drawing to a close, could not find, while online tracking said something entirely different (parcel still in transit to local sorting office).
In fact, Parcel has just turned up, several hours after indicated.
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Phone doing Weird Stuff - well, part of this is not phone per se, it was O2, as in, when I was out and about in the world the other day my web data allowance ran out and they send this message about texting 'WEBDAILY' to get a top-up, so I did, and did it? not until yesterday, which was totally pointless.
Plus, in relation to niggle this morning about Downstairs Flat having an electricity thing doing which involved turning off the Main Meter deep in the cellar which affects both flats, was trying to use phone as a hotspot with my laptop and it wanted some network authorisation code? With old phone this used to come up on the actual phone? Though I was also having issues with bluetooth and this may be down to ageing laptop....
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So there was also that thing of morning routine being disrupted by electricity being turned off. (Though now this thing has been done maybe we too can get a Smart Meter set up, because as I recall having to get at that was the issue.)
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Have actually, this week, started on outstanding overdue essay review, as well as putting it some more effort on keynote presentation for end of month (this is still a goer and is actually up on their site that I am speaking).
Moderate yay me?
Have just been contacted by A Young Scholar who I feel has imprinted on me like a gosling about an article of theirs currently going through the submission process....
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GP has requested to make appointment re routine medication review, which I have done, but am a bit anxious about (but perhaps I can get them put sumatriptan back on the routine medications list????).
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However, in better news, the grocery delivery came early enough that I have been able to get a sardegnera on the go for supper!
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"Would a Calvinist have just scoffed an entire bag of fish jerky?" I reasonably texted selkie, who had just significantly improved the evening of a week that has taken a deeply unwanted turn for the medical by causing a bagful of groceries and seltzer to appear on the front steps. Hestia professed interest in the little squares of maple-and-coconut salmon, but had to content herself with treats designed for delectation of cat and curling up on the couch next to me. I am fascinated by the pumpkin spice cookies that come ready to bake from refrigerated. The bananas are already having a short shelf life.
ETA: Later texted tospatch: "Who the hell is going to steal and sell Pedialyte? If you could get high off it, I'd have spent 2023 as a kite."
selkie, who had just significantly improved the evening of a week that has taken a deeply unwanted turn for the medical by causing a bagful of groceries and seltzer to appear on the front steps. Hestia professed interest in the little squares of maple-and-coconut salmon, but had to content herself with treats designed for delectation of cat and curling up on the couch next to me. I am fascinated by the pumpkin spice cookies that come ready to bake from refrigerated. The bananas are already having a short shelf life.ETA: Later texted to
spatch: "Who the hell is going to steal and sell Pedialyte? If you could get high off it, I'd have spent 2023 as a kite."When her son died in utero, a venture capitalist went to extremes to punish her surrogate.
Sometimes one gets the impression that some people don't understand that pregnancy isn't a straightforward and simple process and that if it goes wrong it's not actually a matter of blame:
Although America is the world leader in surrogacy, it’s also the developed nation with the highest maternal mortality rate and one of the highest stillbirth rates, a situation described by many as “a public health crisis.” Compared to natural conception, carrying a genetically unrelated fetus more than triples the risk of severe, potentially deadly conditions, a statistic surrogates are rarely given. IPs do not always have to disclose complete medical information, including histories of certain conditions that may harm their GCs. They don’t have to be honest about how many kids they have, why they are hiring a surrogate, or how many other surrogates they have simultaneously pregnant.
Things happen. VICTORIAN DOCTORS UNDERSTOOD THAT. (See Alfred Swaine Taylor, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, 1879, on Criminal Abortion).
The whole thing sounds like an entire nightmare (the surrogate was expected to cover pregnancy care via her own health insurance WTF?).
And do we think the intending mother fit to be a parent?
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On people Being The Main Character: she's become a one-woman clean-up crew, sharing her efforts on social media and calling out the Canal and River Trust for what she sees as its failure to properly maintain the area:
In response, the Canal and River Trust said: "Elena might feel alone in tackling London's litter waste, however she is one of hundreds of volunteers who help our charity keep London's canals alive, picking up other people's rubbish and carrying out routine maintenance.
"We're delighted when more people take an interest in looking after their local canal."
However, the trust said it was "more effective" to collect bagged waste "when it's part of the regular organised volunteer events that our charity runs".
"These activities are scheduled alongside weekly clean-ups by our operatives and contractors, which ensures collected waste is removed and recycled or disposed of appropriately," a spokesperson said.
The trust also urged visitors to London's canals to take their litter home with them.
One feels that a little due diligence would have found her a spot on the volunteer rota and a supply of appropriate bags.
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I've decided not to read The Future of the Responsible Company: What We've Learned from Patagonia's 50 Years (2023), which is available plentifully at the big-city library system but would cost me nontrivial transit fees and time to consult. Were a copy available at one of the systems closer by, I'd skim it. Sort of hilariously, I have a mini-paper to write on Patagonia's company culture, which must be related to why the big-city system owns about a dozen copies of what really sounds like a self-pub puff piece, but I can write it without a pilgrimage.
Spolsky is on hold again (though not for three years, I hope) while I evict my small bias about the monograph's approach.
Meanwhile, I've begun Laura Spinney's Proto, as in Proto-Indo-European. Spinney is a journalist, not a specialist in a relevant domain, which is consistent with how the book reads. (If I could identify more than one minor error at a 20-year-plus remove from my small learning of relevance, I bet an active practitioner would find more.) I'm not worried about reading with a sure sense of bias here---it's this: Spinney has inherited the shameful blindness to Afro-Asiatic concerns that her chief sources had---because her take isn't potentially controversial.
Nearly traversed: Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which someone once recced to a roomful of people that included me. Still WIP, besides Spolsky: Everett's James, which I'm enjoying but needed to let rest a bit; Allingham's Case of the Late Pig.
Spolsky is on hold again (though not for three years, I hope) while I evict my small bias about the monograph's approach.
Meanwhile, I've begun Laura Spinney's Proto, as in Proto-Indo-European. Spinney is a journalist, not a specialist in a relevant domain, which is consistent with how the book reads. (If I could identify more than one minor error at a 20-year-plus remove from my small learning of relevance, I bet an active practitioner would find more.) I'm not worried about reading with a sure sense of bias here---it's this: Spinney has inherited the shameful blindness to Afro-Asiatic concerns that her chief sources had---because her take isn't potentially controversial.
Nearly traversed: Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which someone once recced to a roomful of people that included me. Still WIP, besides Spolsky: Everett's James, which I'm enjoying but needed to let rest a bit; Allingham's Case of the Late Pig.
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