these far and starlit shores

Hard to believe it's already almost March, and that it's taken me about this long to claw my way back to something more resembling my usual attitude toward work. Burnout is a bitch.

I have been trying to get more in the habit of reading books again, as opposed to, say, falling into terrible time- and attention-sucking websites -- with some success. Some booklogging below the fold.

( books )

So the usual thing about deadlines is that yes, they are stressful, but then it is over and you are done and you can move on and do something else with your life and not waste more energy fretting about whatever asses have been left halved in your wake.

Things don't seem to work that way any more two years into covid.

I am still going to mostly wash my hands of it, though; it's been making my life miserable for long enough already. Ugh. Tell me something fun about your life recently instead!

I keep having vague ambitions to dust this thing off and try to be social again, and then I get to the point of actually entering text into the box, and it all comes out variations on the same vaguely distanced gosh! isn't the pandemic awful! I have so much work to do but I am too burnt out to do it all, hahaha oh well. Which is (i) boring, (ii) depressingly Groundhog Day-esque, and (iii) I'm sure this sentiment is one everyone is all too familiar with themselves, and hardly needs to see it again from me.

So: I've read some actual books. The theme here is in no small part that the pandemic got me squirrely enough to lift the lid on my well of repressed history geeking (this is probably strongly correlated with my recent free-fall into Old Guard fandom).

Maureen Ash has a series of mystery novels set in 13th century Lincoln starring a convalescent Templar knight on leave from his order. I grabbed the first one, The Alehouse Murders, on impulse at the library, and have mixed reactions. There's a clear wealth of research into the details of everyday life in the medieval town, the politics of the time, and so on. But Ash is much less successful (in my opinion) in evoking the real community of people that would be living there; characterization is done in rather broad strokes. But they do enough right that I'm now on book three. Basically, if you're interested in reading murder mysteries set in medieval England, you could do a lot worse, but if you aren't already in the mood for that very specific genre, I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend them.

If you happen, for some reason, to be interested in the Crusades, I highly recommend Carole Hillenbrand's "The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives". It's an excellent overview of the course of the conflicts, focusing on providing a clear, succinct, and trenchant discussion of the political and intellectual developments in the Muslim world through this time period. As a bonus, includes a large number of illustrations drawn from architecture, art, and inscriptions, some of which are just plain fun – for instance, I didn't realize there was a substantial medieval genre of "animated inscriptions", where the large upward strokes and serifs in written texts are anthropomorphized and do all sorts of entertaining things.

Paulina Lewicka's "Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes" was a surprisingly fun read -- I grabbed it from the library because it showed up on Google books as the only useful hit for working out how many meals, and what times of day, you might expect a medieval Muslim to eat, but ended up reading it straight through out of delighted curiosity. Highly recommended if you're at all interested in the topic, or the sort of person whose life is improved by knowing about the existence of medieval food anthropomorfic: it's well-written, thorough, vivid, and occasionally hilarious.

This is a hard day to sit down and write.

There is a big essay lurking here, about the loss of an illusion -- yes, another one. Even after so many illusions wavered and dispelled, like so much socially-constructed mist, over the last five years, apparently there are yet more. No matter how much you lose, there is always more to lose; and no matter how much you win, the amount by which you fall short is heartbreaking. And we had so much more to win.

But I don't feel like writing that essay. It wouldn't help, that's the thing. For grief time helps me more than dissection, and of all the illusions I may have, the idea that my particular articulation of this common grief would be helpful to anyone but me is not one of them. There is an ample supply of these essays already, and by more practiced analysts than I. The point, and we must all know it, is that the work does not, and cannot, stop after all the votes have been counted.

This is more like what I feel it is useful to write.

But from that. There is a justly famous biography of the brilliant nuclear physicist and should-have-been Nobel Laureate Lise Meitner, by Ruth Sime. Meitner did much of her great work in Germany, establishing herself thoroughly in the Weimar Republic. I came away from the first part of that book in utter awe of what she was able to achieve at a time when, once you were paid, you needed to immediately rush out and buy groceries for the week, because if you waited until the end of the day, your salary would be worth less. I was -- and still am -- in complete awe of Meitner's discipline and focus, her brilliance, and how she was able to achieve astounding things in the bitter teeth of a hostile society and the unbearable turmoil of the times.

And now, a decade later, I wonder -- I have been wondering since that horrible November evening, four years ago -- the extent to which it is right to admire that furious focus. Or rather, how to weigh the completely orthogonal demands of doing my job -- especially since, while the impulse toward excellence may be selfish, doing my job is still, alas, inextricably political -- as opposed to the urgency of, well, saving the world.

Anyway, record scratch – I unapologetically took most of the day off today. Which means, nowadays, I mostly answered email.

So...like...in the middle of a global pandemic, in the lead-up to the single most stressful and consequential election in my life, while managing a small child, is probably the wrong time to be entertaining self-doubt and hair-pulling about the quality and impact of my recent research program, right?

gah

Today I told the kid about blue-footed boobies. I mean, she had seen the picture before, but I had just been saying, “Here’s a bird with bright blue feet!” Today I said, “Oh look, here’s a blue-footed booby!” and she lit up and said, “Booby!” A pause for thought. “More booby!”

“Oh,” I say, best happy isn’t-learning-things-amazing voice, “this is a blue-footed booby, and this one over here is a red-footed booby, they are birds that live near the ocean, and they like to dance!”

At this point, you may go back and reread the previous paragraphs several times, as that will give you a fairly good idea of the general tenor of the conversation.

“Boobies!” she says, and, as she often does when she is too full of delight to sit still, goes off to climb up the nearest vertical gradient. On top, she turns around and says to me, hopefully, “More? More boobies!”

“Is ‘booby’ fun to say?” I ask.

“Yes!” she says, with a great grin. “Booby!”

First of all, this clarifies a lot for me in retrospect, and second, I don’t think this is the context they will assume at daycare.

I am now at the point where every single picture of Mitch McConnell and his smug evil turtle face makes me nearly incandescent with fury.

Another fun article, this time featuring a strong contender for best headline ever: Psychic Snail Sex Couldn't Replace the Telegraph But One Frenchman Sure Tried.

The only way I am reading books right now is in small chunks on my phone overnight, to help keep myself awake. Alas, the physical copy of Ancillary Justice that I checked out of the library has been sitting unopened on my desk; but on the other hand I have finally been reading a few of the books that have been collecting in my Kindle library.
(also I have been compulsively reading political blogs, a terrible habit I really should stop.)

The Vanished Child, by Sarah Smith, is the kind of book that could be classed as a mystery, historical fiction, or the genre-that-is-unmarked of just plain "fiction". The plot: an Austrian chemist reluctantly attends exactly the wrong conference; a 17-year-old blind pianist foolishly agrees to get married; and a very Catholic doctor dances a protracted tango with his conscience.

Less flippantly, Richard Knight, eight-year-old heir to an American Gilded Age fortune, vanishes from a New England vacation home in 1887, following the brutal murder of his grandfather. Twenty years later, the Catholic doctor, friend of the Knight family, happens to see Austrian chemist Alexander Reisden on a train platform in Switzerland, and in a dizzying moment thinks he recognizes Richard Knight. The plot turns around the dual mysteries of what happened in 1887 and whether Reisden is indeed the vanished Knight -- with the interesting twist that Reisden is the main POV character.

The realization of turn-of-the-century Boston and Boston society is stellar, the writing is lovely, and the characters are very well drawn. I got a little impatient with the style of the psychological introspection Smith's characters are prone to – due in part to the demands of the mystery plot, I think. I very much liked that two of the protagonists have a strong abstract calling – music and chemistry, variously – that, and the tensions that come up when that calling is balanced against interpersonal relationships, is something I love in fiction, and the depiction here was organic and rang entirely true. I liked this one enough I'm thinking of buying the sequel.

I spent spring break gibbering, sleeping in the name of great white blood cell justice, and mainlining Martha Wells' Raksura books.

I have so very much work to do it is not even funny, my friends, but that is situation normal for me so let's go on and talk about the Raksura, who are delightful, them and Our Hero Moon and the sheer unfolding inventiveness of the world they inhabit. I find myself in the awkward spot of wanting to roll around in all the meta but where I have nothing much concrete to contribute myself, necessarily. So I will say: ( Read more... )

The thing about Wagner's Ring is that it is horrifically addictive. Listen to one of the operas once, and you'll have trouble getting your head out of all of them for the next week, or at least, I do. I started writing this after I watched the HD broadcast of the Met's Ring operas a couple of years ago, and (true to form) it stalled at 85% done. Recently I was rashly listening to the audio of that performance, and instead of following that up by playing every creditable performance of every opera in the cycle over and over and over again, I decided to shove this off my hard drive and out of my brain so I could get back to work. (Rose, if you're reading, I know it could have benefited from a beta! But I wanted to get it off my plate so I could be undistracted by it!)

So, fic! It is awfully febrile but it is Ring fic, so. Also, it is inevitably Sieglinde/Siegmund, so uh fair warning.

Title: Fimbulwinter
Characters: Sieglinde, mostly, with Freyja, Hel, and Siegmund
Summary: Things to do on Yggdrasil when you're dead; or, Sieglinde, too, has a chance to choose her afterlife.
Word Count: 3875

Bonus supporting material (also known as: canon): Some of the most well-sung Walsungs I have ever heard (oh right and some gods too).