Fifteens are a Northern Irish fridge-tray bake - apparantly unknown outside of Ulster. I came across them on a BBC evening tour of Irish food programme which is currently filling the space usually taken up by Michael Portillo and his trousers. I like the food tour programme but I miss Michael Portillo, who, if in office now would probably be the Labour Party's third greatest Prime Minister.
I'm practicing for the bake sale attached to the end of season rugby festival.
They are very very sweet.
Fifteens ingredients
Digestive biscuits
Marshmallows
Glace Cherries
Desicated Coconut
Almond
Condensed Milk
Milk Chocolate Chips
Very easy to make 15 each of digestives, marshmallows, cherries - whizz the biscuits in a food processsor. Chop up the marshmallows and cherries, mix in a bowl with the condensed milk, put most of the coconut on a sheet of cling film,dollop the biscuit mixture on to that, top with the rest of the coconut, roll up in to a sausage and put in the fridge overnight. Cut up in the 15 pieces (or smaller as they are very very sweet.)
I'm not actually eating them myself as I'm on a diet but the small taste test I did suggests they are dangerously moreish.
...the lad has now decided that he is off to Athens to study Epicurean philosophy – which would only be true if Epicureanism taught the importance of getting as far from one’s parent and potential spouses as humanly possible. [p. 60]
Having greatly enjoyed Matyszak's 24 Hours in Ancient Athens for its blend of narrative, historical fact and wry observation, I decided to try another of his books about Ancient Greece. A Year in the Life of Ancient Greece is set a couple of centuries later than 24 Hours, in 248BC, and explores the lives of a small cast of characters: a farmwife, a diplomat, an athlete (it's Olympics year), a female musician, an escaped Thracian slave, a merchant who falls ill in Egypt, a young woman due to be married, and a builder of temples. It opens with a nice little scene outside the Temple of Hera at Elis, with a group of people sheltering from the rain and a temple attendant contemplating who, and what, each of them may be. Over the preceding twelve months (starting from the autumn equinox) we discover their stories and how they're connected.
I went for a walk this afternoon with Cattitude and Adrian: downhill to Beacon Street, then inbound as far as the Summit Avenue T stop. Not only was it useful exercise, I got to smell one of my favorite flowers, rugosa roses. It may have been too long a walk, because my joints were feeling the strain before I turned back and took the trolley partway home, but if I'd turned back any sooner I'd have missed the roses. While I took the T home, Cattitude and Adrian continued to Coolidge Corner, to shop for groceries and then get bagels. (Most of the time, the two of them can walk further than I can.)
I had to walk a few blocks uphill from the T to get home, but I allowed for that when I decided how far to walk. I came home, took my shoes off, and sat a while before I put on the shoes that I'm still breaking in. I will probably break them in a little more before I wear them outside.
Celebrating. My 35th birthday! With a picnic at the allotment (and the allotment fox, and a slow worm, and THE WOODPECKERS); and birthday cake courtesy of my mother. :)
Reading. Finished The Ladies of Grace Adieu, Susanna Clarke, and enjoyed myself so doing!
Then What An Owl Knows, Jennifer Ackerman, showed back up from the library. I am making better progress this time and continue to enjoy Owl Facts.
I have made 0 progress on any of the books on pain, and The Silence Factory (Bridget Collins) has jumped to the top of my read-next list courtesy of getting to the front of the holds queue much sooner than I'd expected to...
Writing. PIP submission got to Good Enough by very early Friday morning. That has been most of my make-words-go brain this week, shockingly.
Playing.I Love Hue: I am Infuriatingly Stuck, presumably at more or less the point I got Infuriatingly Stuck last time. I am more-or-less at the point where I am going to just restart the level and hope I get luckier on my second attempt, but that is never a particularly satisfactory!
Eating. A made me Saturday brunch waffles, and conveniently we had leftover picnic strawberries and some cream that needed using up, so I got fancy strawberries-and-Chantilly-cream waffles as a Birthday Treat :)
Also had a cream tea at Wimpole early on Sunday afternoon, and curry from a restaurant in Cottenham following Terrible Further Sunday Afternoon Adventures. Some of my mother's bread; birthday cake courtesy of my mother also; also also lentil moussaka ditto :)
Exploring. Visited Home Farm at Wimpole Hall, where we scritched piglets and observed a variety of rare breed hens, rare breed ducks, chicks and ducklings ditto, The Horses, The Rabbits, The Bogat Goats incl. Baby Goats, and we waved to the donkeys, in addition to being very pleased about the various swift-ish things and sparrows making their way in and out of the barns.
Also spent an afternoon sat at the junction of the A10 and Landbeach Road, for terrible hobby purposes, and relatedly a little bit of time poking around the even-more-immediate vicinity of the NEW SITE for Admin: the LRP, aaand also drove past the house we are not even remotely going to buy just to sort of wist at it.
Making & mending. Sawed some wood! All of the bits for railway sleeper raised bed #1 are now in position and I've filled it; but on reflection I deemed the 180mm screws Too Short so am awaiting delivery of some 300mm for Final Assembly. (Whereupon I get to decide to do it all again for bed #2...)
Growing. First broad beans will be ready for harvest any day now (and in fact if we wanted to eat some immature pods I could have the first handful already). Peas are starting to flower! Strawberries are extremely Set Fruit and might even start ripening at some point soonish!
I am extremely excited about how happy the raspberries are looking.
Have sown all of my remaining elderly quinoa seed, which I am not expecting to do much of anything, and will be pleasantly surprised if it does; having one final go at getting any viable plants out of the pineapple physalis seeds I bought at the beginning of the season; have been Donated some Moneymaker tomatoes and a basil plant from my mother; really really need to get the cucumbers started, but Not Quite Yet.
Have started putting squash various outside. Need to finish prepping beds for them to actually go into.
Oh! And the tomatoes are also going out! Annoyingly I lost track of which were Orange Banana and which were Blue Fire so I'm not entirely sure I'm going to actually manage planting up a rainbow of the things, but -- fingers crossed, eh?
Observing. IN ADDITION TO the excellent allotment wildlife and the Creatures at Home Farm, we enjoyed various plantings around Wimpole (including the incredibly striking Very Tall Straight-Stemmed Ferns), and while Doing A Traffic Survey At The A10/Landbeach Road Junction saw also: lambs! corvids harassing a red kite! more swift-y things! goldfinches??? wild rabbits, to A's delight. Some geese, honking merrily away to themselves.
It has been a particularly good week for Creatures. :)
I was caught unawares in the background of photos taken yesterday after the game, and I was so amused by the exhaustion evident in my position and expression that it had to become an icon.
(I was revived with cake and a drink shortly after this was taken.)
It took me a year to drag this fic out of the scorched earth that certain parts of my brain have been since my Epic Psychiatric Misadventures, I think it's genuinely one of the better things I've written, and I am very proud of it.
a word you've never understood on AO3 (Prophet by Sin Blaché and Helen Macdonald, M, Sunil Rao/Adam Rubenstein, 9K words)
Summary: He’s been starving for so long. He thinks he’s never not been starving.
Note: massive spoilers for canon, and probably won't make a lot of sense if you've not read it. I am aware this is niche.
Friday night supper: the hash-type thingy with the last 2 sweet potatoes cut up, boiled, and then sauteed with chopped red bell pepper and Calabrian salami.
Saturday breakfast rolls: Tassajarra method, strong brown flour, maple syrup, cranberries, nice.
Today's lunch: seabream fillets, rubbed with ginger paste and lime juice, salt and pepper, and left for a couple of hours then panfried in butter + olive oil, splashed with the remaining juice at the end; served with baby Jersey Royal potatoes roasted in goosefat, large flat mushrooms marinated in dark soy sauce (was meant to be tamari but I didn't have any) + mirin + tspn toasted sesame oil + star anise boiled up together, then healthy-grilled, and asparagus steamed and tossed in melted butter with lemon juice and lemon zest.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Cameroon.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
How Beautiful We Were
Imbolo Mbue
18,281
726
The Informationist
Taylor Stevens
11,303
950
A Zoo in My Luggage
Gerald Durrell
5,281
959
The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut
Nigel Barley
3,375
623
The Bafut Beagles
Gerald Durrell
2,022
709
Les impatientes
Djaïli Amadou Amal
8,714
105
Houseboy
Ferdinand Oyono
2,295
372
The Overloaded Ark
Gerald Durrell
1,418
472
This was one of the easiest runs I have had for a while. Gerald Durrell does well, and I remember reading those books when I was 13 and loving them; and I also remember really enjoying The Innocent Anthropologist when I was a bit older. But I’m glad that the top spot goes to a Cameroonian woman writer, and I’m interested that a novel by another Cameroonian woman writer, that hasn’t even been translated into English, also makes the top eight. I must add also that The Informationist sounds like great fun.
I’m used to a certain fluctuation between the popularity of books on both systems, but the relative LibraryThing invisibility of Les impatientes by Djaïli Amadou Amal is remarkable. It’s the third most widely owned of these books on Goodreads, and not even in the top fifteen on LT.
I disqualified two books, neither of which was a difficult decision. Behold the Dreamers, also by Imbolo Mbue, is about Cameroonian immigrants in New York, and seems to be set entirely in the USA. The Marco Effect, by Jussi Adler-Olsen, is a Danish crime novel with a subplot set in Cameroon, but it’s much less than half of the book as far as I can tell.
Guy Montag and his wife Millie live comfortable, conventional, middle-class lives. Millie finds purpose in an endless stream of television entertainment. Guy burns books.
We went to the Highland Folk Museum where they had a recreation
schoolroom. Sophia loved writing with an ink pen, Gideon loved
supervising her. Original
is here on Pixelfed.scot.
'Holloway' comes from the Anglo-Saxon 'hol weg', and refers to a sunken path that has been grooved into the earth over the centuries by the passage of feet, wheels and weather...
The second Tesh novel in a couple of weeks for me, thanks to friendly comments pointing out a new one was about to be published. This one in a completely different genre: magical school story with some horror mixed in instead of military space opera with some dystopia. Unusually and refreshingly for any type of school story, our heroine and central character is one of the teachers, and so is most of the supporting cast. There are four students who are important to the plot in the way teachers are in other boarding school stories - from Enid Blyton to Harry Potter - , which is to say, you get to know them, but strictly from the outside, they are plot relevant, but the narrative emphasis is strictly on the teacher side of things, not just in terms of our central character but also the main supporting characters.
Since Dr. Walden (first name Sapphire which is her parents‘ fault; friends refer to her as „Saffy“, but the narration and her own pov call her „Walden“ almost through the entire novel) is near forty and a determined bisexual workoholic, the difference to the Young Adult tone with which many a boarding school story usually arrives is there from the start. At first, the novel seems to go for wry comedy as we get to know the characters and the setting; the rules for this particular universe are established: An AU in which magical abilities are publically known and a thing; the problem is that teenagers with their magical abilities running wild and them not yet able to really control them are the favourite snacks of demons, both, depending on the size of the demon, in the literal sense or via possession or for the smallest imps just via annoyance by them possessing machines. I mean, we all knew that about printing machines and photo copiers in offices, right? Anyway, hence the need for schools simultanously teaching the kids how to control their abilities and doing their best to save them from ending up as snacks. This can be difficult because teenagers by definition think THEY are invulnerable and able to conjur up the cool demons, which is why in addition to the regular teachers like Walden, there are also „Marshals“, i.e. magical cops who mostly don‘t have an academic background but excell at demon fighting. We open the novel with Walden meeting the latest Marshal, Laura Kenning; there is mutual resentment and UST from the get go.
It comes more and more evident that larger demons are no laughing matter and really incredibly dangerous, though the black humor never leaves the narrative tone, either. Walden, for all that she oozes competence and cool in the present, had A Tragic Event in her own youth; basically she‘s female Rupert Giles if you‘re a Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and/or female John Constantine from Hellblazer, if John/Joanna had gone into teaching after the event in question), and while she is really as good as she thinks she is in all things magic, she also is slightly hubristic because of it, and that becomes highly plot relevant. I also appreciate that she has a genuine passion for teaching. As for the demons, they‘re gratifyingly complicated and alien; leaving the comic relief ones you find in printers (I KNEW IT) aside, the reader is presented with two important ones, and while the first one‘s goals are obvious and very Exorcist the tv show, what the other one is up to is infinitely trickier and yet the hints are there early on.
By now, I‘ve found out that there were some complaints re: Some Desperate Glory regarding the characters being queer but their romances only seen in glimpses, so to speak, which I thought was appropriate for the characters and the story of Some Desperate Glory (plus it invites fanfic), but I take the general point, so let me say that Walden‘s romantic and sexual life gets more narrative room, plus Walden/Laura is central to the plot. Also, the novel avoids two extremes I find annoying which some media take with bisexual characters: either a character is declared to be bi but we only ever see him or her with one gender of romantic partner, i.e. the opposite if it‘s a more main stream show (looking at you, Da Vinci‘s Demons) or the same (Torchwood fanfiction; the show itself gave more screen time to Jack‘s same sex romances, but we did get some examples of him and women as well); OR there is the cliché of the evil, disturbed or at least amoral bisexual, unable to commit and breaking hearts that way (famously Basic Instinct, but also the novels of an author I otherwise really like, Sosan Howatch). By contrast, both in the past and in the present Walden is someone the reader sees to be attracted to people of both genders, we‘re not just told that in theory she is, and she‘s emotionally involved in the relationships in question (with one exception). (While at the same time being a sensible force for good. )That said, it is rather clear which relationship in the present we‘re meant to root for. *g*
In conclusion, this was another highly readable and very captivating novel by this author, who I hope will gift us with many more in the years to comem.
Yesterday Kodiaks B played Solent Valkyries in Gosport. I hired a 9-seater and drove a bunch of the team down and back, and in between played a game, captaining the team for the second time. For some reason I am tired this morning.
Some milestones:
It was the first win for Kodiaks B, certainly this season and I think ever.
I got my first points for Kodiaks, ever: a goal and an assist, doubling my lifetime points. (1 assist for Women's Blues two seasons ago, 1 assist for Warbirds late last year)
That's my first recorded goal ever (I scored my first goal ever in a scrimmage at the end of last year)
For extra hilarity I did not actually score this goal, it was an own goal credited to me because I was the last Kodiaks player to touch the puck before the poor Valkyrie kicked it in her own net. A point is a point and I'll claim it. But I have yet to actually score a goal in a formal game.
Also at one point my stick blade got stuck in the boards at the side of the rink when I was digging for a puck. I couldn't get it out, so I went skating hard back to the bench yelling for a change and instead one of my teammates passed me her stick, which I grabbed at speed and went straight back into play. So dramatic! So much fun!
(the ref retrieved my stick and returned it to the bench and I got it back when I changed with my line; it is fine from its adventure)
You can read my thoughts (along with spoilery stuff for TLoU and Andor) in my newsletter, but to save you scrolling past a lot of spoilers for other things, I'll also pop them here.
Late this afternoon or, well, early this evening, getting a very late start on a flying visit to my parents (I have been fed birthday cake), my train of thought was abruptly completely derailed when I finally worked out what was going on with the the individual loitering on the grass outside our block.
They were walking their lizard.
Or, more accurately, their lizard (possibly an iguana???), complete with harness and lead, had plonked itself firmly in a very bright patch of sunshine and was making it very clear (tail curled up and everything!) that it liked this basking spot, thank you, and had no intention of going anywhere.
The human tried at one point to gently encourage it to contemplate moving. The lizard, without moving at all, became visibly heavier.
The human, resigned, returned their attention to the phone in the hand that wasn't holding the lead.
The administrator dismissed the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, by e-mail after the injunctions were announced, because of pressure against her by people who think that a Black woman is completely unqualified to do anything that might have white people subordinate to her, and possibly in petty revenge for being told no that he couldn't simply zero out the IMLS budget. When questioned on the matter, a spokesmodel for the executive proclaimed that Dr. Hayden was involved in unacceptable DEI and in promoting harmful materials to children, proving that the spokesmodel and her bosses have zero idea of what the Library of Congress actually does.
You're holding a dinner party and can invite three famous people from the past or present; who would they be?
I never understood the appeal of this. I hardly get to see my friends and family. I would rather invite them to dinner than a group of people I don't know. That just sounds exhausting.
You have the opportunity to question someone about something you've always wanted to know and receive a truthful answer; what would your question be?
No no no. In my experience, if someone is holding back on telling you a truth, it's because it is not going to make you feel happy. I'll pass.
If you could change one thing in your life, what would it be?
My workload. See answer to Q1.
If you could save other people's lives by completing an act that would lead to your own death, would you do it?
As ever, answers depend on the context. If we are talking about an overstuffed inflatable raft full of vulnerable children floundering in the English Channel, then unequivocally yes. If we are talking about an autocratic dictator and his henchmen, then absolutely not.
Would you commit murder if you knew that you could get away with it?
I have been digging a bit more into a letter from my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Morris Wickersham (1819-1894), to his wife Fanny, dated 25 October 1866, so a year and a half after the end of the Civil War. The letter says, simply,
I have just been tendered the appointment of Asst. Secretary of War & asked for my acceptance. What say you? Mr. Stanton retires & Gen. Sherman takes the position of Secretary of War & ’tis under the new Secty that the offer is made to me.
History records, however, that Edwin Stanton, appointed Secretary of War by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, continued in that position under Andrew Johnson after Lincoln’s assassination until 1868; and the Assistant Secretary of War, Thomas Eckert, who had been appointed only a few months earlier in July 1866, continued to serve until February 1867 and was not replaced when he resigned, and the post of Assistant Secretary was then abolished for over 20 years.
In fact, there was a major clash between President Johnson and Secretary Stanton, with Johnson taking a more accommodating attitude to the defeated South and Stanton taking a harder line on Reconstruction. July 1866 saw temperatures rising, with 46 African-Americans massacred in Memphis, Tennessee, at the start of the month, three of Johnson’s cabinet resigning, and then another massacre of dozens of African-Americans demonstrating for their rights in New Orleans on 30 July.
Congress was dominated by Radical Republicans who supported Stanton as Secretary of War and suspected Johnson (correctly) of being too soft on the Southerners. Johnson fought back by holding a National Union Convention in August, trying to forge a new political movement which would support his presidency, and then mounting a campaign tour, the “Swing Around the Circle“, from late August to mid-September, which took in most of the industrialised North (except, I note, New England).
My attempt to draw the “Swing Around the Circle”, though of course Johnson would have travelled by train and these are the modern roads.
The Swing Around the Circle backfired. Johnson’s stump speeches were portrayed in a hostile media as undignified and irrational; his well-known problem with alcohol fed the image of a President who had lost the plot and needed to be restrained and constrained by Congress. It must have looked different to Johnson himself; he enjoyed public speaking, he was normally good at it and he was surrounded by sympathisers. As the mid term elections of 1866 drew near, he anticipated a groundswell of public opinion in his favour which would weaken the Radical Republicans and enable him to get rid of Stanton.
Election Day was staggered across the states in those days, and in the early returns it was not obvious that Johnson’s position was going to be weakened. Five states went to the polls on 9 October, and while Johnson lost three of his supporters to the Republicans in Pennsylvania, he actually picked up a seat in Indiana. Twelve more states were to vote on 6 November, and to us psephologists looking at the early trends, the result looks pretty obvious in advance, but the phenomenon of wishful thinking by a doomed leader is not unique to that particular time and place.
So, the idea that Johnson might have hoped to get rid of Stanton and replace him with General William T. Sherman is not at all surprising – indeed it is part of the standard narrative of the period, which culminated in Congress passing a law forbidding Johnson to fire cabinet members without its approval, Johnson going ahead and firing Stanton anyway, his impeachment by the House of Representatives and survival of the trial by the Senate by a single vote.
But the idea that he would also have wanted to replace Stanton’s Assistant secretary, the super-competent telegraph expert Thomas Eckert, with Samuel Morris Wickersham, an iron broker from Philadelphia whose military service during the war consisted of chasing the defeated rebels back south from Gettysburg, is a bit more surprising. However, I have one important piece of evidence that supports this narrative.
As it happens, the last stop on Johnson’s Swing Around the Circle was Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is remarkable for only one thing: it is the state capital. The governor since 1860 was Andrew Gregg Curtin, who was term-limited as governor and was campaigning for the U.S. Senate (in those days, senators were elected by the legislature). Samuel Morris Wickersham was friendly with Curtin, but also not a fan of the radical Republicans; I wonder if it was Curtin who put a word in the president’s ear about a potential Assistant Secretary? Or indeed if the entire affair was in Curtin’s own head, and he mentioned it to Wickersham without Johnson’s knowledge?
In any case, it didn’t matter; when the election results came through the following week, Johnson’s authority was dealt a fatal blow by the voters, who gave the Radical Republicans two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress, and left him in office but not in power until he was replaced by Ulysses S Grant in 1869. This was probably a Good Thing, and although Reconstruction was brought to a halt in 1877, if Johnson had prevailed it never have got started. So on the whole I am glad that my great-great-grandfather avoided being on the wrong side of history in 1866.
Four decades later, his son became Attorney-General of the USA under President Taft, but that’s another story.
The orthodontist’s strange mouth exercises are beloved by incels seeking a manlier shape – and a fast-growing TikTok trend in classrooms around the world. So why has he been struck off the dentists’ register?
I don't know if the General Dental Council is like the General Medical Council and strikes off for ADVERTISING (quite aside from the horrendous things this awful guy is doing) but it strikes me that the way he is promoting himself would have been way, way beyond a lot of the things the GMC was taking exception to. But maybe times change.
But honestly. This is probably because I have an perhaps unusual knowledge of medical (including dental) quackery and its promotion, and common themes are:
There Is One Big Reason For All Your Problems
And
One Simple Trick (which I have) To Fix Them.
(Cites here, so that you know that I am not making this up all out of my own head, to Alex Comfort, The Anxiety Makers, Ann Dally, Fantasy Surgery, and a tip of the hat to Rob Darby, A Surgical Temptation.)
Okay, this is at the other end of the alimentary canal to Sir Arbuthnot Lane's Cure For All Evils (caused by Chronic Intestinal Stasis), but I think we can see the pattern repeating here.
Not saying that maybe, somewhere in this, there is something that may be helpful in some, specific cases, but let us consider e.g. radium in the 1920s. Yes, it was really, really useful in treating certain forms of cancer: it was not a cure-all and downing massive amounts of radium tonic just left a person, well, radioactive, if the tonic actually contained any active principle at all.
I am also boggled at the assumptions about beauty, and trying not to comment on this guy's own appearance, but to remark that the Hapsburgs ruled swathes of Europe for centuries without manly square jaws, hmmm, plus, has this chap ever been into an art gallery in his life??? Is there one pattern of beauty or are there many?
Just reading what he thinks the epitome makes me want to assert the true loveliness of consumptive pallor, heightened by just a touch of hectic feverish flush, wilting picturesquely on a fainting couch.
16 works new to me. 8 fantasies, 1 horror, one mainstream, one mystery, one non-fiction (about SF), and four science fiction... although it wasn't always clear into which category works fell. Only 11 works are clearly identified as series, 11 do not appear to be part of series, and there are 3 for which that question does not apply.
Now, on to this week's contribution. Here I must confess I have not watched a single Eurovision contest, not even the one time in my living memory that Germany won (though I do remember the winner, Nicole, as her "Ein bisschen Frieden" was played everywhere all those decades ago). So I had to google Ryan Clark whom based on Belinda's reaction I judged to be a real person doing a DW cameo, ditto for Graham Norton. But thankfully, even a complete ESC ignoramus like myself got captivated by the episode, even before You Know Who graced the screen. Let alone the MCU like tag scene after the first few credits which was a ZOMG! capper on a ZOMG! episode.
I don't have a TV or any fancy subscriptions, but fortunately my friend A does, and since I was the one who introduced her to the Murderbot books a few years back, she took pity on me and invited me over to ( watch the new show with her )
So far, pretty fun, but also somehow a little disappointing? But really I did expect that.
I went to the New Balance factory store today* and, with the help of two salespeople, found a pair of shoes that I think fits. I bought it, then treated myself to a hot fudge sundae before coming home.
By the time I got home my feet hurt, which is from either trying on shoes that didn't fit, or the amount of walking I did in my old shoes. I will wear these around the house for a few days to break them in and confirm that they fit.
If they fit, I'm going to go back and buy another pair in a different color; if not, I'll return them, regretfully. I also want to see about sandals, and have a few stores in mind, but shoe shopping is so often frustrating that I wasn't going to try a second shoe store today.
*meaning Friday, which is yesterday by the computer clock.
After a glitch with my Apple account, their very helpful (!) customer service got me fixed up and I managed to sneak in the first episode of Murderbot before dress rehearsal, and the second one when I got home. I just finished it and am ready for more. It's a good adaptation. I never feel like adaptations replace books because there's no way to capture narrative voice in the same way in a visual medium, but there are other advantages books don't have. I love seeing actors interpret characters; it's a sort of fanfiction. The actors are all great.
Maybe I will also finally watch Ted Lasso. Severance sounds too depressing for me right now.
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Today I have: moved my body, joyfully, in ways I did not imagine might ever be possible, only a handful of years ago. I've provided expert support for a disability benefits submission. I've contacted people to let them know I can reunite them with things mislaid but also loved. I've played with stationery. I've eaten cake. I've built structures and made music and read books and tended plants. I've watched foxes and a slow worm and a woodpecker (greater spotted, apparently, though I didn't get a good look at it), and listened to the yelling from its nest. I've written to my government -- one small action toward justice. I've put water out for birds.
Staying in a lovely terrace. We sat in the sunshine, had Korean street food takeout for dinner, watched the penultimate episode of The Residence (omg!)... I'm enjoying this so much I almost don't want to watch the last one but also I really wanna watch the last one! but not tonight because we're all tired: the prep and traveling is enough to do V in; D woke up at 6:30 this morning, couldn't get back to sleep, and had a busy day at work; I had a migraine and had to call in sick by noon and do packing while pretending that I was fine...
I had a nice shower and am now in my cozy bed. Everything is nice.
I am getting to the end of the Black Archives! At the time of writing, there is only one more to go after Silver Nemesis, though I expect that there will be another in June.
I missed this story on first broadcast in 1988. When I finally saw it for the first time, twenty years later, I was unimpressed.
People had warned me that Silver Nemesis was pretty rubbish, and I’m afraid it is. One of my frequent complaints about bad Who, and indeed bad sf, is that all too often the means and motivation of the bad guys make no sense. In Silver Nemesis, the means and motivation of the hero make no sense: how and why did the Doctor launch the rocket into space in 1638??? The basic plot of three different sets of baddies (Cybermen, Nazis and Lady Peinforte) trying to get the McGuffin is comprehensible, but little else is. Am I unusual in finding Fiona Walker’s performance as Lady Peinforte rather poor? She was way better in CLAVDIVS. And the bit with the Queen is pretty silly.
I can’t quite be as positive about Silver Nemesis [as I was about The Happiness Patrol], though again I liked it more than I had expected to. It is the first time we have had a contemporary English setting since, errr, the last Cybermen story three years ago, but it doesn’t really make enough of the normality such a set-up offers, setting us up with real (Courtney Pine) and fake (the Queen) celebrities and then bringing in Lady Peinforte and De Flores through literal and metaphorical timewarps, with added Cybermen. A lot of the bits work well, including the increasing sense of the Doctor as someone with a number of devious plans which we don’t know about (and Fiona Walker’s delightfully psychotic Lady Peinforte) but it doesn’t quite add up together.
Watching it again for this post, I felt a bit more negative. The unrealistic firefights between the Nazis and the Cybermen (often a problem with Who, see also here) are symptomatic of the problems of directing the story, which James Cooray Smith goes into in depth, as discussed below. I did not realise until I read the Black Archive after rewatching it that there are several different versions of the story which have been released on video. Eventually I will shell out for the Blu-Ray and discern between them all.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Kevin Clarke’s novelisation of his own story is:
Such was the visitors’ interest that the materialization of the TARDIS a few yards away passed unnoticed. The Doctor and Ace stepped out. Ace sniffed the damp air as she looked around.
Clarke used the opportunity of adapting the script for novelisation to put back some of the material which apparently ended up on the cutting-room floor, but the result is if anything even more confusing. Where the TV series can just about get away with characters being darkly mysterious, the written word demands a bit more clarity (thinking especially of the portrait of Ace in Windsor Castle, never explained). Fails the Bechdel test, unless the cook who Mrs Hackensack’s ancestor bribed away from Lady Peinforte was a woman. (Hackensack is a much less likely name than the TV series’ Remington for a 17th century English aristocrat; but then, so is Peinforte.)
So, the previous Black Archives that I have read by James Cooray Smith were cases where either I agreed with him that the story is good (The Massacre, The Night of the Doctor) or less good (The Ultimate Foe, The Underwater Menace). In this case, I don’t have a very high opinion of Silver Nemesis, but Cooray Smith mounts a bravura defence of the story as a major classic of the Cartmel / Nathan-Turner era. I’m still not at all convinced, but I admire the passion that he brings to it, as well as the forensic detail in his research.
The first chapter, “‘Meteor Approaches England'”, looks at the context from within DW of Andrew Cartmel’s arrival as script editor in 1987, after the great cancellation crisis of 1986, and his work to assemble a team of writers who could deliver the necessary scripts. He makes the interesting point that in 1987 there were very few experienced Doctor Who writers available; Robert Holmes had recently died, and most of the other veterans were busy with other projects, or had fallen out with John Nathan-Turner, or both.
The second chapter, “The Arrow”, looks at Kevin Clarke’s career – of the newly recruited writers, he was the most experienced on paper, but that is not saying much (and the details say even less). It then looks at how the concepts of Silver Nemesis came together; the Cybermen were there from an early stage, and the weird bit with the Queen was originally intended to be the real Prince Edward, who was active in TV drama at the time; but he said no.
The third chapter, “The Statue”, looks at the difficulties of recording, mainly at the physicakl challenges of getting everything filmed combined with the problem that the two stars, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, were very under-rehearsed due to their busy schedule working on other stories. It starts by noting that most of the guest actors were third or fourth choices for their roles. The second paragraph is:
De Flores was turned down by Charles Gray, while Anna Massey and Sarah Badel declined the opportunity to play Lady Peinforte, as did Penelope Wilton. Even the single-scene role of the mathematician was turned down by Geoffrey Bayldon, Richard Vernon and others before being accepted by Leslie French. It would be tempting to conclude that these refusals reflected Doctor Who’s declining prestige in 1988, but they are in fact common throughout the programme’s history. It’s an example of one of the usual compromises of programme-making.
The fourth chapter, “The Bow”, looks at some of the subtle allusions in the script – the fate of the muggers is a reference to the tarot, Lady Peinforte’s reference to The Winter’s Tale rewards closer analysis, and there’s a lot to say about jazz (I had not realised that Courtney Pine composed new music specially for the story).
The fifth chapter, “Critical Mass”, is the defence that I mentioned previously. Cooray Smith loves this story and is surprised that other people don’t. “Frankly, this writer genuinely struggles to understand what is not ‘explained’ in Silver Nemesis, except that which is left ambiguous for dramatic effect”. As will be apparent, I am not in agreement with Cooray Smith here, but I admire the passion of his argument.
The sixth and final chapter, “‘Re-Form'”, defends the legacy of elements from Silver Nemesis extending into New Who, and also goes into the (fairly substantial) differences between the different commercial releases of the story, including the novelisation.
An appendix lists the known script drafts for each episode, and another the scene breakdown for the first episode.
At 188 pages, this is rather a long Black Archive, but Cooray Smith has a lot to say, and says it well. You can get it here.
Incidentally, as I said last time, the Seventh Doctor has been very well served by the Black Archives; fully two thirds of his stories, and more than 70% of his episodes, are now covered by the series. Leaving aside the special cases of Withnail and I, the closest competitors are the Fourth Doctor, for whom the newly published BA on Logopolis takes his story count to over 30%, and the Thirteenth, 46% of whose episodes have been covered (though only 25% of her stories).
Alarmed by the frequency of magic-related calamities, five anonymous benefactors funded the Walman Hanton School of Mana Research. Its mandate: to seek out and deal with "burners", magical trouble-makers, and to document and where possible neutralize the sorcerous version of superfund sites.
The first Walman Hanton vigiles team was selected on the basis of their superlative magical skills. Their replacements were chosen for their demonstrated talent for surviving magical calamities.
Okay, perhaps the writer of the query means, books that are currently available new but you are able to score a used copy in the local Oxfam shop or whatever - maybe.
(Which of course raises another effikle q that in that case it is For A Good Cause....)
And as someone who has spent years hunting down works which were not in print, or were only reprinted by Virago or the British Library or whatever after I had acquired my collection after arduous searches and considerable expense, or, finally, can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg or the Faded Page -
Hollo larfter.
True, I have also bought copies of works which I probably could have acquired shiny new, but was not entirely sure whether they were for me, taking a punt on something I had heard of, etc etc. And sometimes this led to me buying up everything the author ever wrote, their backlist, preordering their forthcoming, and so on. In hardback.
Plus, while I was appalled at those people who were buying books on Amazon and then returning them and getting their money back, and also at book piracy, on the whole I don't think it is the end-user, the actual reader, who is the greatest villain facing authors, rather than the publishing industry.
***
In other book-related news, yesterday I was still feeling the effects of a couple of bad nights with lower-back flare-up and did that thing of doing some small tedious task which has been lingering about for, lo, a very long time.
Transferring my FREE PDFs of Open Access academic books to my tablet (and also sorting out the file titles to be something a bit more helpful than a truncated ISBN) so I can, should I be moved to do so, actually read them. Some of them are things that yes, I should read, and others are more, er, aspirational.
I also, whilst faffing around with my tablet, finally got the issue with Princeton UP's annoying walled-garden app sorted. So maybe I can finally get to the books I bought in their sale nearly a year ago.
51. Forest of Noise, poetry by Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, 5/5, which centres around his life in Gaza in recent years. I thought Abu Toha's previous collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear was excellent and this new book lived up to my hopes, bringing also a different emotional feel and verbal texture. Highly recommended (warning for the author living in a war zone, obviously). Token quote:
When it rains, farmers think the sky loves them. They are wrong. It rains either because the clouds cannot carry the sacks of water too long, or because a sparrow has said a prayer when it heard the thirsty roots beg.
- TIL, history: in 1945, less than a month before the end of the Second World War in Europe, German submarine U-1206 was sunk, and three men died, because somebody misused the toilet.
- TIL, lexicophilia: Blundell-Hollinshead-Blundell is a real surname. ETA: and Hay Drummond-Hay
I returned to the AU soulmark series An Ever-Fixed Mark by AMarguerite for the second and third installments, which I enjoyed as much as the first.
That Looks on Tempests explores what might have happened if Colonel Fitzwilliam had survived Waterloo. A Dalliance with the Duke tries a different path, in which widowed Lizzy takes up with the Duke of Wellington instead of her cousin-by-marriage Darcy; this one gets a bit spicy!
For those who are not fanfiction readers, a "soulmark" story generally posits that people are born with, or attain at adolescence, a mark somewhere on their body, usually a name or a line of dialogue, that indicates one's soulmate/true love/most significant person. The best of these stories, I feel, interrogate the concept and its societal and personal implications, which the author does in this series.
Second paragraph of third chapter (which is presented bilingually in the original text):
Hoe bijzonder het precies is dat Jardin d’émail als monumentale tuin gerealiseerd is, is moeilijk te bevatten. Natuurlijk, het was Dubuffet die het kunstwerk schiep, eerst als een Édifice van twee bij drie meter met de titel Jardin d’émail. Maar het is museumdirecteur Oxenaar die zorgt voor de ‘vergroting’ van het idee, zoals Dubuffet dat in een brief verwoordt. Binnen het oeuvre van Dubuffet wordt Jardin d’émail gerekend tot de belangrijkste voorbeelden van zijn L’Hourloupe-architectuur samen met Closerie Falbala en de Groupe de quatres arbres, een groep van vier bomen voor een bankgebouw in New York en gemaakt in opdracht van de Amerikaanse bankier Rockefeller. (afb. pp. 38-39)
It is difficult to comprehend how amazing it is that Jardin d’émail has been realized as a monumental garden. Of course, it was Dubuffet who created the artwork, initially as an Édifice measuring two by three metres and with the title Jardin d’émail. But it is the museum director Oxenaar who enables the ‘enlargement’ of the idea, as Dubuffet puts it in a letter. Within Dubuffet’s oeuvre, Jardin d’émail is considered one of the most important examples of his L’Hourloupe architecture, together with Closerie Falbala and the Groupe de quatres arbres, a group of four trees for a bank building in New York, commissioned by the American banker Rockefeller. (image pp. 38-39)
The Jardin d’émail (Enamel Garden) is one of the most striking sculptures in the Kröller-Müller Museum near Otterlo, in the Netherlands. It’s twenty metres by thirty, a stylised garden made not of enamel but of concrete, epoxy resin, polyurethane and paint. It’s probably the biggest single artwork in the whole museum.
We went to see it in 2005 and again in 2022. Here’s my attempt to recreate the same scene twice.
And here’s me beside the central butterfly:
This short book about it by art historian Roos van der Lint describes it as “deeply embedded” in the Dutch national consciousness, and goes into the story of Jean Dubuffet’s career (originally in the family wine shipping trade, but became an artist during the second world war) and how museum director Rudi Oxenaar was impressed by a smaller version, two metres by three, and commissioned the larger one for the Kröller-Müller Museum, built between 1968 and 1973. It also explains the extensive process of restoration in 2020 – it certainly seemed in much better shape the second time we went.
It’s possibly the single most interesting object in the entire Dutch province of Gelderland, and if you ever have a chance to see it, you should take it. Otherwise you can get this little book here, for only €12,50 plus postage, which I think is a real snip.
Why, why O why, would anybody choose a 'sperm donor' (and it looks as though he made his donations very up close and personal, we are not talking test-tubes?) whose pitch was - on Facebook! - 'recipients did not have to “have a weirdo in a lab coat look at your hoohaw”. (The service was also free.)
Do we think that anyone asked for a recent STI check? The whole thing sounds ick to the max.
No, instead you got involved with this deeply odd and controlling bloke who claims he fathered more than 180 children and far from just vanishing over the horizon, in several instances has tried to gain custody of the resulting children.
In the US, where he was offering sperm donor services until 2017, there is a warrant for his arrest over unpaid child maintenance amounting to thousands of dollars.
I was going to comment, so, not one of these billionaires who is trying to breed his own master-race out of his own loins, but then I seem to recollect that there has been a certain amount of outing them for not paying up as they had said they would.
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