Beyond Selidor

It's full-blown autumn, and the world has suddenly become laden with falling leaves, rosehips, and the sharp smell of woodsmoke. We picked the last of the pears from the pear tree, and today's storm seems to have dislodged the remaining apples, so I think that's it for the fruit harvest until next year. Everything feels very much as if it is simultaneously winding down (I want to lounge around in the house in oversized woollen jumpers in front of the woodburning stove) and building up (the inevitable chaos and busyness that the start of the academic year brings). I've just now signed up for Yuletide, although I need to watch the letters app and signup summary carefully to make sure that my offers go the way I expect.

In less good news, everyone around me keeps getting COVID — my coworker and one of her daughters, friends in other UK cities, family members of colleagues and so on. They're all getting it relatively mildly due to being vaccinated, but it is worrying and frustrating, particularly since the people who are mixing with the greatest variety of others — secondary school and university students — seem to be the most averse to wearing masks in public indoor spaces. I had to teach my first in-person class since March 2020 and my students were thankfully all masked up, but Matthias taught two back-to-back inductions in which all the students removed their masks and coughed the whole time. It's all very frustrating.

In even less good but inevitable news, Al-Jazeera has just published an investigative journalism piece revealing the appalling behaviour of one of the most senior academics in my former field. ( Cut for mentions of sexual harassment and abuse of power )

Let's move on to more pleasant things — a Reading Wednesday roundup on an actual Wednesday. My reading this month has very much been a mixture of soft and gentle rereads, and sharp, thorny stuff.

The former definitely includes my reread of Felicia Davin's Gardener's Hand trilogy — a fantasy adventure series set on a tidally-locked planet subject to unpredictable natural disasters, in which certain people possess supernatural abilities, and are feared, pitied, or valued for these powers, depending on the culture in which they live. But what it's really about is found family, in recovering from trauma and saving the world and building something beautiful in the process. The main trio of characters are all bisexual, and all in love with each other, and the resolution to this somewhat love triangle is extremely satisfying. I'm only annoyed that I didn't remember this series in time for Yuletide nominations, but there's always next year! I wrote about the series in more detail the first time I read it.

Sadly, my next book read — The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake — was less satisfying. This is the first book in a new series set in a magical secret society, and it's definitely part of the growing trend in dark academia/campus novels that's sweeping through fantasy literature publishing at the moment. Some of my favourite books are campus novels/dark academia (Possession, The Secret History), and I'm looking forward to some forthcoming publications in this subgenre (A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid), but I think I'm just a bit too picky when it comes to most dark academia. This one had unsympathetic characters, a badly telegraphed twist, and just in general felt like it was trying too hard to be mean and edgy, and the overall effect was something I struggled to connect with.

I'm now working my way through a reread of the first three Terra Ignota books. The fourth and final volume in the series was published yesterday, and Matthias and I had preordered it, but our copy hasn't arrived yet, so thankfully I have some time yet to get myself up to speed. (I normally buy ebooks or borrow from the library, but Terra Ignota is a series I would find impossible to read in any format other than a printed book.) It's definitely a series that rewards slow and careful rereading, and I'm picking up on so much stuff this second time around. Terra Ignota is also a series that asks uncomfortable questions of its readers, and I'm not always proud of my answers, but I'm always in awe of how ambitious Ada Palmer was with this — her first published fiction — and the degree to which her ability is worthy of that ambition.

While I'm very glad I left academia after receiving my PhD, I do like to dip my toe back in from time to time. Most of my 'real-life' friends are people I met during my postgraduate studies (the majority of whom are still in academia, scattered around the world), and I'm still on a couple of mailing lists in order to keep vaguely aware of scholarly developments.

This is how I found out about a freely available recording of a presentation by my former PhD supervisor, on dindshenchas — place-name literature (a genre of medieval Irish literature which provides pseudohistorical explanations for the etymology of Irish placenames). I worked on dindshenchas for my PhD — my thesis was about authority, exile and dispossession, and the ways history, and etymology were used to claim authority over land, and dispossess others from their claims. My supervisor has taken these ideas further, and has just embarked on a four-year project on dindshenchas, and mapping the literary, imaginative, and physical landscape of medieval Ireland. (More pleasingly, one of my other friends, someone I met when we were both PhD students on a summer course at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies together, is also attached to the project.)

All this by way of preamble to link to my supervisor Máire's recorded presentation. I find it very accessible — she provides explanation and context for those who are not specialists. The video is embedded below. (Note that the person introducing the presentation speaks briefly in Irish, but the talk itself is in English.)



I love thinking about the intersection of land, memory, landscape, belonging and dispossession, in medieval Irish literature, and more broadly.

That is why I'm so happy to have discovered (thanks to a link via notasapleasure), 'the Roma futurist play where cyber witches stop Brexit'.

Romancen is described as a Roma futurist play about radical feminists that fight xenophobic governments through hacking, [and] mixes incantations, hip hop music, and a futuristic aesthetic, with costumes inspired by both sci-fi and traditional Roma motifs.

It's up on Youtube here, with English subtitles:

Welcome, new people who have subscribed as a result of the friending meme. It's great to see so much activity here on Dreamwidth, and I'm really looking forward to getting to know you all.

Due to this flurry of activity, I thought it best to do an updated intro post. People who've had me in their circles for a while, please feel free to read or skip as you please. And both new and old people, please feel free to ask me any questions!

( Those things they see in me I cannot see myself )

I have had an absolutely epic (and fantastic) weekend. It began with a bang, with the ASNaC Society black tie dinner, which involved three courses of Scandinavian food, one mead-filled drinking horn, one drunken dance uploaded to Facebook and several bizarre d and m conversations with people with whom I wouldn't normally discuss my personal life. I followed this with a sprint through snow-filled streets to deliver some of losseniaiel's belongings which she'd left in my room, before beginning my first shift at the English faculty library (with complementary blinding hangover).

Then I got on a train and went to Southampton.

( I met some sraffies )

It was a wonderful, excellent weekend!

Well, that viva was fun, if by 'fun' you mean 'travelling around with St Brendan, existing on a diet of lentils, while Dr Thunderous Laughter quizzes you about Middle Irish linguistic features'. In other words, I have no idea how I went. The questions seemed difficult, the examiners seemed determined to play devil's advocate, and I left feeling demoralised, but that may have more to do with my natural inclination towards pessimism than any actual problems with my viva. All the PhD students claimed that their vivas were easy (L. even claimed he was hungover while he did his). That didn't feel easy to me!

Then losseniaiel and I went out and drank cheap Australian wine and commiserated.

I feel like I should be more upset than I actually am, but I can't make myself feel worried. If this is all there is, if MPhil is as far as I get academically, it won't be the end of the world. I don't feel like I'm owed anything by Cambridge, and if all I get out of this year is a fantastic group of friends and a sense of belonging somewhere, in some time and some place, it really, really will be enough. I can't emphasise this enough. My MPhil year was the making of me, and if I now lapse back into mediocrity, I know that for 2008-09 I became better, tried harder, thought more, and was who I was supposed to be at that time. And that is enough.

I wrote this in my 'paper' diary this morning, but looking at it, I think I'd like to put it out in the semi-public domain of this blog. I was thinking about yesterday's meme, with the question 'what's the best way of telling someone that s/he means something to you?' and for me, this is a way I can let certain people know how much they mean to me. It's slightly edited.

( This is going to get very, very wordy )

I suspect this will be very tl;dr to most of you, but I want the ASNaCs and other Cambridge friends of mine who read this blog to know that they mean so much to me. It's very hard for me to say these things directly to you, but that doesn't mean I don't feel these things.

Thanks to steamboatsnorri for letting me steal his photos.

( Conforming to ASNaC stereotypes? Do you even need to ask? )