Reading

Entry tags:

Wednesday went for the annual eye-test

What I read

Finished Saving Suzy Sweetchild, which has our protag not only dealing with the usual movie hassle but being called in to deal with the papers of a suddenly deceased in possibly suspicious circumstances academic, as well as (with the usual cohorts) trying to work out what exactly the game is with the apparent kidnapping for ransom of child star, who is beginning to age out of cuteness. We observe that the classic sleuths may sometimes have had two mysteries on their hands but very seldom had to multitask like this.

Some while ago I read an essay by Ursula Le Guin on the novels of Kent Haruf: I fairly recently picked up Our Souls at Night (2015), which is more or less novella length, as a Kobo deal, and it was well-written, and unusual if very low-key, and I daresay I might venture on more Haruf but am in no great rush to do so.

Then on to Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd (1953) - perhaps not quite as good as the earlier entries in the series - some of it felt a bit info-dumpy - Lanny and his friends who are promoting peace face the problem of Soviet Stalinist Communism in the Cold War era. I can't help contemplating them and thinking that they are probably going to be sitting targets for HUAC in a few years' time, because they are coming at the issue from a democratic socialist perspective and I suspect their Peace Program is going to be considered deeply sus by McCarthyism. Also, Lanny jnr is going to be of draft age come the 1960s....

On the go

To lighten the mood, Alexis Hall, Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot (Winner Bakes All #3) arrived yesterday.

Up next

The new (double-issue) Literary Review

Also (what was in the straying parcel last week) Dickon Edwards (whom some of you may remember from LJ days?) Diary at the Centre of the Earth: Vol. 1.

Current Music: Brandi Carlile, "Human"

And they won't thank you, they don't make awards for that

As the title indicates, "Threnody for Five Actors" is a ghost poem for its subjects and its inclusion in On Actors and Acting: Essays by Alexander Knox (ed. Anthony Slide, 1998) is maddening because it is accompanied only by the note, "This poem is from an unpublished manuscript titled Screams and Speeches. The five actors named here were all victims of the Blacklist." First of all, you can't drop the existence of an entire manuscript at the very end of a slim selected works and expect the interested reader not to scream, especially when the only copy the internet feels like telling me about seems to be held in a collection in the Library and Archives of Canada, which feels currently even less accessible than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Secondly, and speaking as a person who has been called out for the density of allusion in their stories and poetry, this poem could have done with some notes. The editor was obviously concerned enough about name recognition to parenthesize Julie Garfield as John and Bud Bohnen as Roman, but then why not list their dates so that the reader can see for themselves that all five actors died between 1949 and 1952, mostly of heart ailments, stressed by the hounding of the FBI and HUAC, at the grandly superannuated ages between 39 and 59? If you don't know that Mady Christians originated the title role of John Van Druten's I Remember Mama (1944), then her verse will make much less sense, but catching that one makes me wonder what other references I may be missing, such as in the stage work of Canada Lee or J. Edward Bromberg. Lastly, since it's the only poem I have ever read by Alexander Knox—instantaneously in October, but it's been a rough fall—if he wrote any others I'd like to be able to read them, even if just for comparison. Slide mentions his wicked limericks in the introduction, but unforgivably includes none.

( We know by now that time does not take sides. )

With this one example to go by, he was a better playwright than poet, but except for the self-deprecation which should definitely have hit the cutting room floor, it's hard to want to edit much out of a poem with so much anger at the injustice of a country that wastes its artists in scapegoating xenophobia, besides which there's at least one good line per actor and sometimes more. He wouldn't even have been living in the United States by the time of its writing, having burned off the last of his contract with Columbia by the end of 1951. He hadn't burned off his anger. No reason he should have. I may be confused by the existence of his Hollywood career, but I'm still pissed about the politics that snapped it short. The twentieth century could stop coming around on the guitar any measure now. On Sunday, I'll be at the HFA.

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

cofax7!

Entry tags:

Tidying up some tabs

London Pride has been handed down to us:

Busiest Thoroughfare of the Metropolis of the World - review of book on the history of The Strand.

Over 250,000 images of London from the collections at The London Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery

***

Heritage endangered:

On an old cobbled street in a market town, residents say hundreds of years of history are disappearing before their eyes as thieves keep stealing large slabs of Yorkshire stone.

The Royal Society of Medicine is putting some of its rarest books and photographs up for sale at Christie’s this month. Is this a case of medical negligence? Screaming. The GMC should strike them off.

Rare piece of Australia's Indigenous history captured on camera in the desert

According to a local anthropologist in Broome, the photos were taken by a nurse who was volunteering at the La Grange mission.
In his opinion, the images are extraordinary — one of the rare moments of "first contact" on the Australian continent to be captured on camera.
The originals were donated to a Catholic Church archive, which is not accessible to the public.
But it turns out there are copies. On a dusty CD buried in the boxes of an elderly author.

I have a lot of questions here about disinterring the original - I have very cynical thoughts about the church 'archive', as probably a storeroom in a basement somewhere - and in general things which are literally hidden in the (unprocessed, uncared for) archives of some institution.

And at this I can only fall on the floor, weeping and going 'the horror, the horror': [S]ome AI chatbots (such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Bard and others) may generate incorrect or fabricated archival references.

***

Gender and learning:

The Real Way Schools are Failing Boys - though possibly, just de-emphasise competition, for starters???

Estrogen levels predict enhanced learning (at least in rats....)

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

bibliofilen and

nineveh_uk!

Current Music: Big Thief, "Incomprehensible"

But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulder

It feels like cheating for the air to taste so much like the sharp tin tacks of snow when the sky is so clear that even through the white noise of the streetlights Cassiopeia comes in like pointillism and Polaris as bright as a planet. I saw none of the phi Cassiopeids, but the Geminids peak at the end of the week, with any luck on a night that cloudlessly doesn't make my teeth feel about to explode in my mouth. On that front, may I commend the attention of people in frozen boat fandom to this early twentieth century hand-painted stained glass window depicting Shackleton's Endurance? I spent my afternoon on the phone making sure of our health insurance in the bankrupt year to come: the customer service representative was a very nice science fiction person who agreed that it was time to reset this worldline on account of stupidity and for whom I apparently made a pleasant change from all the screaming and breaking down in tears, even more so than usual this year that never need have happened. I've been sent photographs of some really neat letters. Two cards arrived in the mail. My digital camera is showing further signs of deterioration, but a few evenings ago I caught one of those scratch-fired sunsets it's hard to wreck. I am aware of the collapses in the world, but I don't know what else to love.

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Not the only one having those visions, Margaret....

Margaret Atwood seems to be claiming some kind of unusual prescience for herself when writing The Handmaid's Tale:

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Atwood said she believed the plot was “bonkers” when she first developed the concept for the novel because the US was the “democratic ideal” at the time.

Me personally, I can remember that the work reading group discussed it round about the time it first came out - and I remarked that it was getting a lot of credit for ideas which I had been coming across in feminist sff for several years....

I think the idea of a fundamentalist, patriarchal, misogynist backlash was pretty much in people's minds?

I've just checked a few dates.

At least one of the potential futures in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976).

Margaret O'Donnell's The Beehive (1980) .

Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue (1984) and sequels.

Various short stories.

Various works by Sheri Tepper.

I'm probably missing a lot.

And assorted works in which there was an enclave or resistance cell of women embedded in a masculinist society.

I honestly don't think a nightmare which was swirling around at the time is something that can be claimed as woah, weird, how did I ever come up with that?

I'm a bit beswozzled by the idea that in the early-mid 80s the USA was a shining city on a hill, because I remember reviewing a couple of books on abortion in US post-Roe, and it was a grim story of the erosion of reproductive rights and defensive rearguard actions to protect a legal right which could mean very little in practice once the 1977 Hyde Amendment removed federal funding, and an increasingly aggressive anti-choice movement.

Current Music: MGMT, "Electric Feel"

Put your circuits in the sea

After years of not even being able to pirate it,

spatch and I have finally just finished the first series of BBC Ghosts (2019–23), during which he pointed out to me the half of the cast that had been on Taskmaster. I recognized a guest-starring Sophie Thompson.

This article on the megaliths of Orkney got Dave Goulder stuck in my head, especially once one of the archaeologists interviewed compared the Ring of Brodgar to sandstone pages. "They may not have been intended to last millennia, but, now that they have, they are stone doors through which the living try to touch the dead."

I wish a cult image of fish-tailed Artemis had existed at Phigalia, hunting pack of seals and all.

Any year now some part of my health could just fix itself a little, as a treat.

Entry tags:

cooking,
recipes

Culinary

This week's bread: Country Oatmeal aka Monastery Loaf from Eric Treuille and Ursula Ferrigno's Bread (2:1:1 wholemeal/strong white/pinhead oatmeal), a bit dense and rough-textured - the recipe says medium oatmeal, which has seemed hard to come by for months now (I actually physically popped into a Holland and Barrett when I was out and about the other day and boy, they are all about the Supplements these days and a lot less about the nice organic grains and pulses, sigh, no oatmeal, no cornmeal, etc etc wo wo deth of siv etc). Bread tasty though.

Friday night supper: groceries arrived sufficiently early in the pm for me to have time to make up the dough and put the filling to simmer for sardegnera with pepperoni.

Saturday breakfast rolls: adaptable soft rolls recipe, 4:1 strong white/buckwheat flour, dried blueberries, Rayner's Barley Malt Extracxt, turned out very nicely.

Today's lunch: savoury clafoutis with Exotic Mushroom Mix (shiitake + 3 sorts of oyster mushroom) and garlic, served with baby (adolescent) rainbow carrots roasted in sunflower and sesame oil, tossed with a little sugar and mirin at the end, and sweetstem cauliflower (some of which was PURPLE) roasted in pumpkin seed oil with cumin seeds.

Current Music: Annie Bartholomew, "Mountain Dove Song"

Sure as the morning light when frigid love and fallen doves take flight

Crossing recent streams, tonight I participated with

rushthatspeaks in a reading of The Invention of Love (1997) in memoriam Tom Stoppard with a Discord group that does a different play every week. I was assigned Moses Jackson, the straightest himbo ever to play a sport. I consider it a triumph for the profession that I did not catch on fire enthusing about field athletics.

When I read in passing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) had begun life as a one-act comedy entitled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, I went to fact-check this assertion immediately because it sounded like a joke, you know, like one of the great tragedies of the English stage starting out as the farcical Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter and then a ringing sound in my ears indicated that the penny had dropped.

Speaking of, I have seen going around the quotation from Arcadia (1993) on the destruction and endurance of history:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Stoppard was not supposed to have known the full extent of his Jewishness until midlife, but it is such a diasporic way of thinking, the convergent echo of Emeric Pressburger is difficult for me not to hear. I keep writing of the coins in the field, everything that time gives back, if not always to those who lost it.

Entry tags:

reading

also recent reading

(Formerly stalled drafts have been nudged by end-of-term exams, in progress.)

Sonali Dev, Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors, The Rajes 1 (2019)
Recipe for Persuasion, The Rajes 2 (2020)
Incense and Sensibility, The Rajes 3 (2021)

Beyond the pairwise romance ostensibly cranking its plot, the first book is a love letter to third-culture kids whose lives have been bent by contradictory familial expectations, and an acknowledgment of bits of the wreckage wrought by postcolonial aspiration. Light touch, relatively, but I appreciate that these books say some of the quiet things aloud about costs and---better---that several characters encourage each other to speak to someone specific.

"Raje" isn't ordinarily a surname, which makes it a good choice.

Perhaps the most important feature of the setting, as a fix-it, is that when the kids who figure in these books as adult characters were growing up, several older relatives were local. I also appreciate the queer side-character situationship, whose arc suits the books' setting.

Anyway, four books total---none for Mansfield Park, which I think would be tough to fit. The fourth is The Emma Project (2022), which I've begun.

Entry tags:

Deth of Siv, etc

What is this that this thing is, when, okay, one is aware of all the woozing and grumbling about the various delivery services, but here is the ROYAL MAIL being pretty bad.

Yesterday I had an email saying they had delivered a parcel.

There was no parcel.

I looked at the proof of delivery and behold, that was Not Our Front Door they were sticking it through, it was the wrong colour and one could see the corner of a glass panel (ours is solid wood).

So I went on to their site to try and delve a bit further and, my dears, it is HORRENDOUS, one suspects it is designed to make people Just Give Up.

For example, the 'contact us' link, that actually goes to a 'Help and Support' page that lists a whole range of possible contingencies that one has to sort through to discover one that matches the occasion.

And once I had come across the Advice relating to item (presumably) misdelivered to wrong address, advice was, to contact the sender.

I have no bloody idea who the sender was being as how I was not even expecting a Royal Mail delivery, have been back over my emails and texts and no, I did not receive any previous message involving that particular tracking code.

There is a passing allusion to possible scanning errors.

The only means of contacting them is by phone, and when I tried, and had made my way through the menu options, the wait to speak to a person was 50 minutes.

I am leaving all this pro tem in case a) it was misdelivered and gets put back into the system b) it never actually existed in the first place.

But, really.

And in other, perhaps more minor (?) annoyances of Modern Life, what is this thing that this thing is of 'Cooking Instructions on Back of Label'? that you then have to detach, in the hope that it will actually come off in one piece that one can actually decipher....

ETA Parcel has now turned up, either in today's post or popped through letter box by neighbour to whom it was delivered in error.... Is friend's book I was in anticipation of.

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

gillo and

laughingrat!

Current Music: David Byrne, "What Is the Reason for It? (feat. Hayley Williams)"

What does it do when we're asleep?

Realizing last night that I have for decades thought of myself as a full year older than I chronologically can have been for my first real job—I was fifteen—led into a crumble-to-dust reminiscence about the number of bookstores once to be found in Lexington Center, which gave me some serious future shock when we walked into Maxima while waiting to collect our order from Il Casale and it occupied the exact same storefront as my second job, also as a bookseller; it was perhaps the one form of retail to which I was natively suited. My third job was assistant-teaching Latin, but my fourth I accidentally talked my way into by recommending some titles to a fellow browser.

spatch's anniversary gift to me was a paperback of Satoshi Yagisawa's Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (trans. Eric Ozawa, 2010/2023). It was teeth-shockingly cold and we all but ran with our spoils back to the car.

( Twenty-four hours every day. )

We had set out in search of resplendent food and found it in polpette that reminded us of the North End, a richly smoky rigatoni with ragù of deep-braised lamb, and a basil-decorated, fanciest eggplant parmesan I have encountered in my life, capped with panna cotta in a tumble of wintrily apt pomegranate seeds. Hestia investigated delicately but dangerously. After we had recovered, Rob showed me Powwow Highway (1989) right before it expired from the unreliable buffer of TCM because he thought and was right that I would love its anger and gentleness and hereness, plus its '64 Buick which has already gone on beyond Bluesmobile by the time it is discovered in a field of clunkers and a vision of ponies. It has no budget and so much of the world. As long as we're in it, we might as well be real.

Entry tags:

reading

recent reading

1. I've finally dawdled my way through the rest of Spinney's Proto. It has fit into two minutes here, three minutes there, of accompanying tiny housemate outside.

2. Stephanie Brill and Lisa Kenney, The Transgender Teen: A Handbook for Parents and Professionals Supporting Transgender and Non-Binary [sic] Teens (2016)

Continues from Brill's Transgender Child with Rachel Pepper (2008, rev. 2022), which I haven't read. Kenney was (till 2020) the executive director of Gender Spectrum, the nonprofit visibility org that Brill founded almost 20 years ago.

Turban's Free to Be lays out several case studies supported by others' research, intersperses stylized parts of his own journey, and lets the reader decide how to read them, albeit over his shoulder. Brill and Kenney go like this:

We will help clarify the issues at hand so that you are able to refocus your attention on the whole of your child, and not just their gender. We will help you move from a place of concern, disbelief, fear, confusion, or wariness to a place where you can become an effective ally for your child---no matter where they may lie on the gender spectrum. We want to help you move to or return to a place where your teen knows they can count on you to support them, to love them, and to help them through the rough patches of life, both in these years and the years to come. (pp. xi-xii)

To save my hands, though I was given a paper copy, I bought and read epub.

Current Music: The Mountain Goats, "Fishing Boat"

No one who can stand staying landlocked for longer than a month at most

spatch and I have been married for twelve years. A round dozen of anniversary gifts looks as though it adds up to the woven road of silk. Here we are still, intertwined and traveling.

Entry tags:

Large, contain multitudes, do not wish to brag

People asking me last night 'what do you/are you working on?'

Duh. I flannelled and gave the general field, rather than saying: I completed my PhD over 30 years ago, I have published 6 books, 3 co-edited volumes, and getting on for 70 articles and chapters, have done assorted meedja appearances, have lost count of the reviews I've done -

Not to mention the website, the blog, the assorted things that fall into the category of other -

'My Deaaar, it's all a long story and rather complicated' and my most recent publication was not even in my field, it was being a sort of Litry Scholar.

Thing is there were some persons of maturer age there who were, I gathered in conversation, getting back into the academic swing, so I might have been doing that, rather than trying to get back up out of something of a trough?

Did mention, apropos of cute cuddly spirochaete, that I had worked on History of Loathsome Diseases of Immorality: but gee, I am large, I contain multitudes, and I have been going a long time.

ETA

Not that I consider the organisers of 'prestigious World Conference on Women’s Health, Reproduction,and Midwifery, scheduled for 08-10 June 2026, in Paris,France' to really Know Who I Am since they are begging and pleading for my attendance on the basis of my 'remarkable work' a recent review of a book on the history of abortion.

Okay, they do offer partial support for accommodation and registration, and brekkers and lunch at the conference (this implies, o horrors, breakfast sessions).

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

darkemeralds!

Entry tags:

Deck the tra-la wassail etc

So, the Esteemed Research Institution of which I now have the honour to be a (jolly good!) Fellow sent an invite last week to come along this arvo and decorate the Christmas tree in the common room. Bringing, if one so desired, some bauble, perchance alluding in some way to one's research interests.

My dearios, I realised I had The Very Thing! Some Years Ago I acquired a mini-Giant Microbe syphilis spirochaete, the adorable cutie, and though I say it myself, this went over a treat, with people taking photos and so on.

Had social converse - though a certain sense of Don't You Know Who I Am, though there is no reason why people who don't work in my area/s should know, it is a long while since I have been on ye meedjas.

***

Feral wallabies have featured here on previous occasions: apparently there are now 1000 on the Isle of Man: and

[T]here appears to be a continuous population across southern England, with a few hotspots. There have been regular sightings in the Chilterns, plus in Cornwall, where they appear to be breeding.

And apparently there are people who have them on their farms: whence they escape, since they can both jump and burrow.

Current Music: English Teacher, "This Could Be Texas"

And in the end they might even thank me with a garden in my name

Once again the Malden Public Library comes through with Kate Dunn's Exit Through the Fireplace: The Great Days of Rep (1998), a capacious, irreproducible oral history of repertory theatre in the UK. Its timeline of personal recollection runs from the 1920's into the decade of publication, documenting a diverse and vivid case for the professional and communal value of regional theatre without rose-glassing its historically shabbier or more exploitative aspects; its survey includes the subspecies of fit-up theatre which flourished primarily outside of England and devotes chapters to stage management, design, and directing as well as acting and the factor of the audience. It's a serious chunk of scholarship from a writer who is herself fourth-generation in the theater, which must have helped with assembling its roster of close to two hundred contributors. It's just impossible to read much of it without cracking up on a page-by-page basis. Despite the caution in the introduction not to view the heyday of rep as a perpetual goes wrong machine, the cumulative effect of thrills and tattiness and especially the relentless deep-end pace of getting a new play up every week writes its own Noises Off:

Howard Attfield was another actor who was caught on the hop. He remembers, 'I was playing an inspector, I forget the name of the murder thriller, and it was a matinée day and very hot and I remember standing in the dressing-room and I was having a shave, and I thought I had all the time in the world because my first entrance wasn't until the ending of the first act. The inspector comes in, says his lines and ends the first act. So I was standing there quite happily in my boxer shorts having a shave when I heard my call, which I could not believe, and I went absolutely wild. My costume was a suit, an inspector's suit, and a sort of a trench coat and a hat. Anyway, I thought I'd best put on something, the least possible, so I put on trousers and I remember putting on shoes without socks, then I put on the trench coat, did it all up as I'm flying out the door, grabbed the hat and went charging down the stairs, saying, "I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming," and I made it on to the stage just in time, but as I went on someone in the wings said, "Shaving foam, shaving foam!" and I realized that I'd got halfway through this shave and I hadn't wiped it off. Luckily it was on the upstage side, as I was coming on from stage right. So instead of looking at the audience, I did everything looking from stage right to stage left, and the upstage bit was foam in my ears and right round my face. I delivered the line and the curtains came down and I collapsed on the floor half naked and half shaven.'

Persons in this book set themselves on fire, fall out of their costumes, get flattened by scenery, fuck up lines, props, entrances, exits, sound cues, lighting cues, scene changes, the sprinkler system. The number of actors who started their careers as assistant stage managers appears to have been part of the apprenticeship quality of rep; the number of actors who were abruptly promoted because a lead had flanicked screaming into the night feels more telling. "It wasn't till many years later that I got into the truly creative side of acting. In those days it was a question of learn the lines and don't bump into the furniture." It is a tribute to the book's scope that so many of its names are unfamiliar to me when my knowledge of older British actors is not nil; it's not just a skim of national treasures. For every Rachel Kempson, Bernard Hepton, or Fiona Shaw, there's an actor like Attfield whose handful of small parts in film and television has barely impinged on me or even one like Jean Byam who was so strictly stage-based that it would never have been possible for me to see her in anything. At the same time, thanks to its compilation from personal histories, I have been left in possession of some truly random facts concerning actors of long or recent acquaintance during their repertory careers, e.g. Alec McCowen corpsed like anything and at one point became convinced that he could telepathically cause a fellow actor to forget their lines. Richard Pasco had such reliable stage fright that the manager of the Birmingham Rep would knock him up five minutes before curtain to check whether he'd been sick yet. Clive Francis had a stammer so bad it made him the bête noire of the prompt corner at Bexhill-on-Sea. (Robin Ellis did not have a stammer, but found it a lifeline during one particularly non-stop season to play a character with one because it gave him the extra time to reach for his next line.) Bernard Cribbins does not name the production for which he was required to transport a goat—an actual goat, from a farm on the moors—by bus to the theatre, leaving unexplained the reasons it had to be a real one. Of course it was medically possible in the '60's, but it is still n-v-t-s to me that Derek Jacobi got smallpox doing panto in Birmingham. That art was produced by this theatrical system as opposed to merely peerless anecdotes absolutely deserves celebration. As a resource for writers as well as theatre historians and actors, the book is a treasure. Details about interwar digs and mid-century tea matinées would not be out of place in Angela Carter. The less farcical side of all the blowups and breakdowns is the assertion by more than one interviewee that rep provided, if not exactly a safe, then at least a survivable space for a growing actor to fail in ways that were essential to their confidence and their craft: "If you didn't become a great actor in weekly rep, at least you learnt to control your nerves. Despite all the throwing up on a Monday, one seemed to be ice cool on stage, because you knew you mustn't give anything away and you mustn't make your fellow actors look bad." But also one night at the David Garrick Theatre in the late '40's Lionel Jeffries lost hold of a lettuce leaf that sailed out into the stalls and splatted itself dressing and all onto a member of the public and that Saturday a packed house came to see if he'd do it again. Opening the book at random is almost guaranteed to yield a story of this nature. Fortunately I was not onstage at the time, and nobody cared how much I laughed.