Geek Luddite

03:26 pm - Sometimes when they ask, it might be better to have a short answer ready

My gram, who is super supportive of my writing desires (she always asks if I've been writing and stuff when she calls, and nags me if I don't finish things, and reminds me of the artists we know who are successful and how what they all have in common is doing it every day and so forth) asked me if I'd been writing.

I said yes.  I know I should have stopped there, but she called while I was writing, darn it.  So I'm all, "werewolves, gram, jumping from airship to airship at the birthday part of an island countess!"  And she's sort of, "I guess that's nice, dear."

[edited to add]
The above is unfair to my gram.  She actually said, "wouldn't it hurt when they fall?" and I said "that's why islands, so they can land in the water" and she said, "they'd need to watch out for sharks," because my gram is AWESOME and would never say something passive aggressive like "I guess that's nice dear."  The problem is that no matter how awesome my gram is, I am internally editing what she says, and my internal editor is not as nice as she is, and translates the gram coolness into the "I guess that's nice, dear."
[thus ends the edit]

08:20 pm - Books - question

Dear Friends who May Have Already Read Throne of the Crescent Moon:

Can anyone tell me a little about the overall balance of torture and tea in Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed?  Because I am about three chapters in, and my overall reaction is that the writing is lovely and the characters seem interesting, but if it's going to be mostly torture and only occasional tea, I'm just not up for that at the moment and will try again another month.
On the other hand, if the torture and tea episodes are roughly equal in quantity, I will by all means continue reading.

Thanks for any thoughts.

09:10 am - Politics - really not rougher now than then

Every now and then someone starts talking near me in public about the lowered modern tone of civil discourse and I have a hard time not laughing so hard up my sleeve that I choke.

C'mon people.  Really?  We are So Much Nicer Now Than We Were Then.  Just for example, nowadays we hardly ever have one Senator beating the other with a stick on the senate floor and then challenging him to a duel.  If you like American humorous political anecdote, and you enjoy light popular history, may I commend Barbara Holland to your attention?  In addition to the stellar "Hail To The Chiefs" she is also the author of the charming "Gentlemen's Blood: A history of dueling from swords at dawn to pistols at dusk." 
( She has some choice things to say about senators and duelling... )

I think I've burbled about Holland before, but every time I re-read her books I burble again.  What can you do.

08:07 pm - Books - finding them

So I could buy the next book for my book club online.  But... I always hate buying books online. There are used books I've been looking for for almost a decade now that I know are perfectly available online.  I'm still hoping to find a copy in a used book table sometime instead of dropping 2.01 for a used copy on Amazon.  That's just me.
I've been browsing online library catalogs trying to find a copy of said bookclub book, and because some of the middle-of-the-state libraries share an online open source catalog, I see that there is one copy available - in Waitsfield.
Waitsfield is about 40 minutes from here, and if I detour there on my way to visit my family this weekend, it will only add about 40 minutes to the total drive time - plus, I'll get to stop at a small town library I've never visited before.
Also, of course, I'll need to pay an out of town annual membership fee, that may be something between 20-30 dollars.
But golly, I won't have to buy it online.

I'm not sure what it says about me that this seems like a Totally Rational and Rewarding Plan.

03:49 pm - Books: Myke Cole

So, thanks to a) enjoying his Big Idea post on Scalzi's blog, and b) needing to pick up a book for the airplane ride home from New York, I read Myke Cole's Shadow Ops: Control Point this week.  I liked it a lot.  I'm really glad I read it, because I've been miserably slogging through a well regarded military sff book by a male writer this month and starting to think, "well, maybe I only like military sff by female writers, maybe all military genrefic by male writers is going to be a wash for me."  Because I quite like Bujold's work, and I adore Moon's stuff, but this one book was just... not working for me.
And then I picked up Cole's book, and I didn't have the level of visceral identification with it that I do with some of Moon's stuff, but I liked it a lot, it kept me along for the ride in the bits that weren't my thing, and when it hit me with a bit that was my thing it really sucked me under.
The fact that the protagonist is a black man from Vermont was pretty much going to sell me on it anyway, this is true.  But I liked a lot about it.  I wasn't sure how much I loved the portrayal of women in some parts, but we did get some women who were villains and women who were able to use their powers in really destructive ways and ambivalent about doing so.  And the political consequences of the world building and the scale of changes that they implied worked well for me.
That said, there are certain subsets of friends I'd wholeheartedly recommend it to, and others who I wouldn't at all.  I think that this is a book that nails it out of the park for a certain audience, works solidly well enough for a second audience, and wouldn't work at all for a third audience, and that I have friends in all three audiences.

11:17 am - Tiptree

( Boils down to: gender exploration good, but I prefer the happy stories please. )

08:40 pm - Food - bread

If you are, by any chance, looking for a whole wheat bread with seeds/nuts type recipe, I can thoroughly endorse the one from the King Arthur Flour Cookbook.
I just made this for the first time today, and it had a really nice crumb and tasted delicious with jelly.  Much nicer than the whole wheat bread recipe we used at the cafe where I used to work.
It has sunflower seeds and walnuts chopped up in it, and there's olive oil and your choice of thick sweetener (honey, molasses or syrup) in it too.  Wet and sticky dough but a really nice loaf.  I don't know how it will keep yet, but I'll definitely make it again.

07:58 am - small point about Venetia by Georgette Heyer

So I'm reading The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies, by Matthew Parker, about which there will be much more when I finish.

But it reminded me of a small thing that niggles me whenever I re-read Georgette Heyer's Venetia.
The young would-be romantic rival of the neighborhood, whose name escapes me as names often do, at one point mutters darkly to Venetia about how he's "seen things" in the world, due to his recent travels in the Caribbean.

He's sort of an unpleasant character in the story - brash, pushing kisses where they're not wanted, challenging the hero to a duel for no good reason, etc.  But I always pity him.  He's 17 or so.  He just got back from the Caribbean.  By golly, I bet he had seen things that would shake poor Venetia's soul.  Maybe done some of them too.  I always think of him as having some kind of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - he's running around all moody and sad and angry and confused because he's supposed to learn how to cope with the polite surface world of 1800s English society, and he hasn't been able to process the many horrors of slaveholding plantation world at all. 

(And ok, yes, his erstwhile victims in the Caribbean doubtless deserve more of my sympathy...and part of why this moment niggles in my brain is that Heyer never admits that part textually.  Austen, if my dim memory of Mansfield Park isn't being too much overwritten by the movie version, did at least sort of admit the rest textually.)

06:24 am - Random thought: plots and fonts

I'm tired and hoping this morning doesn't turn out bad, so here's a random thought:
Stock plots in fantasy are like the font Papyrus or Cooper Black.  They're distinctive, strongly designed, and most people who haven't seen them before look at them and go "hey, kinda neat."
Then there are the other people, who have seen 10,000 poorly designed flyers covered in Papyrus font, or 3,000 t-shirts designed in Cooper Black, who have an incredible aversive reaction.  It's almost like a flinch.  "Oh, god(dess), not Papyrus!"

But Papyrus and Cooper Black are perfectly nice fonts, separate from their current cultural usage.  And that story about the little orphan child destined to save the world because of their inherent niceness and the band of scraggly outsiders who are drawn to protect and support them is a perfectly nice story, really, if you haven't seen 10,000 horrible executions of it.  If it's your first time, you just go, "oh, neat font."

09:12 am - Books: The Sexual History of London

British social history and social histories of sexuality are two of my favorite things so I really ought to have loved The Sexual History of London by Catharine Arnold.  And yet, I did not.   It wasn't badly written and didn't feel badly researched, so I think it really just comes down to her emphases and preferences not being mine.  Though the subtitle promised me "lust, vice, and desire across the ages" the focus was very much on prostitution, pornography, and criminalized sexual activity.  There were some interesting bits there about armed police attacks on well-defended brothels in strategically defensible locations.  Some nice interview quotes from 1900s-era prostitutes.  Far more citations from My Secret Life than I needed given that I've already read a fair hunk of My Secret Life, thanks, and the book bores me in itself and when described by others.

Basically, it's not a history of people characterizing sex and desire - it's an overview of people monetizing and criminalizing sex and desire.  And it doesn't feel as socially engaged as the source material it cites.  She's got some nods to how religion and disease affected mores, but they really strongly feel to me like nods that were in her source material, that she's passing along. 

I will add that the feeling I got from the text of authorial emotional engagement level goes way up in the 1900s material and the material stretching into the early 2000s. It felt to me like prostitution and/or sex work in the time period 1930s-2010 was really her emotional entry into the topic, and the rest was just rotating around that - but it's really hard to read a nonfiction book whose emotional heart seems to be the last few chapters and feel balanced about the experience.  Maybe there was a disconnect between what interested her and what would be most marketable?