Weekend Listening

[highlyeccentric]

I am finally getting some of my attention span / fiction consumption capacity back!

Music:

Last week as a habits reward I purchased the Christine and the Queens EP. I've been listening to it regularly, but the only track that's really grabbed me so far is this one:

Watch on YouTube

I sort of miss the macho Chris persona.

Meanwhile I've been listening to a fair bit of country, my usual rotation thereof. And a lot of Vienna Teng, which has been out of rotation for a while.

I just purchased 'Sound the Bells', Dessa's collaboration with the Minnesota Orchestra.

Podcasts:

Non-literary:

RTS's daily news podcast (in several small segments) le 12h30 has provided occasional background noise.

The Carbone14 podcast episode Le Monde Romaine ou Les Mondes Romaines. I drifted in and out of paying attention to this one (language upskill: i can now do this without losing comprehension entirely). It makes good points, but, uh, hardly novel ones? I thought?* At least one of the guest speakers was an editor of a collection of essays on the topic, maybe the individual essays make novel points. (Additional language upskill: can identify points and disparage them.)

[*Bedlam, I'm not mad, am I, the point that different parts of the Roman Empire were wildly different, culturally and socially and so on, is... not astonishing?]

Literary and fiction:

I've been puttering through The Spouter Inn. I enjoyed the Christine de Pizan episode, and it filled in some gaps that neither my undergrad education nor my own research have filled. The bonus episode with a curator from the Fisher Library (Toronto, not Sydney) about their new Christine MS was also cool: a really good basic intro to mansucript description, if you need one, in a conversational format. The Little Women episode I really loved, and... sigh. I want to share it with Mum, but I know I'm overstating Mum's interest in this stuff. She noted some features of the text (eg similarities with other children's lit) but fondly tolerated my mini-essays on literary history. Anyway it's GREAT everyone should listen to it, except, I guess, my mum.
So far I've been listening from the beginning forward, but I got out of order to listen to 27b: Reading During Crisis, with guests Irina Dumitrescu, Cord J Whittacker, Oriana Schwindt and Karla Mallette. I really, enormously, recommend this episode. Starting with Irina, who some time ago edited a collection on reading in dire situations and contributed an essay on Romanian political prisoners, a really fascinating thread started up that's not about reading per se but about time: time management, time perception, time shape, in isolation and crisis. Also I loved Cord Whittacker's talking about teaching his kid about the gold standard in order to offer exegesis re the yellow brick road. "Professor's child" problems indeed!

Further headway with The Devil's Party. Raphael is now explaining creation to Adam, and Anthony Oliviera continues to be a fantastic unpacker-of-text.

I finished the first double episode of S3 of the Penumbra. I had been leery of resuming because Juno seem to be painfully embarrassing himself and Peter was basically an arse, but I should've put more faith in the show runners.

Magnus Archives: I'm up to 23, Schwartzwald. I'm not sure how I feel about the increasing meta-plot: I should love it, but part of the reason I've been making headway with Magnus is it's discrete nature, and that it promised A Specific Feeling (creeped out) and nothing more.
I was, unrelated to the above, disappointed with ep 23. Simms the creator can, apparently, fabricate enough Chaucerian knowledge for a plausible young librarian with an English degree, but he cannot do the same for a convincing 19th c antiquarian - or 19th c anything else gentleman scholarly. A 19th c *entomologist*, for ex, who was friends with Jonah Magnus, I would expect to know enough to be annoyed that he didn't have the architectural knowledge to ID the period of a mysterious mausoleum. This is the middle of the Gothic revival! You would either notice if you were walking into a medieval tomb, or at least know that OTHER people would know what they were looking at! (I have specific issues with the books, but I believe I need to wait for more Plot to happen before I make judgement.)
I also do not for a minute believe that Jonathan the character *isn't* the kind of wanker who would insist on pronouncing Wilhelm correctly, but I concede that Simms the narrator probably decided 'sounding like a Dracula impersonation' would be detracting.

Lightspeed Magazine Podcast: Seanan McGuire's 'Hello, Hello'. This is super cool, and not where I was expecting it to go at all.

Anyway the major upside of my Magnus annoyance is it made me think "Ben Aaronovitch wouldn't have done this", so maybe I will manage to get into the next Peter Grant audiobook soon.

Comments

[bedlamsbard]

Without listening to it, uh, yeah, different parts of the Roman world were very, very different and this has not been news for like...a while now. There are obviously some shared cultural similarities and the shared cultural language of ~Romanitas, especially amongst the elites, but like, to pick at random, Britain and Egypt are super different, or the northern European provinces versus the former Hellenistic provinces or so on.