Ursula

I'm skimming through The Secret History of the Mongols for an SCA project. This is a thirteenth-century chronicle; I'm using Igor de Rachewiltz's translation, which has excellent and copious footnotes.

I was struck by the segment where Činggis Qa'an's mother is kidnapped (by Činggis Qa'an's father):

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In the footnotes, de Rachewiltz comments that "Never forget to breathe my scent!" is literally "Go smelling my smell," with a form of the verb "to go" that suggests continuous activity. I think "Go on smelling my smell" is more evocative than his prettier translation.

This passage is simultaneously tragically romantic and pragmatic in a way that I'm not used to seeing in Western literature: I'd expect either Čiledü or Hö'elün to die here, in older stories, or one of them to kill Yisügei later, in newer ones. (Instead Hö'elün and Yisügei have five children, and then Yisügei is poisoned by some Tatars.)

Cross-posted from http://ursula.dreamwidth.org/17931… .

• What did you recently finish reading?
  
  Listing back a little ways, since these books are thematically akin:
  
  Full Fathom Five and Last First Snow by Max Gladstone, Night Flower by Kate Elliott, The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar, and Fire Logic by Laurie J. Marks.
  
  I read the first of Gladstone's Craft books, and found it interesting, but a little too aggressively weird for me to relate to any of the characters. Full Fathom Five, on the other hand, drew me in quite quickly. This could mean that I connect with hopelessly noble finance nerds, or that a postcolonial Polynesian setting is easier for me to deal with than a bunch of skeletons. The book starts out looking as if it's a thinly veiled meditation on the machinations that led to the Great Recession, and ends up being about faith. Recommended.
  
  Last First Snow is about, variously, war, gentrification, and choosing to be a parent. Heroic efforts mean that a doomed plan results in only about 95% of the expected carnage. Meditations on the nature of manhood & fatherhood aren't a theme that I connect with, particularly; if those themes matter to you, I suspect this book will be fascinating/ gripping/ horrifying. I read it in small increments while moving, and had to rush to finish the last ten percent before my library ebook expired.
  
  Night Flower continued the colonialism theme, and features another Kate Elliott heroine who is really good at selling fruit. Does not emphasize the horrors of war & its aftermath, which was a nice break.
  
  I read The Winged Histories in one sitting, on a flight to England. I associate Stranger in Olondria with sobbing in a hostel in Toronto; I didn't quite have tears running down my face on my intercontinental flight, but it was a near thing. My thumbnail description for Stranger in Olondria was 'if Ondaatje wrote fantasy novels'. At WisCon, I went to Samatar's talk on influence; she did indeed namecheck Ondaatje, and read excerpts from War and Peace. If you cross that book with The English Patient and then imagine the protagonist as a teenage girl with a sword, you will have some idea of what reading The Winged Histories feels like.
  
  I'm not entirely convinced The Winged Histories stuck the ending: it's an astonishingly beautiful doomed moment, but the book is complicated enough that I want to know about the messy things after the last page. I should note, also, that while meditations on fatherhood never quite draw me in, meditations on siblinghood always do. Still thinking about that strand, among many strands.
  
  Fire Logic felt rather a lot like the Steerswoman books in style; if you thought that that series would've been improved by more women kissing, this is definitely the book for you. Oddly, Karis reminded me of my maternal grandmother.
  
  
• What are you currently reading?
  
  I started The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman, which like all Ryman books is fascinating, brilliant, and very, very weird. It's also an excruciatingly realistic portrayal of how awful it is to be a teenager. I am not quite ready for another amazing literary novel just now, and may put this aside until I'm ready to stop thinking about The Winged Histories.
  
  
• What do you think you'll read next?
  
  The new Laundry Files book. I'd hoped to find this while at a conference in England, but was thwarted by the paucity of airport bookstores.
  
  

Cross-posted from http://ursula.dreamwidth.org/17835… .

My university's student body president made national news this morning, which means it's time to make that essay I've been writing about tenure public:

https://medium.com/@superyarn/the-…

Cross-posted from http://ursula.dreamwidth.org/17793… .

Recently read: Nine Princes in Amber.
Currently reading: Guns of Avalon.
Up next: Next one in the series, probably.

I actually stumbled on A/N/N/A/R/C/H/I/V/E, read about half of the Amber Diceless RPG rules linked therein, and decided to go back & see what the Amber books looked like, from an adult perspective.

I read Nine Princes in Amber the first time on a rainy day in the library of the Sylvia Beach Hotel on the Oregon coast, when I was about thirteen. I remember wondering why nobody had told me these books existed. I was interested in the world-building, I think, and the propulsive effect of the plot. I don't remember caring about the characters, particularly.

Adult me is struck by how terrible (intentionally) the characters are, and the amount of unintentional privilege conveyed. The sexism is blatant, and the echoes of Earth's colonialist history are likely planned; the casual assumption that the realest people in all of many universes can be distinguished by their pale skin and blue or green eyes is in some ways weirder.

Thirteen-year-old me was irritated by large chunks of the prose. I retain the joke "Blue sky . . . Green sky . . . Dot dot dot . . ." Adult me is interested in the structure, though. There are tales within tales, which reminds me very much of eighteenth-century novels, and a little of medieval romance.

Cross-posted from http://ursula.dreamwidth.org/17691… .

thistleingrey asked, "Have you been knitting at all?"

My knitting productivity definitely fell after I became a tenure-track professor, but yes, I have been knitting, even if I haven't been tracking most of it.

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Right now I'm working on a brilliant teal pair of stockings with patterning inspired by this sixteenth-century boys' pair. These gilt-and-green stockings in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts are part of the case for bright colors.

Cross-posted from http://ursula.dreamwidth.org/17488… .

pinesandmaples asked, "What recipes do you default to?"

This varies by season. Right now I'm in the middle of a month of travel (holidays followed by conferences), so I'm not cooking much. On a slightly wider timescale, my defaults have been changing because I'm avoiding cheese and glasseye wants lots of protein.

My improvisation-for-lunch standards involve a lot of eggs: frittata with whatever vegetables are around, soy sauce eggs from Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East (boil eggs briefly, peel them and cut slashes in them, cook smashed garlic in oil, add soy sauce and brown or palm sugar, simmer the eggs in the sauce until brown), fried rice with a scrambled egg or two, fried egg with rice and stir-fried spinach or mushrooms with lots of hot pepper, maybe scrambled-egg tacos. This quinoa gratin makes a nice template, though I like it more with greens and something savory like sun-dried tomatoes, olives, or bacon than with the rather plain zucchini and cheese in the base recipe. If I've got smoked trout-- there's very nice smoked trout available in Wisconsin-- I'll make something inspired by kedgeree, with leftover rice, a splash of fish sauce, and a bit of almond milk.

Last winter, I bought lots of frozen spinach and peas, canned tomatoes, potatoes and carrots, cucumbers, celery, and the occasional expensive bell pepper or avocado. The regular rotation included soy sauce eggs or egg curry, Madhur Jaffrey's ground lamb with peas (I've been skipping the yoghurt), ginger chicken (dreamwidth locked recipe/ lj locked), "Send the rice down" ground beef with celery (scaled up in quantity, because Fuchsia Dunlop's accounting assumes the number of dishes is the number of people plus one), and the Pok Pok Thai salad with canned tuna, which you can easily make more substantial by adding another can of tuna and whatever crunchy vegetables you've got handy.

This sounds a bit more carnivorous than I actually am, but the vegetarian dinners tend to be prompted more by things like finding some nice fennel in the market, so they don't get repeated as often. Lately I've been excited about chickpea soup with lots of parsley and lemon or preserved lemon, and about wild rice with spinach.

Cross-posted from http://ursula.dreamwidth.org/17360… .

Suggest some topics, and I'll post about them in January?

Cross-posted from http://ursula.dreamwidth.org/17355… .

Let's take the Chaucer Hath Blog gift quiz, in the spirit of livejournal of yesteryear.

THE MOOST OOLD AND POWIRFUL QUIZZE OF GIFT PREFERENCE

1. Which element dost thou prefer: fyre, air, earth, watir?

Earth and air. (Careful high-school analysis suggests that I appear to be an earth sort of person, but am actually 100% air. This is probably still reliable.)

2. Ovid or Virgil? The Beatles or the The Stones? Seinfelde or Friendes?

Ovid; the Beatles; let's not.

3. Which humour doth dominate thy disposicioun: yellow bile, black bile, blood, phlegm?

Phlegm.

4. What type of rabbit ys best?

My sister's pet rabbits. Careful perusal of Wikipedia suggests that the Havana rabbit is pretty adorable, though.

Cross-posted from http://ursula.dreamwidth.org/17327… .

My translation of the portion of the statutes of the sixteenth-century French Ordre du Saint-Esprit concerning the initiation of a new member. In comparison to fifteenth-century ceremonies, this shows a much greater emphasis on the power of the Sovereign. As one might expect from a kingdom embroiled in religious wars, there is also a far greater emphasis on the role of the Church.

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Cross-posted from http://ursula.dreamwidth.org/169664.html .

I bought early period shoes at An Tir Twelfth Night. I try for sixth century when I'm doing early period stuff, which is a hard time period to buy shoes for: due to market forces, people sell Roman-era shoes and Viking-era shoes, but not much in between. Thus, when I saw comparatively inexpensive, plausibly at least fifth-century shoes, I jumped at the chance.

Of course, afterward I discovered that since I had last checked, there had been a new reconstruction of the sixth-century Queen Arnegunde's shoes, which suggests I really should be looking for something more slipper-like. It's still a better silhouette than my fancy leather Birkenstocks, though!

Cross-posted from http://ursula.dreamwidth.org/16817… .