Strong Verbs Are Just Better

As you may have gathered, I've been on a deadline lately, finalising my book proposal for the-book-from-the-PhD. It's no longer Book-OF-the-PhD, it's changed so much I'm starting to doubt the validity of the bit of paper that says 'Docteur es Lettres'. As sometimes happens when I'm in academic-stress-hyperfocus, I hit a point where I could stop what I was doing and do something else, but I couldn't do *nothing*, and reading unrelated fiction felt like nothing. So I've consumed a LOT of podcasts lately, while crocheting.

Music Notes: Last Listening Post I noted I had become obsessed with The Longest Johns. Shortly after that post I bought 'Between Wind and Water', the album with Wellerman on it; and last week I bought 'Cures What Ails Ya', which has a lot more comic songs.

It also contains 'Fire and Flame', which, by the baffling (if you live in Switzerland) line 'The Mont Blanc was gone and the town with it too', suddenly lurched out of Nice Background Ballad to setting off a deep Wikipedia dive re the Halifax Explosion mid-week.



Since I submitted the proposal I've been listening to Dessa's orchestral live album 'Sound the Bells' a lot.

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Podcasts and similar:

Fiction:

Paradise Lost (The Devil's Party podcast): Finally finished Bk 9, and am into Bk 10, as far as where the Son descends to seek the pair out. Still loving Anthony Oliveira's discussion sections, although I really do think he's under-estimating the extent to which Eve Is Right, Actually.

Lightspeed Magazine: both Ann of Rags (P.H. Lee) and Miss Beulah's braiding and life change salon (Eden Royce). Both brilliantly narrated. Ann of Rags is fairy-tale like, but inverts fairy-tale logics. Really great use of repetition that works incredibly well read aloud but might be a bit heavy-handed on the page. Miss Beulah's Braiding and Life Change Salon is an urban-fantasy type slice of life, which does a great job with slowly revealing to the reader bit by bit how far the world of the story diverges from ours.

Non-fiction:

The Spouter Inn: I finished the Odyssey episode and enjoyed the bonus with Emily Wilson. I then got through all three of the 'Philosophical novels(?)' block - Middlemarch, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, and The Blazing World, and the bonus episodes with experts on Middlemarch and The Blazing World. I kind of wished there had been a bonus expert for Hayy ibn Yaqzan, because not only was that the book for which I had least context, it also showed that that was the book for which the two hosts, Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Chris Piuma, had the least expertise. Of the three, Middlemarch was the only one I'd read; I was fascinated by Dr Akbari's dislike of Dorothea - I need to read again to see if my own perspective on her changes as I grow older. What was obvious though was that I had missed a lot ABOUT Dorothea, and many other characters, along the way. The Blazing World I'm pretty sure I don't want to read right now but I really appreciated having highlights pulled out, and having the philosophical commentary in the expert bonus episode. Clearly I do not know enough about the 17th cenutry. Hayy ib Yaqzan I'm filing in the back of my head: I'm sure one day it will come in handy as a counterpoint to some kind of medieval Xn text.

Histoire Vivante: I'm two episodes in to a five-parter on Imperial Rome. Mostly for the purposes of picking up vocab, it's a general survey and not telling me anything I don't know, but it's telling me it in French.

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Some links of possible interest:

Thomas Stevens (SwissInfo), The talented Ms Highsmith's life in "club like" Switzerland. Nothing complex, but I didn't know she'd lived here. Nor did I know about her vehement racism and antisemitism, although those are only briefly mentioned in this piece.

Suzanne M Harvey (UCL Researchers in Museums blog, 2012), How did man lose his penis bone? Don't tell me you haven't wondered.

Alan Cleaver (The Beyonder), Rediscover our ancient coffin paths. Now I want to walk a coffin path.

Amanda Mull (The Atlantic), The pandemic is resetting casual friendships. I think this is less marked for me because so MANY of my 'weak ties' are social media based anyway, and because I've moved so much that I'm used to weak ties disappearing quickly. But it's definitely A Thing.

John Grindrod (The Social), Last Night a Bookshop Saved My Life: a love letter to Gay's The Word