![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizbeekaberettLate 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.
andrewducker
Gorgeous weather, swimming, walking up a hill, and the kids mostly
getting on. Life could be a lot worse.
Original
is here on Pixelfed.scot.
silveradeptadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
nanila![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
fromtheheartofeurope_feedI 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).
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.
oursinThe 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?
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.
james_davis_nicoll
Which of these look interesting?
The Age of Calamities by Senaa Ahmad (January 2026)
11 (20.4%)
Cathedral of the Drowned by Nathan Ballingrud (October 2025)
5 (9.3%)
Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories by Terry Bisson (October 2025)
20 (37.0%)
A Fate So Cold by Amanda Foody & C. L. Herman (November 2025)
2 (3.7%)
The Last Vampire by Romina Garber (December 2025)
5 (9.3%)
Graceless Heart by Isabel Ibanez (January 2026)
5 (9.3%)
Empire of the Dawn by Jay Kristoff (November 2025)
1 (1.9%)
The Monster and the Last Blood Match by K. A. Linde (June 2025)
3 (5.6%)
Westward Women by Alice Martin (March 2026)
10 (18.5%)
Dead Fake by Vincent Ralph (January 2026)
0 (0.0%)
The Unwritten Rules of Magic by Harper Ross (January 2026)
7 (13.0%)
The Bone Queen by Will Shindler (February 2026)
4 (7.4%)
This Gilded Abyss by Rebecca Thorne (November 2025)
9 (16.7%)
A Mouthful of Dust by Nghi Vo (October 2025)
21 (38.9%)
Trace Elements by Jo Walton & Ada Palmer (March 2026)
37 (68.5%)
Good Intentions by Marisa Walz (February 2026)
2 (3.7%)
Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)
Cats!
35 (64.8%)
selenak
andrewduckerwychwoodI 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.
redbirdoracnehelloladies posting in ladybusinessSidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag. You can also support Sidetracks and our other work on Patreon.
kaberettToday 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.
I've travelled around the sun thirty-five times.
It's been a good day.
cosmolinguistIn Chester for the weekend.
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.
fromtheheartofeurope_feedI 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 was a bit more positive on my rewatch three years on:
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.
I wrote in 2008 that:
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.)
Not much to add to that. You can get it here.
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).
The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | Silver Nemesis (75) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | A Christmas Carol (74) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)
james_davis_nicollaurumcalendulaoursinOkay, 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.
spiralsheepjames_davis_nicoll
rydra_wongoracnefromtheheartofeurope_feedSecond 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.
oursinWhy, 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 suppose at least this guy has been seriously spreading it about ('dozens of children across South America, Australia and the UK' and presumably USA), unlike the Dutch guy most of whose 100s of offspring are in the Netherlands.
james_davis_nicoll
skygiantsgenarti, and she said, 'that kind of book absolutely does still exist,' and okay, true, yes, it does, but it doesn't exist as Genre! it gets published as Literary Fiction and does not proliferate in mass-market paperback and mass-market paperback is where I want to be looking for it.) andrewduckertamaranth
“How can I stop doing something that I don’t even know I’m doing in the first place? It’s not like I’m sabotaging myself on purpose. The feelings are just there.” [p. 281]
M/M romantic fantasy. Leovander Loveage is brilliant at small magics, his cantrips and charms executed with musical accompaniment. Sadly, Leo's larger spells -- his Grandmagic -- never work out right. He's a student at the Fount, an institution where scrivers (like Leo) write the spells, and are paired with casters who execute them. Unfortunately, in their final year, Leo is not paired with his best friend Agnes but instead with his nemesis Sebastian Grimm( Read more... )
james_davis_nicollkaberettItem the first: I totally failed to mention, yesterday, but one of the things we Observed the teenage coots doing -- okay, well, one of them was successfully managing to invert itself, Köpfchen in das Wasser, Schwanzchen in die Höh' -- but we only observed this after having already spent Quite Some Time laughing (delightedly) at its sibling, which was making great big determined accelerating shoulder-shrug motions, and separately managing to put its head and only its head underwater, but had not yet quite managed to work out how to combine the two movements so as to rotate itself around its axis. I realised while trying to describe this earlier that the reason for my feeling of Great Affinity is just how much it looks to have in common with learning to do a wheelie.
Item the second: cake of the day.
Item the third: the tomatoes I planted out and then abandoned for a couple of days seem to be none the worse for wear for it (and I established this on the trip where I took the water condensed in the dehumidifier from the latest round of laundry up to the plot, in an empty milk flagon, for the purpose of watering the blueberry, on the basis that the water butt is running low and there's still no rain forecast...).
Item the fourth: I am continuing to greatly enjoy Owl Facts. Favourite so far, which I am utterly failing to track down a specific reference for: apparently owl chicks start vocalising before they emerge from the egg, at the point at which they breach the air cell in their Containment! which you need a very sensitive microphone to pick up. The second favourite is a long shaggy dog story that I might manage to type up tomorrow, but I'm not holding my breath.
Item the fifth: I am now at two nights running for "watch thinks my sleep quality is significantly better if I spend ten minutes listening to wave recordings after lying down and lights out". If it continues to hold I will be both very pleased (about having a way to improve energy levels) and mildly irritated (about not being able to replicate this effect some other more convenient way). We Shall See.
cosmolinguistAccording to this, and a new book I maybe have to read now, a gay pioneer in the UK was blind.
In 1960, seven years before the law in the UK changed to permit sex between men, he had written to the national press declaring himself to be gay. Roger believed that the only way to change public opinion about homosexuals was for them to take control of the gay rights movement – and this required them to unashamedly identify themselves on the national stage. But nobody else had been willing to do it.
It's because of his blindness that this person had to come in to his life: an Oxford student, also gay, who could be trusted to read his papers and write and generally be a kind of personal assistant.
To gay when it was illegal, and then to be blind, required a lot of access intimacy when everything was still on paper.
The article ends:
In the years since, it has often led me to wonder how many other quiet revolutionaries live among us, ready to share their stories, if only we knock on their doors.
So many. I'm sure of it.
oursinWhat I read
Finished Dance and Skylark, which was a bit slight (felt there was a certain unresolved slashy subtext going on between Stephen and his former Greek-American wartime comrade in arms, hmmm) though I marked it up for the women characters looking as if they might be a bit one-dimensional and then revealing other facets.
Katherine V Forrest, Delafield (2022) - Kate Delafield, still retired, dealing with a stalker who is a woman who her poor handling of a case way back in her career led to being falsely imprisoned, and now released through the Innocence Project, also her PTSD issues, etc, also old relationship stuff.
Long Live Great Bardfield: The Autobiography of Tirzah Garwood - Persephone edition, 2016, initially published in limited edition 2012 - her memoir written when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy in the 1940s, for her family, edited with some supplementary material by her daughter. Said a bit about it here.
Ursula Whitcher, North Continent Ribbon (2024) - v good.
KJ Charles, The Henchmen of Zenda (2018), re-read because not feeling up to much.
On the go
Still dipping into Melissa Scott, Scenes from the City.
Have started the other book for review - wow there is a lot of insider baseball stuff about the Parliamentary toings and froings over the legislation in question, or maybe I mean, how the sausage got made - and maybe my general state at the moment is not quite in the right space.
Just started, Kris Ripper, The Life Revamp (The Love Study #3) (2021) because it was on offer in my Recommended for You on Kobo today.
Up Next
New Literary Review.
Otherwise, not sure.
redbirdfromtheheartofeurope_feedCurrent
Doctor Who: Warrior’s Gate and beyond, by Stephen Gallagher
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs
Last books finished
The Eleventh Doctor Archives vol 3, ed. Andrew James
So Let Them Burn, by Kamilah Cole
Beyond the Sun, by Matthew Jones
City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, by Deborah Blum
Amnesty, by Lara Elena Donnelly (did not finish)
Next books
Doctor Who: Logopolis, by Christopher H. Bidmead
Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi
fromtheheartofeurope_feedThe Clarke shortlist has been out for a couple of days, but I’ve been quite busy so am posting the ownership stats for the six lucky books only today. I’m also noting the ranking of each book in the equivalent table for the long list.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
| Goodreads | LibraryThing | |||||
| raters | rating | owners | rating | |||
| (1) | The Ministry of Time | Kaliane Bradley | 139,555 | 3.59 | 1,976 | 3.71 |
| (5) | Annie Bot | Sierra Greer | 52,555 | 3.83 | 529 | 3.74 |
| (13) | Service Model | Adrian Tchaikovsky | 11,505 | 4.04 | 350 | 3.83 |
| (21) | Private Rites | Julia Armfield | 8,632 | 3.68 | 213 | 3.81 |
| (60) | Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock | Maud Woolf | 642 | 3.69 | 27 | 3.75 |
| (79) | Extremophile | Ian Green | 139 | 3.90 | 16 | – |
None of these was in the top quintiles of reader ratings from the long list. The last two seem to have made a big impression on judges despite low print runs.
I’m planning to be at the ceremony on 25 June – see you there perhaps.
selenak
james_davis_nicoll
lizbee - To the surprise of everyone, especially myself, I really like the Murderbot adaptation so far!kaberett - SOMETIMES THINGS ARE GREATjesuswasbatman - Doctor Who: "The Story and the Engine" and "The Interstellar Song Contest"andrewducker - Photo cross-postsilveradept - The usual amount of strange things in place - Early May 02025nanila - The Friday Five on a Saturdaychickenfeet - Comfort Food at Crow'sfromtheheartofeurope_feed - My great-great-grandfather’s non-appointment as Assistant Secretary of War of the United Statesoursin - Quack, quack, quack, says historian of medicinejames_davis_nicoll - Books Received, May 3 — May 16selenak - Doctor Who ? 05 + 06andrewducker - Interesting Links for 17-05-2025wychwood - murderbot 1&2redbird - shoesoracne - MURDERBOT!!!helloladies in ladybusiness - Sidetracks - May 16, 2025kaberett - now, of my three score years and tencosmolinguist - City breakfromtheheartofeurope_feed - Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith (and Kevin Clarke)james_davis_nicoll - Fabula Ultima: the charactersaurumcalendula - some nonfictionoursin - Maybe this is just badly put?spiralsheep - In which I read therefore I amchickenfeet - Alexander Cappellazzo at Metropolitan Unitedjames_davis_nicoll - A Quiet Teacher (Quiet Teacher, volume 1) by Adam Oyebanjiandrewducker - Interesting Links for 16-05-2025oursin - (no subject)rydra_wong - Gender Free World shirtsoracne - Wednesday Reading on Thursdayfromtheheartofeurope_feed - Jean Dubuffet: Jardin d’Email, by Roos van der Lintoursin - He's terribly poor stuff, but honestly -james_davis_nicoll - Five Stories About Time Travel and Bureaucracyjames_davis_nicoll - Sky Pride, volume 1 by Warby Picuschickenfeet - A second look at Wozzeckskygiants - (no subject)andrewducker - Interesting Links for 15-05-2025tamaranth - 2025/073: Sorcery and Small Magics — Maiga Doocyoursin - (no subject)james_davis_nicoll - (no subject)kaberett - some good thingsjames_davis_nicoll - Bundle of Holding: Dungeon Dressingcosmolinguist - many other quiet revolutionaries live among usyourlibrarian in common_nature - First Ducklings and Goslingsoursin - Wednesday has been having the lower-back thing flare up again, sighredbird - CT scan looks finefromtheheartofeurope_feed - Wednesday readingfromtheheartofeurope_feed - Clarke shortlist, Goodreads/LibraryThing statschickenfeet - A Taste of Hong Kongselenak - Star Wars: Andor 2.10 - 2.12james_davis_nicoll - People From My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakamibranchandroot
