Weekend Listening Post

[highlyeccentric]

Looking at my annual reading roundup for the year, I rather hope that the reason I read so few books was my podcast intake - certainly that might explain the two-year downward trend, although why I read fewer books this year, when I am actually being paid to read books, than I did last year, when I was not, is a depressing consideration.

Music:

Grace Petrie put out a Fairytale of New York cover:

Watch on YouTube

Her alternate lyric scans better than the Pogues' own alternate, although it obviously makes no sense within the song itself. It DOES strike me as a beautiful choice marking the song's shift into something closer to a carol in function than a pop song - ie, something about which the important experience is the present-and-continuous singing of it rather than a specific recording.

Podcasts: I think the only one I've made much headway with is the Magnus Archives - now up to episode 70. I'll definitely give myself a break at the end of S2.

Other: I got through the first half of this double lecture on Offensive Shakespeare, and a. it is cool and b. so, it seems, is Gresham College, a college which exists exclusively to give public lectures in London. Neat.

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Some links:

Frieda Moran (Conversation AU), From curried wombat to rendang and doro wat: a brief history of curry in Australia. I really liked this: it made sense of a puzzle that I ponder over occasionally. Namely, that I was pretty sure Indian and Thai and other curry-having cuisines were as foreign to most of my peers and my parents' peers as they were to me and my parents, growing up, and yet I knew people who ate things like 'sausage curry'. I had sort of supposed this was a hangover from 70s 'international foods' fads, but I've since checked the curry recipes in the Women's Weekly original cookbook and they bear significantly more resemblance to the intended cuisines than did the... odd... thing... that I once at a friend's place. Turns out curry has been around in Aus since the 19th century, which, duh. British Empire.

Rachel Handler (Grubstreet), What the hole is going on? The very real, totally bizarre buccatini shortage of 2020. Everyone on Twitter said you have to read this, and they were NOT WRONG. You have to read this.

Andrew Whitehead (BBC) She is beautiful, but she is Indian: the student who became a Welsh bard at 19. In 1914, the first woman to win the Eisteddfod at Aberystwyth College was a young girl from India.

Naveen Razik (SBS), How a regional Australian city became an unlikely home for hundreds of Yazidi refugees. Our refugee intake is far from enough, and our policies generally terrible, but I am very pleased when regional resettlement schemes work out.

Phillip Weiss, interview with Susan Abulhawa (Mondoweiss), Abulhawa on her Palestinian epic: It's really important for me for Palestinian characters and literature to speak their truth without apology

Randa Abdel Fattah (Meanjin Blog, July 2020), The Great Palestinian Silence. An old one I failed to save, apparently, because I couldn't find it when I needed to pull cites in a Twitter spat.

Roxana Hadadi (Pajiba), The questions of male consent that puncture both fantasy worlds of Bridgerton and Wonder Woman 1984.

David Eugster (SwissInfo), Switzerland's black market in sweet white powder. Quick on the heels of my recent interest in the sugar beet industry, I give you: saccharin smuggling!