So we don't talk for months and then you ask me where the wind is blowing
Jul. 17th, 2025 02:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Links: Collections of info
Jul. 16th, 2025 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
For example, Threat Model is a weekly newsletter about the latest on Covid. With beautiful drawings of people in masks, and the June ones are in Pride colors.
The Menopause Wiki. "The official menopause wiki for Lemmy's c/menopause community, and its Reddit siblings, r/menopause and r/perimenopause." Lots of info and opinions about perimenopause and menopause.
links
Jul. 16th, 2025 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
To overcome that fear, to begin to embolden potential defectors and peel off some of Trump’s key support, will require huge numbers of people pushing back, in organized, strategic ways. So our goal — the one goal, to which everything else is secondary if not irrelevant right now — should be to grow a bigger organized resistance movement.
When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers (in 1965) by Gustavo Arellano.
"These [high school students] had the words and whiteness to say what they were feeling and could act out in a way that Mexican-Americans who had been living this way for decades simply didn't have the power or space for the American public to listen to them," she says. "The students dropped out because the conditions were so atrocious, and the growers weren't able to mask that up."
Queer as in Fuck You by Aiden Grace Smith, via
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Having that conversation reminded me of nothing more than being told, in kindergarten, that we were to line up every day by gender to go to the playground. I wanted desperately to go to the playground, and I did not know which line to join. I remember having a kicking, screaming meltdown at recess time for the first week of kindergarten because I could not in any other way articulate my rage that there were different lines, maybe any lines, at all.
Word: Cavil
Jul. 16th, 2025 04:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
...cavil.
[kav-uhl]
1. to raise irritating and trivial objections; find fault with unnecessarily (usually followed by at or about).
--
I found this in Murder in Zanzibar by M. M. Kaye.
It’s a pity that your taste in newspapers didn’t run to a smaller sized sheet, but who am I to carp and c-cavil?
Old-timey regency romances
Jul. 16th, 2025 10:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I used to collect these in my late teens, once I'd gone through everything the library had. They were sold by the bunch in used book stores, fifty cents for ten, which suited my babysitting budget--I could read one a night once the kids were asleep.
I did a cull of these beat-up, yellowing volumes with godawful covers 25-30 years ago, donating the real stinkers* and keeping a slew of others because my teenage daughter had by then discovered them.
But she left them all behind--she stopped reading fiction altogether around 2000--and I always meant to do a more severe cull, perhaps dump the entirety. But thought I oughht to at least check them out first, yet kept putting it off until recently. While I was recovering from that nasty dose of flu seemed the perfect time.
I finished last night.
Of course most of them are heavily influenced by Georgette Heyer, or at least in conversation with. Some were written when Heyer was still going strong. Authors from UK, USA, Australia, etc. For the most part you could tell the UK ones not only because the language was closer to early nineteenth century--these writers surely had grown up reading old books, as had Heyer--but their depictions of small towns in GB were way more authentic than those written by writers who'd never seen the islands.
But there were common threads. Good things, as one reviewer trumpeted: they wrote in complete sentences! They knew the difference between "lie" and "lay"! In the best of them, characters had actual conversations. Even witty ones! (There's an entire chapter in Austen's Emma, when we meet Mrs. Elton, which demonstrates what was and what wasn't "good conversation." I can imagine readers back then chuckling all the way through at Mrs. Elton's egregious vigor in bad conversational manners.)
But those are the superficials. What about the plots? Here were common tropes shared with contemporary romances of sixties and seventies. A bunch of these tropes have long since worn out their welcome. I didn't know why I hadn't culled some of the books containing the most egregious examples--maybe they were just so common that they were invisible, and there was some other aspect of a given book that had made me chuckle fifty years ago.
Dunno. But in this cull, as soon as I hit the evil aging mistress who will do anything to hang onto the (total jerk) hero, including setting the young and pure heroine up for rape and ruin (which she always j-u-s-t escapes), out it went, the rest of the novel unread: the plot-armored heroine will get her HEA. my sympathy lies with the mistress, whose grim situation veers closer to historical accuracy. Ditto I dumped unfinished the ones where the hero, who can't seem to control his raging hormones (or you know, talk like an adult) mistakes the pure and innocent heroine for a lightskirt and corners her at every opportunity for "can't-say-no" making out, while she castigates herself afterward, moaning, "Whatever is wrong with me?" Basically, while these heroines (and their readers) did not want to be raped, they did want to be ravished. And they weren't guilty of being bad girls if they were overpowered, right?
That was a VERY common trope in the early contemporary romances, the ones read by my mom by the literal sackful, and traded with other women at the local shop. In the seventies, Mom and her buddies organized themselves. None had the budgets to read everything coming out, so one woman would buy the new books from the Dell line, and another the Kensington line, and so on, then they'd trade them back and forth. Mom saved a sackful for my visits--she thought they were something we had in common, and I never disabused her of this, though I was fast getting sick of the "virginity" plotline. I read them all, noting patterns.
I could say a lot about why I think Mom and her buddies couldn't get enough of that plotline, but I'm trying to get through these regencies. In which the authors did understand the social cost of straying. But the heroine gets her reward at the (abrupt, usually) end, a ring from the guy who'd been cornering her for bruising kisses two chapters ago, and wedding bells in the distance. As I got older, I wondered if those marriages would make it much past the wedding trip. As a teen, I read uncritically for the Cinderella story--as I recollect all the weirdness about the heroines and their main commodity, their virginity (and their beauty) whizzed right over my head.
That said. Every so often you'd get a storyline that was a real comedy of manners, and while the research/worldbuilding was never as period-consistent as Heyer's secondary universe, they'd be fun stories. Like Joan Smith's Endure My Heart, which I'd remembered fondly for the battle of wits between hero and heroine--she the secret leader of a smuggling ring, and he the inspector sent to nab whoever was running that successful venture. Now, on rereading it, there were plenty of warts, but I remember the fun of the early read--and the only two attempted rape scenes were done by a villain, not the hero.
The regency romance has staying power, but it's evolved over the decades since these "old-timey" regencies for the 21st C reader who wants on-page sex, without real consequences. And only vague vestiges of the manners of the time. Few, or no, conversations or even awareness of the dynamics of salon socializing. Basically modern women in sexy silk gowns, and guys in tight pants and colorful jackets and rakish hats, with all the cool trappings--country houses, carriages, balls, and the elegant fantasy of the haut monde.
In the donation box the old ones go.
*I'll never forget the one that had to have been written in the mid-seventies, which had the pouting heroine stating on the first page that she was bored, bored, bored with Almack's and why did she have to participate in the marriage mart anyway? She wanted, and I quote from memory, "actualize her personhood!" Then there was the one that featured the hero, leader of fashion, sporting a crew cut and a "suit of flowing silk of lime green"--I think the author meant a leisure suit.
Then there was Barbara Cartland. Whether or not she hired a stable of writers to churn these out once a month under her name or not, she boiled the story down to the barest skeleton of tropes, padded out mostly by ellipses. Except for one early one, published in the thirties or early forties that lifted huge chunks of a Heyer, stuffed into a really weird plot...
Wednesday has socialised enjoyably
Jul. 16th, 2025 07:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
What I read
Finished Long Island Compromise, and okay, didn't quite go where I was expecting but didn't pull a really amazing twist either.
Alison Espach, The Wedding People (2024), which somebody seemed enthusiastic about somewhere on social media while mentioning it was at 99p. Well, I am always there for Women's Midlife Narratives but this struck me as a bit over-confected plotwise and I was not entirely there for that ending.
Latest Literary Review (with, I may as well repeat, My Letter About Rebecca West).
Simon Brett, Major Bricket and the Circus Corpse (The Major Bricket Mysteries #1) - Simon Brett is definitely hit and miss for me and some of his more recent series have been on the 'miss' side, come back Charles Paris or the ladies of Fethering. But this one, if not quite in the Paris class, was at least readable.
On the go
I have got a fair way in to Jonny Sweet, The Kellerby Code (2024) but I'm really bogging down. It's an old old story (didn't R Rendell as B Vine do a version of this) and for someone who cites the lineage Sweet does, his prose is horribly overwrought.
I started Rev Richard Coles, Murder at the Monastery (Canon Clement #3) (2024) but found the first few chapter v clunky somehow.
Finally picked up Selina Hastings, Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life (2020), which is on the whole v good. Okay, blooper over whether Sybille could have become a barrister: hello, the date is post Sex Disqualification Removal Act and I suspect Helena Normanton had already been called to the bar. However, the actual practicalities might well have presented difficulties. And wow, weren't her circles seething with lady-loving-ladies? And such emotional complications and partner changes! there's no 'quiet spinster couple keeping chickens/breeding dachshunds' about what was going on. Okay, usually conducted with a fair amount of discretion and probably lack of visibility, though even so.
Helen Garner, This House of Grief (2014), which I actually started a couple of weeks ago at least, and picked up again for train reading today, as the Bedford bio is a large hardback.
Up next
I am very much in anticipation of the arrival of Sally Smith, A Case of Life and Limb (The Trials of Gabriel Ward Book 2)
Reading Wednesday
Jul. 16th, 2025 12:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Finally picked back up where I'd left off *mumble* months ago in Bleak House, because— on the theory that since I clearly was not going to continue Bleak House at any point in the foreseeable future, I might as well try a different Dickens novel— I read a few chapters of Oliver Twist and realized that yeah, no, I'd much rather read Bleak House (or, to be honest, literally anything else).
Murderbot ficlet involving spies and forced drugging
Jul. 15th, 2025 10:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Update: Now posted on AO3 as Soft Reboot.
( 1800 words of forced drugging )
News & Views
Jul. 15th, 2025 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
2. My work is going along. I am learning my clients' needs and preferences and ways. People live very differently, from very messy to very clean and that's interesting.
3. Trying to figure out when to fic and how to get myself in the mood & mindset to fic.
Not much else exciting going on.
Ryu and Ryua went camping again!
Feeling just slightly disingenuous
Jul. 15th, 2025 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Have been involved over the last day or so in the discovery and revelation of a hoohah over an esteemed bibliographer having copped to having fabricated a set of letters, of which the transcriptions appear on their website, with, true, a provenance note that might give one to be a tad cautious when citing.
But anyway, someone I know did actually cite something from one of these letters - fortunately not as a major pillar of an argument or anything like that - in their book which is only just published (and copy of which for review I finally received last week). And was informed by the perpetrator.
Cue kerfuffle. The ebook can be readily corrected but not the hardback copies.
But anyway, this led to me (particularly given subject and period) to think upon an instance I had encountered of learning - from the author no less - that a series of supposedly authentic Victorian erotic novels had been knocked up (perhaps that is not the phrase one should employ?) as remunerated hackwork for a paperback publisher in the 1990s.
A few of these are now accessible via the Internet Archive and I discover that they have introductions setting them up as Orfentik Discoveries of the writings of a Private Gents Club.
Anyway, I wrote this all up for my academic blog, and there has been discussion on bluesky about hoaxes and fakes and also I introduced the topic of people being misled by fictional pastiches that were not meant to mislead (or at least, like 'Cleone Knox''s work, have long been known to be made up).
(Ern Malley complicates this like whoa, since it has been claimed that the authors of the hoax actually produced SRS surrealist poetry whether they meant to or not.)
And as a scholar and an archivist I am against hoaxes and fakes and people inserting false documents into archives and so on -
- but I still have the occasional qualm that some naive reader will not read the disclosure of the real origin story right at the back of the volumes and think that the Journals of Mme C-, subsequently Lady B-, actually exist.
Murderbot fanvid: I Lived
Jul. 14th, 2025 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
With every broken bone, I swear I lived. Team/family vid. (Contains some sci-fi violence as per the show, flickering/flashing lights in a couple of scenes, and canon pairings in the background, but it's mostly focused on team + Murderbot.)
Song: I Lived
Artist: OneRepublic
Length: 03:57
AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/67565471
Tumblr: here
Having made this in a fit of exploding feelings today, I plan to get subtitles/downloads up soon (as soon as I remember how to do all of that; it's been ages since I made a vid!).
Temp download: Download from Dropbox (286 Mb, it's huge)
Stories! social awkwardness and unexpected friendship
Jul. 15th, 2025 04:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being by A. W. Prihandita. A doctor struggling with corporate control as she tries to treat a patient who is a member of an isolated minority.
Unread books on dusty shelves tell a story of their own
Jul. 14th, 2025 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I don't think that what I feel for the sea is nostalgia, but I am intrigued by this study indicating that generally people do: "Searching for Ithaca: The geography and psychological benefits of nostalgic places" (2025). I am surprised that more people are not apparently bonded to deserts or mountains or woodlands. Holidays by the sea can't explain all of it. I used to spend a lot of my life in trees.
I napped for a couple of hours this afternoon, but my brain could return any time now. The rest of my week is not conducive to doing nothing. The rest of the world is not conducive to losing time.
Music Monday: Killin it Girl by jhope
Jul. 14th, 2025 03:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Went to the doctor, turns out I'm sick
Jul. 14th, 2025 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
After enjoying both The Big Pick-Up (1955) and The Flight of the Phoenix (1964), I was disappointed by Elleston Trevor's The Burning Shore (U.S. The Pasang Run, 1961), which ironically for its airport setting never really seemed to get its plot off the ground and in any case its ratio of romantic melodrama and ambient racism to actual aviation was not ideal, but I am a little sorry that it was not adapted for film like its fellows, since I would have liked to see the casting for the initially peripheral, ultimately book-stealing role of Tom Thorne, the decorated and disgraced surgeon gone in the Conradian manner to ground in the tropics, because of his unusual fragility: it is de rigueur for his archetype that he should pull himself out of his opium-mired death-spiral for the sake of a passenger flight downed in flames, but he remains an impulsive suicide risk even when his self-respect should conventionally have been restored. He is described as having the face of a hurt clown. He'd have been any character actor's gift.
Mostly I like that Wolf Alice named themselves after the short story by Angela Carter, but the chorus of "The Sofa" (2025) really is attractive right now.
Poking my prickly nose out into the world....
Jul. 14th, 2025 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Dr rdrz may have noticed that (in spite of the FAIL at getting to the Birmingham workshop in early May) I have gradually been Getting Out Into the World beyond health-related appointments and walks in the local parks.
Am still being possibly unwontedly cautious.
But, anyway, on Saturday went to a BBQ in coughingbear and
hano's garden - slightly earlier this year than the usual Mahv'll'ss Pahti of the summer - and it was lovely to see them and other friends after so long being A Hermit.
Still (as found at conference the other week) having issues adjusting to the hearing aids - when there are several conversations happening - I think this possibly depends a bit on where I am positioned in relation to them - a distinct sense of (very dating reference) trying to tune in radio and getting two or more overlapping stations.
But on the whole was, I think, Coping.