Things which are gratifying

Aug. 12th, 2025 07:19 pm
oursin: Drawing of hedgehog in a cave, writing in a book with a quill pen (Writing hedgehog)
[personal profile] oursin

People reading one's work.

People citing one's work.

People buying one's books.

People writing articles (or really, any research thing) based on a small part of an archive one catalogued back in the day (somebody should have had a word about archival citation practices, though).

Finding that one has after some moaning, groaning, and struggle, got a paper with something that is a bit of a counter-intuitive discovery, based on just going back to the notes made during that research trip.

(no subject)

Aug. 12th, 2025 09:56 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] cynthia1960!

The Other Shore, by Rebecca Campbell

Aug. 11th, 2025 07:14 pm
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This collection featured stories I'd read--and very much liked--before as well as stories that were new to me. I read extensively in short SFF, so that's not unexpected for any collection these days. What's less typical is how consistently high-quality these stories are, across different tone and topic.

There is a rootedness to these stories that I love to see in short speculative fiction, a sense of place and culture. It doesn't hurt that Campbell's sense of place and culture is a northern one--not one of my parts of the north but north all the same. And forest, oh, this is a very arboreal book. There's death and transformation here--these stories are like an examination of the forest ecosystem from nurse log to blossom, on a metaphorical level. I'm so glad this is here so that these stories are preserved in one place.

Well, they did make a slight change

Aug. 11th, 2025 08:07 pm
oursin: The Delphic Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel (Delphic sibyl)
[personal profile] oursin

I recently went slightly spare at the blurb for the reprint of an obscure (if interesting for non-literary reasons) dystopian work of the 1920s (on which I have writ myself in chapter of volume of which I have lately received my advance copy) as describing someone in a rather misleading fashion -

- and looking at it this evening I see that they have very slightly tweaked it.

But on reflection, why, in the first place, are they mentioning the HUSBAND of the author and their ideological position (which I will still contend was a whole lot MOAR COMPLIK8ED than they want to make it)?

(Possibly, over here, just a slight touch of the miffs that, if they are doing a line of dystopian works of the period in question, Y U NO ask meeeeeee to do critical intro to any of them?)

Culinary

Aug. 10th, 2025 07:26 pm
oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)
[personal profile] oursin

This week's bread: the Collister/Blake My Favourite Loaf, strong white/wholemeal/einkorn flour, turned out v nice.

Friday night supper: grocery delivery came so early that I had time to whip up dough, etc, for sardegnera (with Calabrian salami).

Saturday breakfast rolls: the ones loosely based on James Beard's mother's raisin bread, with Marriage's Light Spelt Flour. I think the current mace is a bit underpowered? I thought I had sprinkled on a fair amount but it didn't really come through.

Today's lunch: smoked haddock with butter beans - using Belazu Judion Butter Beans since actual dried butter beans are still being hard to come by - the haddock seemed a bit bland? - maybe I need to add further seasoning when mingling the poached fillets and the beans; served with slowcooked tenderstem broccoli (not bad considering it boiled dry a couple of times), and the whomping adult courgettes I was sent instead of baby ones (at least they weren't actual vegetable marrows) cut into batons and white-braised with sliced red bell pepper.

(no subject)

Aug. 10th, 2025 12:16 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] loligo!

Flurry

Aug. 9th, 2025 05:03 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

August is supposed to be this winding-down/wound-down month, right?

Well, for reasons which I concede are not particularly seasonal, the last week or so has been a bit of a flurry.

Getting next volume of The Ongoing Saga ready for publication in near future.

My tech person having issues with the website: it transpired that they had been upgrading some software which had had knock-on effects, but this involved a lot of three-way emailing about what was going on.

And I decided, for Reasons, to start putting together my talk for conference at end of September (rather than leave it until later I'd rather at least rough it out now and leave it to percolate) and this has so been the thing where the writing is the process and I am now actually feeling that I might have something a bit more original than I thought, and it has more of a shape to it. But the thing with this was that I kept having Ideas and going and adding bits and moving bits around, and realising I needed to go and Look Stuff Up, rather than just collate bits from my notes, so it was more of a vortex than I'd anticipated, and still ongoing.

Plus, the new physio exercises for hip/lower back and incorporating them into the routine, and, er, something or other was causing flareup of the Old Trouble, so there was working around that.

(Also, flurry of spam/phishing emails claiming to be 'support tickets' with deeply implausible references and origins.)

oursin: China hedgehog and the words It's always more complicated (always more complicated)
[personal profile] oursin

People on bluesky have been sending up the claim that GPT-5 boosts ChatGPT can provide PhD-level expertise.

After all, if you ask me for Mi Xpertise, you are likely to get 'it's complic8ed' and your ear bent with perhaps TMI on the subject, and what the areas of uncertainty are.

Do we not think that it would be more like having an overconfident mansplainer in one's pocket?

This led me to the teasing memory of a quotation, which I have tracked down and found has been researched in considerable depth here: Quote Origin: I Wish I Was As Sure of Any One Thing As He is of Everything.

It's fairly reliably attrib. to Lord Melbourne about the historian Thomas Macaulay (not, we fear, a member of the discipline given to declaring IAMC, sigh). Though it's been ascribed to various about various (funnily enough, all blokes) over the years.

(no subject)

Aug. 8th, 2025 09:42 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] chickenfeet!
oursin: Painting of Clio Muse of History by Artemisia Gentileschi (Clio)
[personal profile] oursin

Okay, I suppose that maybe the model is 'Disney princess' rather than any princess in history ever, but even then, don't they display a certain degree of agency?

This is A Thing where apparently women display princessiness by performatively giving up agency - sitting in restaurants with castdown eyes being ordered for, not speaking until spoken to - also certain forms of helplessness which suggest they actually need a team of Ladies of the Bedchamber fighting over whose hereditary right it is to put on their stockings and whose to lace their stays....

This boggles the mind of someone raised in an actual monarchy in which there were two princesses around who did not, actually, model docility - I don't think Princess Margaret conceding to the strictures of the day and Giving Up The Man She Loved because he was divorced really qualifies as she'd been going around with him, as far as I can recall WITHOUT A CHAPERONE for some time.

Historian is obliged to point out that for centuries princesses - apart from bearing necessary heirs - quite often had to undertake regnal tasks, either as consort or regent, or at least aid in the general work of Being Royal, even if they did not actually take the throne themselves. Note here conference paper I heard on the preference for female regents in medieval Europe when there was a minor heir.

If you're going to Be a Princess, perhaps do not take Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst as your model, though on another hand, why not? Girl-Bossing It to the Max!

but we commend Princess Sophia Duleep Singh to your attention.

Observe also the daughters of Queen Victoria: e.g. Princess Alice, who married Louis, the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, was known for her commitment to philanthropic work, interested in nursing, met and befriended Florence Nightingale, and also set up military hospitals; Princess Louise who attended the The National Art Training School and designed a full-size statue of her mother as well as a memorial sculpture for the Boer War. No meek sitting about for them.

(I will cop to have read Alot of historical novels in my misspent youth very much contradicting the notion that princessing was sitting still and being silent.)

(no subject)

Aug. 7th, 2025 09:54 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] glinda, [personal profile] haloquin and [personal profile] wordweaverlynn!

Back on pilgrimage

Aug. 6th, 2025 09:36 pm
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

Good news, fellow humans! My short story A Pilgrimage to the God of High Places, which appeared last year in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, is a finalist for the WSFA Small Press Award for short fiction.

I am seriously chuffed about this for a number of reasons. One, you know how everyone always says it's an honor just to be a finalist? You know why they say that? Because it is in fact an honor just to be a finalist. So many wonderful stories come out in this field every year that--well, you've seen my yearly recommendation lists. They're quite long. Winnowing them to any smaller group? Amazing, thank you, could easily have been a number of other highly qualified stories by wonderful writers, I am literally just glad to be on the team and hope I can help the ball club. Er, programming staff.

But here's another reason: if you've read that story--which you can do! please do! it's free, and it turns out people like it!--you will immediately see that it is a story about a disabled person. That disabled person is not me, does not have my family or my career or anything like that. But it is my disability. I put my own disability into this story. I gave someone with my disability a story in which they do not have to be "fixed" to be the hero. And...this is not a disability-focused award. This is just an award for genre short fiction. So I particularly appreciate that the people who were selecting stories looked a story with a disabled protagonist whose disability is inherent to the story without being the problem that needs solving and said, yeah, we appreciate that. Thank you. I appreciate you too.

oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

What I read

Well, Presidential Agent kept me going for quite a while - boy, Upton Sinclair chucks a lot in - this one was particularly gripping.

I decided not to go straight on the next one - needing a break from the grim extension of Fascism over Europe - and therefore read Jessica Stanley, Consider Yourself Kissed (2025), which was a considerable disappointment. What I'd read about it led me to expect something fresher, more original, sparkier - I found this meh and towards the cosy women's fiction end. We note that back in the 60s/70s women were trapped like woodcock in springes by getting pregnant prematurely and thus stuck in unwelcome marriages or finding themselves tied down, and the gen X/millenial narrative is Biological Clock is Ticking On, so the trajectory is a bit different. The other thing I noted is that, as with All Fours, I feel Lessing's 'To Room 19' is somewhere in the DNA and it's a bit like the Omelas revisionism thing?

On the go

I've been wondering about Elizabeth Bear's The Folded Sky (White Space #3) (2025) and there was a very tasty deal on UK/European sites for the ebook - I found it a bit slow-starting but then we got the 'murder-mystery in enclosed setting' while a whole lot of other shit goes down.

Up next

New Literary Review.

Read a review of Andrea Long Chu, Authority: Essays on Being Right, which made these sound intriguing, and I read the preview sample on Kobo, and fell to the temptation of preordering. Should turn up this week.

Volume in which I have a chapter has arrived - I ought to at least riffle through the other contributions.

(no subject)

Aug. 6th, 2025 09:53 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] batrachian!

Assorted stuff

Aug. 5th, 2025 07:12 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

More monks behaving badly: Head of Shaolin Temple in China under investigation on suspicion of embezzlement: plus'violated Buddhist precepts by maintaining relationships with multiple women over a long period and fathering at least one child, according to a notice from the temple’s authority on its WeChat account'.

***

How unlike our own dear Cardinal Newman, St. John Henry Newman: The First Openly Gay Catholic Saint? (actually an older post, I think floating about again because he was recently declared A Doctor of the Church). Quite separately the other day I was thinking of Newman's Description of a Gentleman, and how certain recent converts fail to match up to this ideal (I think they would also - no names, no pack drill - be destroyed by early C20th convert Dr Letitia Fairfield, who unlike most of those in that category was leftwing and feminist and in a lot of respects not totally unlike sister Rebecca West for all their quarrels).

***

A nice article on Barbara Hepworth - A revelatory new view of Barbara Hepworth: The Fondation Maeght’s stunning show brings the British sculptor into dialogue with European modernists. '“If the ‘Winged Figure’ in Oxford Street gives people a sense of being airborne in rain and sunlight and nightlight I will be very happy,” Hepworth said.' Bless.

***

I feel this is Already Known, or perhaps not, because this sort of thing seems to keep needing being rediscovered, sigh: Darwinist feminism: Dismantling the myth of female sexual passivity: The arrival of researchers like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Amy Parish transformed not only the study of primates, but also our understanding of evolution, sexuality and gender roles in general.

***

Students make one of the most subversive and experimental women writers of the Romantic era accessible for all (and kudos for not mentioning what she is probably best known to history for, being Prinny's 'Perdita', that he was financially mean towards). Having read that bio of Mrs Barbauld, suspect Robinson also had the problem of Georgian dude-bros being critically condescending if not outright dismissive with knock-on effects for reputation.

oursin: The Delphic Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel (Delphic sibyl)
[personal profile] oursin

I was reading this article about a book I actually have no particular desire to read myself, however much (or perhaps particularly because?) of a cult thing it is -

What our obsession with Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life says about us

(Who even are 'we')

(Copping to having read the author's The People in the Trees because I had a copy lying around received free and gratis in connection with the project #ifitoldyouidhavetokillyou some years back, and it was considered it didn't quite fall within parameters.)

But reading about this book, and people's response, I was wondering, does the author read/write fanfic? and if so, what?

Because there was something about the way this work was being described and people's reactions which were making me think of the term 'id vortex' and that the way people were responding to this very literarily-okay work did not seem to me entirely distinguishable from responses to certain fat fantasy series.

The article almost goes there - does cite one critic who makes a comparison with YA - but tries to make a case for Significance and Zeitgeist.

It sounded like something that provided the satisfactions that the reader gets from genre, while not being That Sort of Thing, perish the thort.

Or maybe I'm just being cynical.

(no subject)

Aug. 4th, 2025 09:33 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] greenet and [personal profile] maeve_rigan!

Culinary

Aug. 3rd, 2025 07:54 pm
oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)
[personal profile] oursin

This week's bread: made Greenstein's 100% wholewheat loaf with wholemeal spelt flour approaching its use-by date, and also using up some buttermilk ditto. Turned out quite nice but a bit crumbly.

Saturday breakfast rolls: adaptable soft rolls recipe, approx 70/30% strong brown/rye flour, honey, dried cherries. Somehow turned out a bit bland.

Today's lunch: portabellini mushrooms in olive oil, rainbow carrots roasted in vaguely Japanese style in sunflower and toasted sesame oil, and tossed in teriyaki sauce and a little demerara sugar (these were rather aged carrots and could probably have done with roasting a bit longer), steamed asparagus dressed with melted butter and lime juice, and cornbread (having failed to source medium cornmeal, used a mixture of fine and coarse, turned out not badly).

(no subject)

Aug. 3rd, 2025 12:30 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] ailleurs, [personal profile] cija and [personal profile] lcohen!

Books read, late July

Aug. 2nd, 2025 04:22 pm
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

William Alexander and Wade Roush, eds., Starstuff: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Celebrate New Possibilities. This is that rare thing, an anthology of MG SF. Even rarer, the authors in it are generally experienced at writing for children but were not giving us (or the kids) a pile of tie-in stories, rather doing SF that works as short stories. Count me in. There were several favorites here with new work--Fran Wilde and Carlos Hernandez stood out.

Elizabeth Bear, Blood and Iron, Whiskey and Water, and Ink and Steel. Rereads. One of the strange things about having been in this business this long is that I can now have the entirely new experience of rereading something that a peer wrote twenty years ago, that I read when it was new. That's basically what I'm doing with the Promethean Age series, and it's fascinating to be able to see not just how a person might do some things differently but how my friend, specifically, definitely would. A person would not have someone's female mage title be Maga in 2025 (ope); but I've been there the whole time for how my friend handles writing about trust and betrayal and other themes like the ones in this book, and...she wouldn't do it the way she does now without having done it the way she did then. Looking forward to finishing the series reread when I've made a bit of a dent in my birthday books.

A.S. Byatt, Babel Tower. Reread. What's interesting to me about the structure of all this on the reread is that Byatt sets it up for herself so she never has to make Frederica's marriage work on the page. Frederica was married after the previous book, and by the time this one starts, the marriage is already absolutely ghastly. So we never have to live through the "oh, this is why she picked this guy, I see it now" moments. We can go with accounts, summaries...which are never the whole story. I also feel like it's clearer to me on the reread that the level of domestic violence that had to be involved to be sure that the reader would take Frederica's side was absolutely appalling. Which is not to say that level of domestic violence doesn't happen, just...well. This is very well done, and I will want to reread it again but not often, oh lordy not often.

Agatha Christie, Murder Is Easy. This sure is a murder mystery by Agatha Christie.

Alexa Hagerty, Still Life With Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains. Oh gosh, this was extremely well done, one of the best books I've read lately, and also of course harrowing. Of course. The title tells you what you're getting--specifically, the author did forensic anthropology on mass gravesites in Guatemala and Argentina--you should not be surprised at what is in here. And indeed I was not, because shocked and surprised are not the same thing, especially not in 2025. I think the thing that I found notable, that I have been turning over and over in my head as a speculative fiction writer for the last several years and not finding solutions to, is that there were very clear examples of how the people who are wrong--who are very wrong, morally wrong, villains of history wrong--very often do not have a point where they change their minds and see that they are wrong. And I think that we are ill equipped for shameless wrongs, and I am probably going to be thinking about that for many years more.

Barbara Hambly, Murder in the Trembling Lands. This is the latest Benjamin January mystery, and it leans on the complexities of family structure (emotionally as well as socially) in Louisiana in the early 19th century when the different sides of the family were racially differentiated. Which is an interesting thing to do, and I am still enjoying this series twenty-some books on.

Kat Lehmann, No Matter How It Ends a Bluebird's Song: A Haiku Memoir. There is a whole spectrum of how nitpicky you are about what does and does not make a haiku, and if you are (as I am) toward the nitpickier end of that spectrum, you will find that many of these things are not haiku. They are brief, fragile, fleeting, fascinating. Sometimes it doesn't matter whether they're exactly haiku. (Also sometimes it might.)

Elizabeth Lim, A Forgery of Fate. This is an East Asian-inflected Beauty and the Beast retelling wherein the Beast is a water dragon and Beauty is an art forger. That part was great, and I find Lim's prose compulsively readable. What was less great for me is that it featured the trope that if someone is being mean and unpleasant it means that he secretly likes you and is doing it to protect you from something something who cares. BIG NOPE from me, people who are mean and act like they don't like you probably do not like you and should not get to have sex with you. (There is not a great deal of actual sex here. This is a YA. But still, message remains the same.)

Molly Knox Ostertag, The Deep Dark. The twist was very telegraphed for me, and I'm not sure that the author stayed fully in control of the metaphor throughout, but it was a fun coming of age self-acceptance magic comic that I will probably give to a young person in my life.

Victor Pineiro, The Island of Forgotten Gods. Discussed elsewhere.

Helen Scales, What the Wild Sea Can Be. This is nonfiction (title could go either way!) about marine life and how it is adapting (or not) to climate change, and it was very cool and full of a wide range of sea creatures. I like sea creatures. Yay. Also Scales was very conscious of walking the line where she reported accurately but did not inculcate despair, which in climate writing is crucial.

Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. This is very short and pithy, and probably people who are not disabled and spend less time with other disabled people than I do need it more than I do, but also it was a fast read and well done, good to know that I have this as a resource to recommend. Also kudos to our librarians for putting it on the Disability Pride Month display, which is where I found it. Also kudos to our librarians for having a Disability Pride Month display in this year of 2025.

Jennie Erin Smith, Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure. This specifically deals with the families in Colombia that have strong clear lines of genetic tendency toward Alzheimer's: how they have suffered, how they have been involved in Alzheimer's research, the ways in which that has not been handled very satisfactorily by people with more resources and power. Smith interacts with these families as individuals and groups, as real people, and it is a correspondingly difficult read, and also a correspondingly worthwhile one.

Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, David Rafferty, and Christopher J. Dart, eds., How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond. Kindle. This is a series of papers mostly about the transition from Roman Republic to Roman Empire, with several that venture beyond that to historical parallels. It's interesting stuff even if you aren't someone who thinks about Rome all the time, definitely worth the time, and as with many of this type of collection, if you don't find one paper particularly interesting, another will be along in

Profile

stillsostrange: (Default)
stillsostrange

August 2018

S M T W T F S
   1234
567891011
12131415161718
19 202122232425
262728293031 

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Aug. 12th, 2025 09:37 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios