What Are You Reading Weekend has ploughed through quite a few work books

But has about tripled her current library loans, so the TBR stack is now encroaching on the living room side table.

Unlike last fortnight, there isn't a real stand-out thought provoker. I finished Tim Mackintosh's abridgement of the Travels of Ibn Battutah, which were a delight; what really struck me was that, with the exception of Delhi and the Maldives, he left it entirely opaque how he *came by enough money to live and maintain his retinue*. There's a lot of 'in such and such a town they basically adopt travellers', and I find myself how far down the social hierarchy that extends.

Probably the best essay I read this week was Tara Haelle (Elemental), Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted — It’s Why You Feel Awful. It's hardly new news, but I appreciated the 'surge capacity' framing; and the Fairly Obvious Advice at the end is i think well delivered and more meaningful with the full essay for context.

V.S Naipul's description of adopting a scared kitten, in this long essay about grief, is utterly adorable:

The kitten was absolutely terrified. It had had an up-and-down life for many days and had no idea what was coming next. It tried now to run away, though there was no place for it to run to. It dug its little claws into the screen door and raced up to the ceiling of the utility room. That was as far as it could go, and I reached up and brought him down. Something extraordinary then happened. It was as though, feeling my hand, he felt my benignity. He became calm, then he became content; he was happy to be in my hand (not much bigger than him), so that in a few seconds, guided by a cat’s instinct alone, he moved from terror to trust. He ran up my arm to my shoulder; when I introduced him to some of my lunchtime guests, he sought to do the same with them. I knew nothing about cats. But he was easy to like.

I also became rather agitated about the #Reclaimhername controversy: firstly, as many noted, it dismisses the complex relationships of writers like Vernon Lee and George Sand to their assigned gender and to the persona of their pen name. Secondly, it insults literally everyone involved (the intro to the George Elliot novel is so patronising!). Thirdly, in the case of someone like George Elliot, the birth name they used *isn't the female-coded name she used in her personal life* (she used her common-law spouse's name although they weren't legally married). And then there's the hot mess with the woman whose birth cert says Edith Maude Eaton, who published *one* (rather problematic) novel as Mahlon T. Wing (the one chosen by the Women's Prize for this stunt) but several others under the name Sui Sin Far, which she preferred over her English name as it aligned her with her Chinese heritage. Details on that at Pema Monaghan's Twitter.

Onwards to Weekend Reading update!

Currently Reading:
Fiction for fun: I'm now only four stories from the end of Wake, Siren! Three Daughters of Eve is back on the backburner.
Non-fiction for fun: All on hiatus
Poetry: Some headway through Paradise Lost via podcast.
Lit Mag: Finally started the Autumn Meanjin. Never mind that it's nearly spring in Aus.
For work: I think only 'A New Companion to Chaucer', which is still on the currently-reading list as I have scans of several more chapters yet to skim through. Will pick up more on Monday, no doubt.

Recently Finished:

( Cut as it's so long )

Meanwhile, Online short stories:

Sarah Gailey (Uncanny Magazine), Away With The Wolves, from the Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction issue.

Up Next: One of my work goals for the coming week is to skim through as much as I can of the teaching-related library books I have out, so. Those, probably. When I'm done with Wake, Siren, I might move on to 'The World's Wife', or maybe to something not even tangentially work-related (Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows has been catching my eye).

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Links backlog:

No Author (Medieval Histories Magazine 2018), New Research Into the Black Death: looks at Norwegian scientific models of plague spread across Europe, and also at Norwegian archaeological findings; suggests transfer by human ectoparasites (rather than rats and rat fleas). I had been asked about whether historians still believed the black death was bubonic rather than pneumonic - my local health historian had encountered epidemiologists who argued for pneuomonic spread. All the digging I could do confirmed that Monica Green is not committed to either case (for mainly bubonic or mainly pneumonic spread), and I will commit to neither. This hypothesis, for bubonic spread but via a different vector, does seem compelling, however (and I encountered it in a number of other places both more and less scholarly).

Estelle Laure (LitHub), On being a young reader attracted to the darkest possible stories. Laure is a horror reader, which I am not; but her comments on this I think neatly distill why I am usually uninterested in gay utopia fiction:

I have been reading violent stories since I learned how to read at all, not because I’m a proponent of violence, or because I fetishize it, or because I like blood and gore. I don’t. It wasn’t only horror that provided solace, though those books were cathartic. The year I was twelve I also read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Lord of the Flies, The Outsiders, The Color Purple, Of Mice and Men, each one revealing a little more.
Still, people have questioned why I dwell in darkness, why I like twisted plots and books that are considered depressing. I’ll venture to speak on behalf of readers like me: We read those stories because they don’t lie. They show us the scorpions and the worms under the rock. In doing so, those books make us kinder, more aware, more compassionate.

Mellissa Faliveno, To live alone in the woods and write. I love any kind of writing with a strong sense of place, and this has that.

Diane Cook, interview with David Adjmi (Electric Lit), A Queer Memoir about navigating toxic masculinity.

David Crystal (LitHub), Some of the earliest written dialogues were in Middle English literature. Earliest in English, he means. I'm not a huge fan of Crystal but this is kinda neat.

Rachel Cohen (LitHub), On Jane Austen's Politics of Walking. I am not an Austen fan, so I quite like essays that can make me appreciate aspects thereof.

Mike Seccombe (Saturday Paper), Could Josh Frydenberg ease this crisis by printing money. Seccombe has a skill in distilling complex econommic theory: here he breaks down Modern Monetary Theory, which involves some radical ideas like 'printing money', but also components like a jobs guarantee that we see espoused in slightly more mainstream left politics. (I'd have liked to know how, or if, UBI fits in here)

Rick Morton (Saturday Paper), Lost Function: Long-term consequences of surviving Coronavirus

Tabitha Lean and Debbie Kilroy (Saturday Paper), Speaking out for Criminalised Women.

Backlog of links is about 18 days old now! More ... definitely next weekend, hopefully sooner.

Pandemic 159-161: Social Activities

Thursday: after stressing all morning because the maintenance men who were supposed to come at 10 didn't come until 1.30, it turned out they had a master key, and therefore I could leave them in my flat while I went to Basel.

Basel was hot! I acquired about 15 books from the main library, which is an excellent library with multi-storey open stacks. I met up with Hobbit S and, briefly, their boyfriend. Boyfriend fits exactly Type 2 of Polyamorous Men (the probably harmless type with bad hair). Hobbit S is delightful, and showed me the mysteries of the library, and then chatted to me for a while in Tibits after.

Friday: I had only medium success at salvaging my workload, but I did interview N. re the Lords of Misrule audio production of the Canterbury Tales, which was vr interesting. I took more naps than is really normal?

Saturday: I had a video date with Shiny lined up, and dinner with J and her partner Y scheduled for my place in the evening. J had been disappointed I couldn't make it to go swimming with them Thursday or Friday, so we planned to visit a museum on Saturday afternoon. I'm actually quite glad this plan fell through (they overslept and their dessert plans took longer than expected), because although I got my whole house vacuumed before calling Shiny, I did not get the chicken in marinade or the vegetables pre-prepared. A quieter afternoon let me do that.

J and Y are both a delight to talk to; dinner (roast chicken with plums) turned out deliciously. I forgot I had set the table outside, though, so we ate inside in front of the hot oven! Ooops. They brought wine with, and I broke my streak of abstinence - my goal was never complete teetotal, and I do intend to resume comfortable social drinking once I feel like I've broken the mental pattern that was leading to drinking too much at home. For now, though, I'm resetting the 'a month dry gets you a reward' calendar, so no reward for august. Nominated reward for September is a printer, and I really want a printer at this point, so that should prove reasonable incentive.

Sunday: Has been quiet. Podcasting. Knitting. Ordered some brightly patterned fabric, so I really need to get onto sewing some stuff with the LAST brightly patterned fabric I ordered. German class happened, and was pretty boring.