Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Kitten approves of Becky Excell. Nice thick pages for chomping.

1. No Reading Wednesday post yesterday because a) travel and b) haven't finished reading anything and only started one thing.

2. I have now handed the final hard copies of my PhD in. Thus the travelling: Sun-Wednesday to and from Geneva. Saw friends, had many many weird feelings (mostly... angry? I was ANGRY at my PhD, i don't even know), got some stuff out of storage, including my German and Latin grammar drilling books.

3. Other travelling: St Andrews last weekend, Oxford coming up the weekend before Christmas. St A was beautiful, A+ I intend to go back.

Also, as noted in my flocked post, there's a Tumblr Implosion going on. Not to mention the insidious facebook policy change. The internet is, as someone aptly noted, not going tits up but rather tits-away. I have a lot of opinions but most of them are a. unsurprising and b. not particularly eloquent compared to many. conuly had a good set of round-up links if that's of interest to you.

Please enjoy this photo of a Musk Lorikeet which I took at home in August. I'd never seen them before, but they were chilling in the backyard, down by the water:

I want to get in the habit of writing up occasional multi-paragraph reviews, as well as WAYRW posts with the ecclectic range of comments I put on goodreads. Plus for once I have a photograph that complements an e-book, for instagram purposes.

Kerry Greenwood: Death Before Wicket (Phryne Fisher #10)



This was a delightful romp, albeit one which had me madly cross-referencing historical USyd figures to see who was fictional and who wasn't. (And seething about the fact that the Hours of Juana the Mad are an actual book with known provenance, which was definitely never held - let alone lost - in Sydney.)

In points entirely typical of the Phryne Fisher books, you can expect parties, cocktails, side characters with a penchant for witty banter, extravagant costumes, and at least one (1) sex scene. This book sees Phryne going to Sydney to answer a call for help from two undergraduates, concerned that their colleague may be expelled. Along the way she gets entangled with practitioners of the occult, a notorious brothel madam, entirely too many professors, and assorted debauched poets. I particularly appreciated Christopher Brennan's accurate-to-type bit part appearance as a drunkard poet, A++ work there. A sub-plot involving two different wives and mothers pulled by circumstances into the sex trade is well handled, interesting, and a good supplement to the main theft/attempted murder plot.

There's something slightly odd about the central plot premise, which, without giving too much away, involves in part a rivalry between a professor of Egyptology and a professor of anthropology over the allocation of funding (archaeological research, or work with indigenous australians). The anthropologist is carefully characterised as someone who genuinely respects his indigenous hosts, and opposes mining on their sacred lands (nice contemporary reference there), which... is fair enough, given that the historically more likely situation would make unpleasant reading, and cosy crime relies on most characters being essentially likeable. The Egyptologist, though, is portrayed as particularly interested in Egypt because there he can pursue relationships with younger men, and... the gross colonialisms of that are not interrogated. There's a lot of deflecting going on, essentially.

In short, a good read, but not one that exhibits the best of Kerry Greenwood's ability to navigate historical diversity and the racial politics of 1920s Australia.

1. What was your favorite toy as a child?
2. What did you name it?

This is my most beloved bear, Brown Bear. I think he was briefly named Daddy Bear (I had a Mummy Bear and a Baby Bear too), but Brown Bear stuck. At this point in my life, my mother was guiding my bear name choices.

3. Who gave it to you?

Our neighbours in western Sydney, when I was one and a bit. I can't remember their names or indeed anything about them, but they gave me Brown Bear when we moved to Wagga Wagga with the RAAF. There's a photo of me holding him while the trailer is being packed.

4. Do you still have it?

As you can see, yes I do. He is a very important bear.

5. If not, what happened to it?

I still have him but MANY THINGS have happened to him. Brave bear has been on _three_ long haul flights: he came with me (along with Katherine Bear - my carry on was 50% bears) when I moved, because I would not consign him to shipping. And last time I went home, he came with (usually Monkey is my travelling companion) in order to be fitted for his new jacket as a Christmas present from Mum. He's quite threadbare on the back, and the jacket he had since I was about twelve had burst at the seams. His current jacket is lined with the leftover scraps of my 12th grade formal dress. Mum thought the outer red fabric was mine, too, but I think perhaps it was a fancy outfit she made for J at some point; I never had a brushed red suede outfit.

Long haul flights are not the worst thing that have happened to Brown Bear, though. ( This story not safe for monksandbones, although not detailed by anyone's standards )

Anyway any time after that that I felt in the slightest bit ill I would exile Brown Bear, lest he suffer again.

Seen on the eastern shore of Derwent Water, July 2017:



More photos from that expedition and others are slowly drip-feeding through to speculumannorum_feed

Currently Reading: Mary Renault, 'Fire from Heaven'

Recently Read:

The Demon's Covenant by Sarah Rees Brennan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I liked this book a *lot* better on second reading and with a few more years' age difference between me and Mae! I still like the version of her you see through Nick or Sin's eyes better than her as POV narrator, but being sigifnicantly older, old enough not to *need* to identify with her, goes along way to dissipating my aggravation with her. (I know, I was one of those people SRB objects to who disliked Mae and particularly disliked her kissing-many-boys coping mechanisms. It wasn't that I thought no one should kiss many boys: it's that I'd hyper-invested in Mae's little speech in book one about not getting caught in Nick and Alan's weird powerplay, and then she got caught in it anyway! Anyway that annoyed me less this time.)

Jamie is fab. Witty repartee is fab. On the other hand, Nick and Mae's relationship has not got less fucked-up with time. I know from experience that SRB and I both love dubious bonding magic stories but I pretty consistently dislike at least one major aspect of how she handles them, so yeah, that's a thing.



Proof by David Auburn

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Well. This was a hell of a ride.



Firstly the production I was working on was *magnificent* - a couple of people who'd seen professional productions and disliked the play said they liked GEDS' handling of it. It concerns a recently deceased genius mathematician who had an unspecified mental illness that looks a lot like paranoid schizophrenia; his youngest daughter, who gave up school to care for him; his elder daughter, who is not a genius but does think she knows best when it comes to caring for impractical geniuses; and Hal, a former grad student of the deceased who believes there might be genius maths work among his papers, despite his illness. The script is *difficult*: pitch it just wrong and you get something dismal, or too far the other way and you're callously laughing at mental illnesses.

It was tough going in places: the opening scene, where father and daughter argue about their respective mental illnesses, hit hard the first time I saw it. But then it was full of amusing academic jokes. And at the end of act 1 it abruptly turns from amusing family drama with some heavy themes to Joanna Russ's 'How To Suppress Women's Writing' in dialogue form and applied to pure maths.



I got irrationally angry at audiences for LAUGHING at "I didn't find it, I wrote it". I had to sit on my aggravation with my lighting tech tutor, who didn't think it was outrageous that the young prof disbelieved the twenty-something girl because "things like that happen all the time, people plagiarise things". Yeah, dude, and you're way more likely to suspect women regardless of whether or not they actually have plagiarised things! Aaargh.

My only quibble with the play is that Hal, the young prof, is kind of an entitled well-meaning white dude dick. In order for the play to resolve properly it has to allow him to *prove* to himself (and thus the audience) that Catherine has in fact written this ground-breaking mathematical proof. Which gives him a credibility I'm not sure he deserved. Cathy did get to smack him down, telling him none of his logic counts and he should have trusted her. But, because Cathy is also struggling to assert herself against her overbearing sister, Hal gets enlisted on team "there's nothing wrong with Cathy!" and instead of going to New York to be taken care of, she stays to talk maths with Hal. BUT. Cathy *had* been having hallucinations of her recently deceased father! (or were they dreams? Open to interpretation). Cathy took to her bed for a week and is clearly very depressed! She might be a maths genius, but she *is* ill, and while her sister's overbearing control would be a very bad solution to leave her with, I'm not sure Hal's "omg let me adopt the hot baby genius" is any better.

The ending holds together on a Doylist level: you get what you want, Cathy not going to New York and showing confidence in her mathematical skills. On a Watsonian level, I forsee either Hal sliding into controlling her, or total meltdown.



The Demon's Surrender by Sarah Rees Brennan

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Now this, this I wholeheartedly loved. Sin is fantastic and I adore her, and this book gave so much to Mae's character through Sin's eyes. Plus, SIBLING LOYALTIES yes good. Sin's dad is pretty awesome. I like Sin's grandma, too.



The Last of the Wine: A Virago Modern Classic by Mary Renault

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I read most of this on the plane from Geneva to Melbourne via Abu Dhabi, and it kept me pretty much enthralled the whole way. A+ ten points, Mary Renault.

THIS BOOK IS REALLY GOOD. It's slow to start, and starting from early childhood gives the first part a distinctly different pace to everything after Alexis first rides out with Lysis. But it's good! Alexis is complicated and interesting - my only complaint would be that Lysis is a little less so, perhaps because of Alexis' narrow perspective. The historical narrative of the last days of the Pellopenesian War is gripping, and I loved how much it made me look up: Renault simply refers to things as if everyone knows them, and you have to just go with it. She's even better at that than Hilary Mantel, actually, who can be a little ponderous in giving explanations via character introspection.

( grumbling about the romance narrative )

In short, I loved the book, but the m/m plot did not live up to the "tell gay stories in a setting where there is no stigma!" hype.

Up Next: For once, I know exactly because I plan my plane reading in advance. I have the Shepherd's Crown (hard-copy), and two more Kerry Greenwood e-books, for the plane after I've finished Fire From Heaven.

This is me, with baby Gremlin's teddy. (Or possibly GremlinMother's teddy, Gremlin's not that interested in large teddies yet.) I babysat for a few hours on friday, which he spent asleep, so I spent a few hours napping in front of a fan and it was *glorious*.

I would like to state that babies continue to be excellent academic therapy. Gremlin can be a difficult little human (although I've not had him at his most... explosive. Just shouty. I have yet to meet the 'crapocalypse' mode). But he doesn't care about my thesis. He is extremely demanding but these demands do not include 'think complex thoughts'. Ergo, he is good for me.


Gremlin understands that iPhones are something you show off for. (I got an iphone. Thus far it's glorious.)


Probably a hollyhock flower.


Bridge near my house.


Basil from my basil plants.


Said basil plants, with parsley and chrysanthemums.

I'm kind of exhausted from the torrent of introspection over the weekend / earlier this week. Here, have a picture of a heron:

In 2015 I'll be posting a poem on fridays on speculumannorum.

Meanwhile, please enjoy this photo of fushcias:

I am really pleased with what I'm putting up on speculumannorum these days. I had a bit of a hiatus after the breakup, but I've taken tons of great photos lately.

Examples:

( photos, yo )