Beyond Selidor

It's been a rather video-heavy weekend. Yesterday, I had the online graduation for the postgraduate certificate in teaching that I completed last year. Originally, this was meant to be an in-person graduation in May, at which I had elected to graduate in absentia. (To be perfectly honest, being there in person seemed a disproportionate amount of effort relative to the personal importance the qualification held to me.) But given the ceremony ended up being a prerecorded online event, I decided to 'attend'. What this meant in practice: sitting in leggings and lopapeysa in the living room, drinking tea, and skipping the parts of the ceremony irrelevant to me. I could get used to this style of graduation!

Several hours later, Matthias and I Zoomed in for the alumni event at the department where I did my postgraduate studies (and where he did undergraduate and postgraduate degrees). This event usually involves hanging around in the departmental common room, eating chips (crisps), drinking cheap wine, and listening to brief presentations from faculty members about their current research. Over the years, the number of friends among the alumni who still live in Cambridge has dwindled, and therefore we've rarely seen anyone we know. But because this event was online, we got to see friends in Vienna, London, Anglesey, Tübingen, and Utrecht, in addition to faculty, and it ended up being a nice way to catch up. We didn't get a chance to talk to everyone, as the organisers wisely decided not to have a thirty-person free-for-all, but rather split us into breakout rooms of three or four people.

Further online social events are on the horizon: I missed an event at which Roshani Chokshi was in conversation with SA Chakraborty to launch her new book, as it streamed live in the middle of the night in my timezone, but thankfully it's now been uploaded to Youtube. (I'm just trying to decide whether to finish the last thirty per cent of the book — which is excellent — before watching the video.)

I've also signed up for the virtual launch event for Robert Macfarlane's new book. As Macfarlane lives in my timezone (indeed he lives in my city), this is taking place at the much more civilised time of 7pm on Thursday. If anyone else is interested, you can register here (it's free, but you need to 'buy' a ticket in order to get the Zoom link).

Given my job involves teaching via videoconferencing software, and loads of other virtual meetings, I need to remember not to overdo this sort of thing in my spare time, as it can become very draining on top of the hours of Zooming and Teamsing for work, but at the moment it's pretty manageable. There are a lot of things I hope remain the norm long after we emerge on the other side of the pandemic tunnel, and above all I hope we retain a certain degree of online conferences, workshops, conventions, book festivals and book launches. They're so much more comfortable to attend, a lot of them are free, and the lack of cost and travel opens them up to a much wider audience than in-person events make possible. You lose all the in-person spontaneous networking, but in some ways I think that's a good thing.

It's growing significantly colder here (which inevitably coincided with our boiler having a hissy fit; I think we've fixed it by bleeding the radiators), and the grim greyness and gales of wind certainly didn't encourage me to go outdoors. That made it the perfect time to curl up with lots of virtual social events, get my Yuletide nominations in, and catch up on a bunch of Dreamwidth comments. Sometimes, that's a nice way to spend the weekend.

I had today off work, for yet another of the three- or four-day weekends I'm taking for the remainder of July and August, and it seems to have reset my mental health for the better. I suspect it was all the cleaning. Today's cleaning has involved:

Cleaning the bathroom

Mopping the floors after Matthias vacuumed

Cleaning the kitchen sink and counters

Defrosting the freezer

Wet-dusting the two remaining bookshelves (having done the other bookshelves last week)

I've also repotted a few of my herb seedlings into the container garden outside, made a huge pot of chicken stock to freeze in batches, and read three books over the course of the weekend, meaning I'm now 2/3 of the way through my reread of Aliette de Bodard's Dominion of the Fallen series and Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series.

I haven't done as much yoga as I'd have liked over the past three days, but I did at least manage one short restorative session focusing on neck, arms and upper back earlier this afternoon.

The big highlight of the weekend was going on a train to Ely to meet up with notasapleasure and her husband. They are the first people Matthias and I have seen in person, other than delivery drivers and shop assistants, since mid-March. Being on the train made me feel very nervous, even if was only 20 minutes and with everyone wearing masks (other than the two young guys behind us on the way back, who were drinking can after can of beer and talking loudly — and I suspect not entirely truthfully — about their Tinder conquests ... sigh). But it was nice to be able to go slightly further afield, and sit out on the patio of our favourite Ely cafe, and eat homemade Georgian food, and dumplings, and salad made from vegetables grown in our friends' allotment. I'm not sure we'll be repeating such adventures frequently (the train feels like an extravagence and a risk), but as a one off it was good.

And tomorrow it's back to work for another four days, and then another long weekend, and then the whole thing repeats itself.

Working from home continues without change for us in the academic library world, in spite of the garbled, incoherent, irresponsible messaging from the government. I've had a pretty good working week — a bit of online teaching, a bunch of Twitter and website analytics (which basically just told me what I knew already), a lot of research support, and some very good professional news which I can't post about yet. It's looking like my university/employer is in this for the long haul.

This morning I chatted with my mother in Australia, this afternoon Matthias and I will be having virtual drinks with friends in Ely and Vienna, and next weekend we'll have a virtual catch-up with our friends in Devon, whose house we were meant to be visiting this time next week. That's probably about the amount of online socialising I can handle — I'm pretty introverted and find any more than that incredibly draining.

This weekend should be Eurovision, and Matthias and I would normally have hosted some kind of viewing party. Obviously the actual song contest is not going ahead, but the BBC are putting on a Eurovision retrospective/showcase thingy, so I think we'll watch that tonight.

Other than work and video calls, life is punctuated, as ever, by TV and books. I'm aiming to write a couple of longer roundup posts towards the end of the month.

I'm currently doing a Pagan Chronicles reread, which is my ultimate comfort series, and always makes me want to write Babylonne/Isidore fanfic. The trouble is that I find it hard to come up with plots beyond 'Babylonne and Isidore bicker amiably with each other about medieval theology.'

I hope you're all safe and well.

Somehow I've managed to get all the chores and tasks I wanted done by lunchtime on Saturday, leaving the rest of the weekend free, free, free. I spent the morning at the market, then weeded the garden, cleaned all the gutters on the roof, cleaned the bathroom, and mopped the floors after Matthias had vacuumed. I then wrote a quick blog post on my reviews blog, which looked at the two books by journalists who exposed Harvey Weinstein's decades of abusive behaviour towards women — Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow, and She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. You can read the review here. Obviously this one has a content warning for discussion of sexual abuse. As always with my reviews posted elsewhere, I'm happy to discuss their content either on the original review post, or over here on Dreamwidth.

I've spent the afternoon doing a very long, slow yoga session, the kind where you hold poses for a long time, with an emphasis on flexibility. The rest of the evening will be spent cooking, and then eating, a three-course meal (which in all honesty is an excuse to drink some of the nice wine that we've had in our house for ages). It's windy and miserable outside, and set to get colder, but I have filled the house with flowers, candles, light, warmth, and, hopefully, delicious cooking, making a cozy nest to guard against the last gasps of winter.

Tomorrow notasapleasure and her husband will be visiting in the afternoon, mainly to collect some garden chairs which we no longer need, and Matthias and I may possibly head into town for a book fair, but that will depend on whether we can bear the thought of leaving the house. In other words, things should be fairly calm and quiet.

What have you all been up to?

An overly melodramatic title for this post? We'll see on Thursday night. But it really has felt that I've spent the past two weeks storing up happiness in case I need to remember the feeling later, trying to do as much as possible in some kind of frenzy to keep the fear at bay.

( Last weekend in London )

( TV, books and films of the past two weeks )

This weekend began with the annual Christmas party for Cambridge librarians, which one of the booksellers in the town always puts on for us. It was nice to spend a few hours with Matthias, notasapleasure and her husband, clutching glasses of mulled wine and moving around the bookshelves, while outside the rain poured down. The books in the shop are discounted to librarians during the Christmas party, and a lot of my colleagues use this as opportunity to buy all their Christmas presents, but I was restrained and bought nothing.

Yesterday was the annual Mill Road Winter Fair, when all the restaurants, cafes and other shops throw open their doors and sell hot food from stalls outside, joined by live music, various food trucks and other market sellers. Last year Matthias had been too sick with a cold to go, but this year we were determined, and spent a nice few hours out in the sunshine, eating, drinking, and generally enjoying one of my favourite events of the Cambridge year.

Today has been all about resting and recuperating, drinking soup and tea, preparing meals in advance for next week, and writing another Yuletide treat. I've now written four fics for the collection — my main assignment, and three treats — and have two ideas for more fic percolating in my mind. The best I've ever managed has been four fics per Yuletide, so if I can get these two written in the next week it will be my most productive year by far. I'm hoping all will be well received.

What's everyone else been up to, this weekend or otherwise?

(Not because nothing has happened, but simply because I do not have the energy to keep up.)

I don't normally log TV viewing in the way I do books read, but I've watched so many shows recently — beloved old favourites finishing forever, perennials returning for another batch of episodes, new things popping up on my radar — that I felt I had to write a little bit about each one.

( TV shows behind the cut )

Matthias has gone out to meet up with a friend from the US who was a visiting scholar in our former academic department in the year I did my MPhil, but I decided to stay at home and just rest a bit. I've spent the morning doing yoga, housework, and reading every Vasya/Morozko fic (in the Winternight trilogy fandom) on Ao3. This evening is the alumni event for my old department (this weekend is alumni weekend in Cambridge), so I'll head out to be sociable in a few hours' time. Tomorrow will be more socialising — spending the afternoon in Ely with notasapleasure, her husband, and a couple of their friends. All in all, it should be a good weekend.

This weekend's been a bit of a mixed bag in terms of activities, and it hasn't been particularly relaxing. But given the state of the world, I'm not sure I'm capable of relaxing at the moment, anyway.

I went back to Market Square at Saturday lunchtime for the large Stop the Coup/Defend Democracy rally, which was mostly all right, but frustrating on account of several of the speakers, who seemed set on turning it into a pro-Corbyn rally. I recognise that it was organised by the Labour Party, so there was going to be a slant towards Labour MPs, union leaders and so on as speakers, all of whom clearly want a Corbyn government very much — but that was not why the rally had been called. It had been called to protest Boris Johnson's prorogation of parliament, and, secondarily, to protest a no-deal Brexit. A Corbyn government may be the best — or indeed the only — way to stop those things, but I was not at the rally due to a burning desire for Corbyn to be prime minister, and I resented the attempts of several speakers to pretend this was so. In other words, stop frothing in rage about Lib Dems and Blairites: there are fascists at the gates. Stop that immediate threat first. (And, from a purely practical perspective, basically the only way they are going to get their Corbyn government is by keeping the Lib Dems, 'Blairites', and at minimum one Conservative MP on side, so relitigating the coalition years and the past three general elections is profoundly unhelpful.)

After the rally, Matthias and I met up with our friends L, C, and their four-month-old baby daughter (who we were meeting for the first time) for lunch. L and C were pretty sleep deprived, which was very understandable, but it was nice to sit out in the sun and catch up. They live in Devon now, and we normally only see them about once or twice a year, so I appreciated that they'd made the effort to travel through Cambridge en route to a holiday in Norfolk.

Today I've been alternating between scrolling in despair and fury through Twitter, and reading The Paper Bark Tree Mystery, the third in Ovidia Yu's series of cozy mysteries set in 1930s Singapore.

I can't say it's been a particularly restful weekend, but these are not restful times.

Thirty Day Book Meme Day 9: Film or TV tie-in

You know, I don't think I have ever owned, or even read, a book in this category. I've read lots of books that went in the other direction (i.e. were adapted for film or television), but not tie-ins. So rather than rack my brains trying to think of a book that I know doesn't exist, why don't those of you who do read tie-ins use the comments to tell me about your favourites?

( The other days )

Matthias and I are heading out later today to catch up with two of our friends who are visiting from Vienna. They're just two among the many people I know who have left the UK because of Brexit. It will be good to see them (we're all going out for a curry at a new restaurant), but I'm sad about the circumstances.

I don't have much to catch up on in terms of reading. I finished P. Djèlí Clarke's novella 'The Haunting of Tramcar 015' (another story set in an alternate, steampunk Egypt when djinn and other supernatural beings live openly among the human population), which was excellent, although as with all of Clarke's work, it left me wishing that it had been expanded to novel length. I also read 'Lullaby for a Lost World,' a creepy, gothic short story by Aliette de Bodard (freely available on the Tor.com website should you want to read it), and have begun reading God's War by Kameron Hurley. I'm nearly finished it, but it's left me with the conclusion that Hurley's writing is just not for me. It's grimdark in a specific way that I find really repellent, and I particularly dislike that she writes societies where women are uniformly violent, cruel, and exploitative (I do know that this is kind of her thing, so I wasn't unaware of this element going in). This is the second book of hers I've read, and I think it's probably time to stop trying her writing.

It's been snowing in much of the UK this weekend, although not in Cambridge. However, it has been freezing here — witness the frost as I walked in to the market this morning. I've just returned from a walk to and from Grantchester, and although it was around 2pm when I was out, much of the frost on the ground has not thawed at all.

Other than walking around in frosty landscapes, I've spent a lot of the weekend out — on Friday night Matthias and I went out to one of our favourite wine shops/bars for a few drinks and food truck dinner, and on Saturday it was my former academic department's annual black tie dinner. The number of current students/postdocs/lecturers I know in the department shrinks every year, but most of the time alumni come back for the dinner, so there's always a good handful of people I know to catch up with at the dinner.

My remaining spare time this weekend has been spent reading. As well as Roshani Chokshi's glorious The Gilded Wolves, which I finished on Friday and will probably review more extensively later, I devoured K.J. Charles's The Magpie Lord while lying in a pool of sunshine on the couch this morning. I know a lot of people in my circle are fans of Charles (if my Goodreads feed is anything to go by), and enough people whose reading tastes I trust seemed to have read some or all of her work, so I thought I'd give it a try. It was a sweet, undemanding m/m romance novel, a great blend of mystery, historical fiction and fantasy, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It felt to me as if it could be an interlude within the universe of Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell — the way magic worked felt similar, as did the scaffolding of myth and folklore, although it lacked the literary-ness (and playful re- and deconstruction of the conventions of nineteenth-century novels). And it was just restful to read about fundamentally good and decent people being generous and brave, you know? As a bonus, the ebook also included a short story, 'Interlude with Tattoos', set in the same world, which temporarily fed my hunger for this series — although I suspect I will be buying the next two books in the series as soon as I've finished this blog post!

Other books I've read recently include Katherine Arden's The Winter of the Witch, which again I plan to review more extensively later, The Mermaids in the Basement by Marina Warner (a short story collection in the vein of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, in which biblical tales, stories from Greek myth and so on are given a second-wave feminist twist), and The Prince of Darkness, the fourth in Sharon K. Penman's Justin de Quincy stories (historical mysteries in which the protagonist is a private detective of sorts working for Eleanor of Aquitaine). Both these latter two books had been on my 'to read' list for a very long time, so I'm glad to have finally read them.

What has everyone else been reading this week?

Matthias' birthday is 16th November, and, in a rather uncharacteristic manner,* we celebrated it early, in London, on Friday night and most of Saturday. This is because four of the '90s Eurodance acts that he grew up adoring — but, as a young teenager never had the opportunity to see live — were performing together in a club in the O2 Arena, cashing in on Gen Y nostalgia, on Friday night. Given the closeness of the event to his birthday, I offered to get us tickets as a present, and he overcame his squeamishness about 'pre-celebration'. While theoretically it would have been possible to make the last train back to Cambridge after the concert, we opted to stay overnight in a budget hotel, in order to see the British Library exhibition on the Anglo-Saxons (which covered history, and Old English literature and intellectual culture) on Saturday morning.

Both the concert and the exhibition ended up being all about international connections, openness, intercultural exchange, and the 'outward look' more generally.

I had been dubious about how four groups/singers — Maxx, Masterboy, Haddaway, and 2 Unlimited — notorious as one-hit, or at best two-hit wonders, were going to find enough material to fill an entire concert, but I shouldn't have worried. They knew why they were there: to play that handful of hits, and get a crowd of nostalgic thirty- and forty-somethings dancing, and on that they delivered. It certainly worked for me, and as for Matthias, he was bouncing around in sheer energetic joy. If the bands resented having to play the songs that made them famous circa 1992-1995 they gave no indication of it, and treated the audience in that tiny club as if it were a sold-out stadium tour.

As we queued to go into the club, we heard no languages other than Polish, and, judging by the makeup of the audience, I would say it was mainly Polish, Romanian, and Lithuanian people. And, as I jumped around enthusiastically, being elbowed in the face by the extremely tall, very perky, glowstick-covered Lithuanian guy in front of me, and being hugged and danced with by the very drunk, very friendly Irish woman next to me, while an ageing Dutch popstar yelled 'TECHNO, TECHNO, TECHNO!' at us, I felt a bittersweet kind of joy at this easy, effortless, pan-European sense of community, at home together in London, brought together by cheesy Eurodance nostalgia, and a fury at how easily it is about to be taken away, by people who never saw its value.

The Anglo-Saxons exhibition was excellent.** I didn't really learn anything new — although my major in undergrad, MPhil, and PhD are in medieval Irish literature, my department where I undertook the MPhil and PhD are multidisciplinary, focusing on the languages, literatures, history and material culture of medieval Ireland, Britain, and Scandinavia, so it's impossible not to learn about Old English literature and Anglo-Saxon history by osmosis in an environment like that (and indeed, as the exhibition makes plain, to study any medieval culture in isolation is absurd). However, it was great to see so many important manuscripts all brought together in the one exhibition space. Matthias was like a child in a sweet shop, and in particular was deeply moved to see the Vercelli Manuscript, Junius Manuscript, Exeter Book and Beowulf Manuscript — representing the entirety of extant Old English poetry — side by side. (Whenever I'm reminded that those four manuscripts are all that survive of the Old English poetic corpus I am deeply grateful that I chose to study medieval Irish, with its embarassment of riches when it comes to vernacular manuscripts!)

The exhibition as a whole was mainly manuscripts — the vernacular poetry ones I mentioned above, law codes, religious writing, hymn books with musical notation, saints' Lives, grammatical texts to teach Latin, legal codes, medical writing, history, and charters — with a few other artifacts of material culture, such as jewellery (including the famous 'Alfred jewel'), pottery, and weapons. What I particularly appreciated (and overheard many other exhibition attendees remarking on) was the relentless emphasis on the international component and outward-looking nature of Anglo-Saxon societies. The enduring networks, reinforced by diplomacy, political marriages, trade, and the exchange of ideas, were mentioned in all the displays' descriptions: the movement of manuscripts between ecclesiastical establishments in Britain, Ireland, and continental Europe (and even, in some cases, from places further afield such as North Africa), the movement of people between royal courts on both sides of the Channel, and the exchange of ideas apparent in more prosaic form — in the design of jewellery, belt-buckles, coins, or calligraphy. On one level it was dispiriting to overhear so many other attendees remarking on how astonishing they found all these connections, because this made it plain how pervasive is the common perception of medieval insularity. But I suppose on the other hand at least those attendees will go away with a new understanding of how international, interconnected, and outward-looking medieval people could be, and that the concept of national borders and identities has always been fluid and complicated. That the ocean was not a barrier, but rather a highway. That the lies nationalists tell about the peoples studied in my former academic discipline are just that — lies, deceptive myths designed to comfort and simplify for people who find complexity discomforting. That the wider world has always been there, and even premodern people engaged with it. That intellectual and creative culture has always been a collaborative effort, in conversation with itself, open to 'outside' influences.

In other words, there has always been migration, and migrants. And, as was made clear in the Eurodance concert on Friday night, we migrants are still here, and this is still our home, and we will remain, and we will go on dancing.

__________

*'Uncharacteristic' because, as a German, he has a deep aversion to celebrating birthdays in advance, which is felt to be tempting fate.
**Inevitably we bumped into someone we knew from the department at Cambridge where we did our degrees. She was there with her husband and small son. Cambridge is a very, very small town, even when it's in London.