Weekend Listening post

Music: Hmm. Nothing revelatory. I picked up, with my habit-reward-budget, a couple of CN Lester (better known as the author of 'Trans Like Me')'s albums. I haven't glommed onto any track yet, but the albums are nice background noise.

Watch on YouTube

Podcasts:

Audio Fiction: Since last post, I...

Finished the first four Anne books via Radio Canada's Oh!Dio app. They were good! I feel like my French improved quite a bit!

Listened to a bunch of Megan Arkenberg short stories: Lessons from a Clockwork Queen at Glittership; All the King's Monsters at Clarkesworld; A City of Kites and Crows at Glittership.

Plus listened to a couple of other short stories: In September by Aimee Ogden, at Podcastle; and Tiger lawyer gets it right by Sarah Gailey, at Escape Pod.

Various news and current affairs: After finishing the Anne books I made a solid stab at more FR and DE listening. So far I'm enjoying:

A couple of RTS (swiss public radio) streams - Le Journal Horaire, most mornings (often it's the last update from the previous night, but never mind that); random short news or discussions from 'Le 12h30' and 'Forum: Le 1iere'. One of the latter does a periodic 'revue de presse Allemanique', which is useful for...

SRF (swiss public radio, German) 'Heute-Morgen'. I actually find i can understand most of this! My class level is just at the beginning of B1, but I find this _much_ easier to understand than I did even 'français facile' from RadioFrance when I first arrived in Geneva. Unsure if it's because my aural skills are much stronger due to immersion, or something about Francophones having way too high standards.

Possibly the latter, because I'm ALSO listening to a couple of German easy-German news podcasts, and one of them, the one from Deustsche Welle, is actually *too slow* for me; for comparison, I'm also occasionally listening to RadioFrance's 'journal en Français Facile' and, like, yeah, it's not pushing my comprehension skills but it's still work.

SBS Australia's 'wir sprechen Deutsch' podcast, which does a mix of news and discursive episodes. Doesn't explicitly say it's for learners, but I'd guess that high school and university students make up a chunk of the audience. In terms of the details covered in the discursive episodes it's got to be B2 level, but I'm finding it pretty easy to follow. And useful! I could now talk about the premier of NSW and the Prime Minister, separately, if I needed to! (The premier is Minister Präesidentin, while the PM is Premier Minister; the Chief Minister of the ACT is just 'Chief Minister' in a German accent because fuck it. I look forward to the day they need to talk about Governors and Governors-General).

Discursive Podcasts:

Productivity Alchemy by Kevin Sonney with Ursula Vernon. Okay so I put this on for showering background noise (I've figured out that I'm less likely to lose time if I have noises on for the morning food / meds / shower / cat / dress / minor chores routines), having done so a couple of times before, but instead of just puttering around I got FUCKING OBSESSED i'm binge-listening to it now. The episode I happened to land on had a whole preface talking about Ursula's one-year-post-diagnosis ADHD coping mechanisms and it was really cool and affirming (I actually noped out of the rest of that episode, because military interviewee). And then I went back to 137 where she got diagnosed, and have been alternating March 2020> with recent stuff. The March 2020 experience is wild, because useful (if also enviable- damn you Ursula with your simple meds process!) ADHD content, but like, the interviewees, even the one who was a doctor, were just... way too optimistic about the pandemic prospects, huh? And I've now gone back to episode 1>, where they didn't KNOW Ursula was diagnosed but were trying to figure out an organisational strategy that might work for her (none of them do, but the ways they fail are interesting).
This is so great! Affirming neurodivergent content! Nerd background noise! Mostly fascinating interviewees, too. I think listening to Kevin nerd out played a part in finally galvanising me into starting a Data Oriented subproject. And listening to many many interviewees bang on about reviewing your progress prompted me to, er, review my week and write a list of hanging threads on Friday. Hooray!

I have listened to some others (Two Bi guys, and... some other stuff, gendery, I think?) but I gotta go do a thing now. No more content for today, no links today, but hey, you get Listening Post, at least.

Some links, mostly the TLS

I'm waaay behind, but I have a few issues waiting for me to pin the essays I recall or might want to recall and then I can ditch the rest.

Rosemary Righter, Ox Demons and Snake Spirits: The Causes and effects of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, review of Yang Jisheng, The World Turned Upside Down.

Rohan Maitzen, Austen in Nazi Europe: review of Olivia Manning's 'Balkan Trilogy'. I constantly went back and forth throughout this as to whether I now want to read the trilogy, or I now know it will annoy me.

Julia Priest, Queen But Not Queen, review of Mark Bryant's 'Queen of Versailles'.

Kathryn Hughes, Beyond the school for scandal, review of Antonia Fraser's bio of Caroline Norton

Sean O'Brien, The doors they came out by: Nostalgia for a vanished pub.

Simon Beattie, A lamp left burning, review of Johann-Günther König's biography (DE) of Freido Lampe. Je just sounded cool.

David Edgerton, Pit stops: A study in the lost world of British labourism, review of Huw Benyon and Ray Hudson, 'The Shadow of the Mine'

Felix Waldmann, Level Unlocked: a manuscript discovery confirms John Lock's reading of Hobbes. I don't know much about either philosopher but now I know slightly more.

D.J. Taylor, Larger than life: How to go about writing an obituary. This was fascinating!

Nicola Shulman, The enigma of the recorder: a portrait of Cecil Beaton's coterie, review of Hugo Vickers, 'Malice in Wonderland: My adventures in the world of Cecil Beaton'. "Perhaps the most revelatory aspect of this adventure, and the part that Vickers has captured whole, is how little interest the subject of Cecil Beaton excites". (I snorted)

Kathryn Hughes, Go ask Alice, I think she'll know: review of the V&A's Alice: Curiouser and Curioser exhibition, and of Jake Fior's 'Through a looking glass darkly'.

Jakob Hofman, Coring the Big Apple, review of 'The Great Mistake', which covers the life (and death= of Andrew Haswell Green, a town planner essential to the layout of New York. Convinced me the book would be engaging; did NOT give me the impression the book deals in any depth with the racialised nature of Green's work, eg, the Central Park project. Pity, because Green's life and death do sound fascinating.

Philip Horne, An element of the cruel: what Henry James found when he went back to America, review of Henry James, 'The American Scene' (new ed. by Peter Collister). Dithers a bit over James' racism but at least addresses it. Otherwise an interesting synthesis of a book I... probably never will read, lbr.

Robert Gildea, Imperial Blether, review of Pria Satia, 'Time's Monster: History, conscience and Britain's empire. At least SOMETHING in the TLS admits it's not feasible to dither about the past, and that Britain today has no real way of reckoning with the atrocities of empire.

That will have to do for the night, the kitten is rampaging.

Ed: first link (which went to kitten instead of article) now fixed