Strong Verbs Are Just Better

As you may have gathered, I've been on a deadline lately, finalising my book proposal for the-book-from-the-PhD. It's no longer Book-OF-the-PhD, it's changed so much I'm starting to doubt the validity of the bit of paper that says 'Docteur es Lettres'. As sometimes happens when I'm in academic-stress-hyperfocus, I hit a point where I could stop what I was doing and do something else, but I couldn't do *nothing*, and reading unrelated fiction felt like nothing. So I've consumed a LOT of podcasts lately, while crocheting.

Music Notes: Last Listening Post I noted I had become obsessed with The Longest Johns. Shortly after that post I bought 'Between Wind and Water', the album with Wellerman on it; and last week I bought 'Cures What Ails Ya', which has a lot more comic songs.

It also contains 'Fire and Flame', which, by the baffling (if you live in Switzerland) line 'The Mont Blanc was gone and the town with it too', suddenly lurched out of Nice Background Ballad to setting off a deep Wikipedia dive re the Halifax Explosion mid-week.



Since I submitted the proposal I've been listening to Dessa's orchestral live album 'Sound the Bells' a lot.

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Podcasts and similar:

Fiction:

Paradise Lost (The Devil's Party podcast): Finally finished Bk 9, and am into Bk 10, as far as where the Son descends to seek the pair out. Still loving Anthony Oliveira's discussion sections, although I really do think he's under-estimating the extent to which Eve Is Right, Actually.

Lightspeed Magazine: both Ann of Rags (P.H. Lee) and Miss Beulah's braiding and life change salon (Eden Royce). Both brilliantly narrated. Ann of Rags is fairy-tale like, but inverts fairy-tale logics. Really great use of repetition that works incredibly well read aloud but might be a bit heavy-handed on the page. Miss Beulah's Braiding and Life Change Salon is an urban-fantasy type slice of life, which does a great job with slowly revealing to the reader bit by bit how far the world of the story diverges from ours.

Non-fiction:

The Spouter Inn: I finished the Odyssey episode and enjoyed the bonus with Emily Wilson. I then got through all three of the 'Philosophical novels(?)' block - Middlemarch, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, and The Blazing World, and the bonus episodes with experts on Middlemarch and The Blazing World. I kind of wished there had been a bonus expert for Hayy ibn Yaqzan, because not only was that the book for which I had least context, it also showed that that was the book for which the two hosts, Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Chris Piuma, had the least expertise. Of the three, Middlemarch was the only one I'd read; I was fascinated by Dr Akbari's dislike of Dorothea - I need to read again to see if my own perspective on her changes as I grow older. What was obvious though was that I had missed a lot ABOUT Dorothea, and many other characters, along the way. The Blazing World I'm pretty sure I don't want to read right now but I really appreciated having highlights pulled out, and having the philosophical commentary in the expert bonus episode. Clearly I do not know enough about the 17th cenutry. Hayy ib Yaqzan I'm filing in the back of my head: I'm sure one day it will come in handy as a counterpoint to some kind of medieval Xn text.

Histoire Vivante: I'm two episodes in to a five-parter on Imperial Rome. Mostly for the purposes of picking up vocab, it's a general survey and not telling me anything I don't know, but it's telling me it in French.

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Some links of possible interest:

Thomas Stevens (SwissInfo), The talented Ms Highsmith's life in "club like" Switzerland. Nothing complex, but I didn't know she'd lived here. Nor did I know about her vehement racism and antisemitism, although those are only briefly mentioned in this piece.

Suzanne M Harvey (UCL Researchers in Museums blog, 2012), How did man lose his penis bone? Don't tell me you haven't wondered.

Alan Cleaver (The Beyonder), Rediscover our ancient coffin paths. Now I want to walk a coffin path.

Amanda Mull (The Atlantic), The pandemic is resetting casual friendships. I think this is less marked for me because so MANY of my 'weak ties' are social media based anyway, and because I've moved so much that I'm used to weak ties disappearing quickly. But it's definitely A Thing.

John Grindrod (The Social), Last Night a Bookshop Saved My Life: a love letter to Gay's The Word

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:



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!

Music:

I bought Vika and Linda's latest album, Sunday (The Gospel According to Iso), which is a full-on gospel album. A good one, I think, and I'm enjoying it, but due to my maximum tolerance for Xn religious music I doubt any of the tracks will make my most-played list (which now has a threshold of about 70 plays, so, even things I really adore are taking Quite Some Time to make it in).

Here's one track I've been enjoying- not the album version but apparently they've been doing a series of Sunday Sing Songs, and this was one they'd pre-recorded in expectation of lockdown:



We had one Vika and Linda album when I was growing up - the first, self-titled one, Dad tells me - and I have 'Between Two Shores', a best-of they did a while back.

Here's a track from the album, video also from the pre-recorded Sunday Sing Songs, where you can hear their two voices more distinctly. Vika, in the I <3 Jesus hat, has had more formal singing training, but they've been singing together since they were kids. Bonus points to anyone who can explain what purpose the potato serves.



I thought I remembered a few occasions of asking to listen to Vika & Linda and getting redirected to The Black Sorrows (with whom they recorded for several albums - here's of my favourites), and that's backed up by Dad's comments when I asked about what album we had. Apparently we didn't listen to it much because my parents find Vika's voice 'hard to take' compared to Linda's 'mellow' one. I'd suspect something weird and racialised, except Linda's got the lower range, so... w/ever. It's a twang, certainly, but I quite like it? The track I linked to just now is one mainly featuring Vika, I think. (Here's We've started a fire, off the self-titled album, which I had forgotten about because it's not on the best-of but suddenly I am overwhelmed. I LOVED that song as a kid!)

Here's a professionally mixed video version of Aint No Grave, which shows off both of their voices really distinctly. I like this one particularly because it's one that's best known in versions with male bass/baritone, and some female-fronted versions (like this Bethel Music / Molly Skaggs version) do sound like they're missing something, even with an alto or mezzo vocalist (maybe that's because white people can't be trusted to sing gospel, but Johnny Cash managed it).



Thank you for coming with me in this nostalgia trip re Australian blues/soul music.

Podcasts etc:

I've got through a few more episodes of Magnus - I lost several hours too late one night researching the Oregon Trail thanks to Trail Rations.

I finished Lovers of the Fallen Tower (Penumbra), and am ever more enamoured of Olala and her Tail.

I think some Paradise Lost might have happened in there? Satan has been 'stupidly good' for a hot minute, so I guess everything's downhill from here.

And finally, I'm most of the way through the Slightly Foxed episode on Charles and Mary Lamb and am agog with all i didn't know about them! The fact that Charles took on care of Mary after her violent breakdown (she killed their mother!), both supported and collaborated with her, and their friends not only accommodated his alcholism (plenty of men do that for other well educated men), but extended the same to Mary's ongoing mental ill health and her scandalous past? Sometimes humans are good, actually.

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Some links:

Zenobia Frost (Meanjin blog), What I'm reading. About queer (lesbian-centred) lit. I almost didn't read this because the twitter pull-quote was about happy endings, but the full paragraph (about The Price of Salt) is more nuanced. "it's not an ending at all - it's a promise of a future."

JK Murphy (Greatist), Letting go of finding one love. This is a nice gentle intro to relationship anarchism, and light on the self-righteousness that many RA afficionados exude.

Substack User Known Only As David, David Davis XIII Part 3: On Validity. About kink, but can apply to a LOT of queer axes: Maybe it’s because I don’t see what’s wrong with a kink or fetish being weird. In fact, isn’t that sort of the point? I wonder who it serves to pretend that people won’t think you are weird, or gross, or worse,

Leah Hampton (Guernica), Lost in a (mis)gendered Appalachia. Although it talks in some detail about Nina Simone, it could do with a little more digging into race and gender's intersection. Nevertheless, A Good.

Leah F (own blog), Trans History Will Hurt You. When I tell trans people trans history will hurt them, I do not mean, as trans theorygirl Andrea Long Chu says too often, that being transgender is bad for you. What I mean is that hurting is good for you.

Jen Pelly (Pitchfork), Meet Shameika Stepney. Apparently she remembers Fiona Apple, they're back in touch, and Shameika raps as Dollface/Chyna Doll, and there's a new collab track.

Zavi Engles (Folks: A Pillpack Magazine), The skin disease that gave the world socialism. Headline an over-drawn bow, but hey, Karl Marx was chronically ill. The more you know.

Rachel Combe (Elle), An awaking nightmare. On Upper Airway Respiratory Syndrome, a kind of sleep apnoea that lacks some of the markers of 'typical' sleep apnoea, and is more common in women.

Captain Awkward (own site), Chronically single abuse survivor tired of dating disasters. Another 'just a particularly good example of the advice column genre'. Long, but a bit tighter in structure than some CA of late.

S Johnathan O'Donnel (History Today), Illuminating Conspiracy. On the Illuminati panic as a trend-setter in American conspiracy fears.

Music:

According to Maria Dhavana Headey's twitter, I think on Thursday, her small son advocated a policy of hugging one's stuffed dragon tight and dancing to 'This Year' by the Mountain Goats. I embraced this policy, although I do not have a stuffy dragon.

Yesterday I marked the calling of the race with The Carolina Chocolate Drops. Today I have remembered that The Mountain Goats have a new album out, and am checking that out on Spotify.

Perhaps the best thing I listened to all week though was this:



Podcasts:

I am up to Mag 54. I quite liked 53, Crusader - didn't LOVE it but approved of its attention to detail. Special bonus points for having a Hospitaller knight instead of a Templar. <3 I LOVED 54, 'Still Life', chiefly because I loved the narrator, a man whose great passion is the prevention of money laundering, and who, having encountered unearthly horrors, ran away very fast, made a report to what seemed to be the correct body, and declared "well whatever they have going on, it's not money laundering" and plans to never think about it again. A+ priorities my dude.

I particularly enjoyed how he enthused about the proprietor of the shop being "a good audience" for his money laundering infodump, except for the oddity of not making eye contact, "but I have a cousin with autism so that didn't bother me too much". My dude. My extremely special-interest-focused dude.

Audiobooks:

I've made it through the first part of the House of Fame, via the Chaucer Studio. I once had hopes of collecting the Chaucer Studio CDs, but I gotta admit, the download versions are cheaper and are what I actually *use* anyway.

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Some links:

Cord J. Whittacker, The secret power of white supremacy and how anti-racists can take it back. Whittacker gave a related talk at Notre Dame's Conway Lectures this week, but I wasn't able to make it due to time zones. I am... not exactly comfortable with the idea of reclaiming the language of chivalry and protection as leftist discourse, in much the same way as I am not comfortable with queer-inclusive religious discourse at the centre of queer politics: not comfortable but recognise the utility. I was a little surprised Whittacker didn't mention the Black Panthers in this article - you'd think they'd be right up the front of one's mind when thinking of anti-racist discourses of protection?

Kelly Connaboy, interview with Patricia Lockwood (The Cut), On Miette. Twitter's most important cat has an important backstory.

Kerrie Handasyde (AWHN blog), Women Preachers: What to Wear. On the politics of dress for early Australian preaching women in certain denominations. I have questions about Handasyde's interpretation of Violet Callanan (Churches of Christ) and her bible college photo in blazer, shirt and tie: Handasyde reads this as part of her self-styling in the vein of a male preacher, and the way it's presented in the text of the post you'd think the photo she referred to was taken AFTER Callanan was called to act as full-time preacher for a congregation unable to attract a minister. It's not. It's from her early training. Her masculine dress stands out from the other women in her cohort. I... have questions. The associated article may answer them, but I haven't read it yet.

Brian Resnick (Vox), How to talk someone out of bigotry with deep canvassing. This strikes me as the only reasonable halfway point between 'reach out to a trumpist' and 'ignore them and push the country forward', and applicable in a great many other situations likewise. Worth stressing though that it's emotional labour you need *training* in. There's no guarantee that untrained attempts will have simliar effect.

These two are a pair, both from LAST US election cycle: Peter Kruger's Quora answer to What don't most liberals realise, originally given I think in early 2017. And David Wong at Cracked, How half of america lost its damn mind, from after Trump won the 2016 nomination. Both of them, I think, drop the ball on race (Wong in interesting ways, given he's writing as an Asian-American from a rural area - it's like he doesn't quite see that there's layers of antiblackness completely different to the 'as long as they're just like us' factor governing his experience), but they have a LOT of good stuff to say on rural service provision and the fact that leftist organising focuses so much on cities. Both are writing about rural areas *without* a high number of black and hispanic agricultural workers, I note, but don't quite seem to realise that's a distinction they're making - but nor do the 'actually the agricultural working class are POC' takes note that they're talking about very specific agricultural areas. I dunno. I've been reading a lot of twitter threads, which I haven't saved, about the impact of county-level organising since 2016: the difference it makes, for instance, to polling station access if you get a democrat or independent in as ... whatever the US equivalent of Returning Officer is. County recorder?

Leslie Goldman (Marie Claire), To End Sexual Abuse in Churches, Dismantle Purity Culture

That's it, that's the links for the week. Obviously I have read a LOT of current US election articles, but none of them stood out as astonishingly different to what I can expect you've all read.

I have acquired the three Washington singles I had thought would be on the album, but which are not.



Podcasts: I listened to, and really enjoyed, The Spouter Inn's Moby Dick episode and Moby Dick bonus episode.

I listened to and enjoyed Kate Lister's The history of a nasty word, on the word 'cunt', although I warn you her approach to etymology is more... artistic than accurate. And I'm irrationally annoyed by her including Gwerful Mechain as an example of use of 'cunt'. THE POEM IS IN WELSH, KATE. THE WORD CUNT IS A TRANSLATION. The talk is, perhaps, most useful as an example of a kind of feminist performance art that hinges on embracing certain kinds of obscenity due to the obscenification of the female body.

Finally, I'm into book 9 of Paradise Lost with Anthony Olivera, and enjoying the return to the closet-drama style sections with their wild Satanic soliloquies.

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Some links / essays of interest:

Brabble, Ludwig and Ewing (Nursing Clio), “All the World’s a Harem”: Perceptions of Masked Women during the 1918–1919 Flu Pandemic.

Kevin O'Sullivan (Irish Times), Blonde hair, blue eyes often not dominant characteristics of irish vikings, study finds. I read a lot of pop sci takes on this and the abstract of the actual article (also saw the spectacular promo photos taken by two of the researchers, which are not included in this article: they feature a young brunette guy dressed as a viking looming over his blonde, older, slave). For some reason this is the one I saved.

Daniel Lavery (The Shatner Chatner), The golden calf,in order of, do I love her, is she my best friend.

Dion Kagan (Sissy Screens), Portrait of a Gaze on Fire: Review Essay.

Taliah Mancini, interview with Eula Bliss (The Nation), The stories we tell about class. Re: Bliss' new book, Having and Being Had.

Jeremy Levine (Shelterforce), It's time to move on from community concensus. A good look at some of the major problems with concensus model consultation (not the same as bottom-up consensus model decision making, but I am not convinced that those are free of similar problems either).

Ruby Tandoh (The New Yorker), How A Cheese Goes Extinct. Recommended for those who loved The Glitter Article or the Guardian sandwich longread.

NPR discussion with a group of poets of colour, When poets decide who counts.

Tiffany Higgins (Guernica), In the ruins of paradise. A pensive account of the 2018 Oakland fires, sharply relevant this autumn.

Jesmyn Ward (Vanity Fair), On Witness and Respair. Re: the death of Ward's husband, and grieving during COVID.

Jeanette Ng (Own blog), On identity, performing marginalisations, and the limitations of ownvoices: or, why I can't just repeat my uncle's joke about eating dogs.

Sandra Muniz (Fashion History Timeline), 1866: Toulmouche, The Hesistant Fiancée. Mainly recommended for the painting, which: WOW. I can't help reading it in contrast to the cover of my edition of Good Wives. The Toulmouche might even have been a reference image, Meg's dress in that cover painting is WAY too lux for the narrative.

The Tetrapod (anon education blog), They just said the quiet part out loud: time for some fascist PSHE. The new UK guidelines for sex and relationships education are WORRYING, folks.

I'm still very much enjoying Namoli Brennet (I have two albums, Boy In A Dress and The Simple Life, her first and latest). There are very few of her tracks on YouTube, other than Boy In A Dress, which I've already posted, so you'll have to take my word for it. One odd thing is that aside from Boy In A Dress and one called 'The Works of Man', none of the individual songs really stick in my mind? But I find both albums a Good Vibe.

Podcasts and audiofiction: I'm making some headway with Paradise Lost, via Anthony Oliveira's podcast. Made it as far as the creation of Eve, as told by Adam, tonight.

I feel that the difference between raised-catholic queer (Oliveira) and raised-protestant queer can be epitomised in my reaction to his interpretation of Adam's tale:

Anthony waxes lyrical about Anne Carson (via Carly Rae Jepsen, natch), and her concept of 'art without a personal centre, a hole in the middle left open for God', and the compulsion to companionship and love.
Meanwhile, me: Life without - God's Love - is like a DONUT! (Context. You gotta wade through, like, TV kids giving thanks to God before you get to the psychedelic song).

I've also made headway with Magnus - I found Hive interesting, clearly an important piece of the Ongoing Plot, but I didn't love it (this is a pattern: I am way more impressed with the tight standalones than the ones intricately bound with the overarching plot). First Hunt I quite liked for how it wasn't contributing plot *pieces*, but it was developing plot *themes* - good refraction there, although I must admit I was a bit surprised by the show's stepping so far into a clear vegetarian politic. Boatswain's Call, meanwhile, I really loved - it exhibited the thing that first impressed me about Magnus, the restraint: you never see the monster, you *never even find out what the monster was or does*, or if there was a monster at all.

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Meanwhile, links backlog!

Maya Alexandri (LitHub), Navigating the dual nightmare of an opiod epidemic and a global pandemic. Problems with framing opiod addiction as an epidemic granted, this is... a harrowing piece.

Merve Emre (The Point), The Longing Man. Yearning, indecision, impossibility—the frustrated agency of romance proves endlessly fascinating to the longing man. He believes in soul mates, in beloveds and in the inevitability of cultivating his feelings for them, in cultivating his feelings through them.

Abby Dockter, interview with Irina Dmitrescu (Essay Daily), Digesting Texas, And Other Pursuits of a Fusion Medievalist.

Jessica Xing (Electric Lit), Lesbian Pulp Novels Made Me Feel Normal.

Sonia Saraya (Vanity Fair), How Immigration Nation's filmmakers captured America's broken immigration system. What's striking about this is that they were given unprecedented access to ICE enforcement teams, without lying to them about their film, because ICE just *assumed*, couldn't really conceive of any alternative, that they were doing a gung-ho 'Border Security' style take.

Rachel Corbmann (Notches), Lesbian networks of (cat) care during the sex wars. What it says on the tin.

Lauren Gravitz (Spectrum News), At the intersection of autism and trauma

Olivia Rutigliano (LitHub), The #ReclaimHerName controversy ignores the authorial choices of the writers it represents.

Catherine Taylor (TLS), The story of a new name (same topic as previous).

V.S. Naipaul (The New Yorker), The Strangeness of Grief. Contains many more things than kittens (including, alas, the death of the cat that was once a kitten).

AphroChich (The Spruce), The History and Uses of Indian Charpoy Beds. These were mentioned in Ibn Battutah's Travels, and I couldn't picture them from his description. Research lead me here!

Scott Robinson (Overland), Loneliness without privacy: on isolation under lockdown.

Music:

Having subscribed to the Unwell patreon (Hartlife NFP) I have downloaded Michael Turrentine's 'John the Revelator' as well as the 'Rusty Standish' track Lost that I mentioned two weeks ago. I am enjoying it a lot.

Otherwise I have made no new music purchases and developed no notable listening habits. I think maybe I did a nostalgic sweep back through my Libera albums and some choral compilations shortly after last post?

Postcasts and audiobooks:

I am really struggling to get through Garth Greenwell's What Belongs To You because of the embarrassment squick. I had to go to googlebooks and read ahead for one particular scene involving his teenage friend/crush, because I just could not handle the buildup at spoken speed. And now we are done with the retrospective and back to Awkward Encounters With Mitko.

This is such a good book, and SUCH a well done audiobook, but I really should have had it in text form.

Podcast wise, I finished S1 of Unwell! The finale was An Experience! I am now struggling with the opening double-parter of S2. I am familiar with house fire gothic, and, despite early traumatic exposure to Jane Eyre, can usually cope. I am familiar with Weird Forest Shit gothic, that's fine. But, given my particular phobias, 'Forest Fire Gothic' is REALLY STRETCHING MY CAPACITY TO COPE, especially at spoken speed.

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That's about it. I should do some links, but... naaah.

Music:

I am still enjoying 'Fetch the Boltcutters' and 'Sound the Bells'; the Cher album might have been a flash-in-the pan life choice (but one that I think will continue to please me in occasional flashes over the years).

Bought Grace Petrie and the Benefits Culture, Live and St Pancras Old Church, on bandcamp's fundraising day. Really enjoying that, although also, aww, wee baby Grace. I think 'Deliver Us From Evil' might be my favourite, but it's not on youtube. Have another good example:



Also listening to my 'country' playlist a lot, and the 'upbeat' one that's been extant since 2006, with some additions, is in high circulation too.

Podcasts:

Some further Magnus Archives progress. Interested to meet Sascha. Really admired 27: A Sturdy Lock. I think these are my favourites, the self-contained pieces, which often don't resolve into the discovery of a Big Bad, but demonstrate incredibly fine control over pacing and tension. I found Skintight weirdly difficult to listen through. Loved Cheating Death.

Not much else, except another episode of Paradise Lost. Some of Creation has now been Created.

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:



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.

I am so incredibly tired, I have not had the bandwidth for much media consumption.

Music: Still really enjoying King Princess



I bought a 10 franc cheaply self-printed CD from the guy who does electric violin covers while busking in the station, and that was a good life choice. Here he is with his colleague (who I think is on the CD) doing Shape of You:



Podcasts: Very little, except some more Paradise Lost.