Beyond Selidor

I did my last teaching of the year last week, I had meetings with four separate students today — and no more 1:1 meetings remaining — and I just have one half-day of work remaining for 2025. Between work and illness, I feel almost flattened with exhaustion, so it's a real relief to have my upcoming holiday almost in touching distance.

Today's December talking meme prompt is from lokifan, favourite places to visit around Cambridge.

I could talk about so many, but I will limit myself to three(ish), in three different categories. You'll get lots of guides to Cambridge highlighting the beautiful old colleges and grounds, the standard walk out to the village of Grantchester along the river, punting tours and so on, so I'll stay off this beaten track.

My favourite museum/gallery in Cambridge is Kettle's Yard, which is a contemporary art gallery with a difference. It started out as the home of Jim and Helen Ede, art collectors, who hosted frequent open house events for students to view and tour their collection, and was later gifted by the Edes to the university. Now, the former living space is preserved essentially as it was — filled with objects from the Edes' collection, plus lots of lovely indoor plants — and students can come in and use it as a quiet study space. Other visitors to the gallery get a guided tour of the space, and then can move on to the extension, which is an exhibition space displaying temporary exhibitions. It's an absolutely beautiful, jewel-like little oasis of calm, and rewards return visits. This is a photoset of photos I took there many years ago.

My favourite outdoor space in Cambridge was somewhere I discovered serendipitously during the first days of the pandemic lockdown in early 2020. I had leapt into working from home with enthusiasm, and had deliberately built a whole bunch of routines into the day out of a mistaken fear that Matthias and I would be stressed or irritated or find things monotonous, and one such deliberate routine was my obsession with having short walks outside after lunch, to ensure we moved and saw the sunlight. One day, I made a spontaneous decision to go down a little street I'd never ventured before, and I ended up, quite literally, in Paradise (Nature Reserve). This is Paradise. We had lived with this beautiful, green, jungly place just around the corner from us for eight years and had never known. For the last year we lived in that little house under the ivy, it became a favourite spot. Walking into it was like inhaling deeply.

Foodwise, my favourite high-end places are this one (entirely vegetarian tasting menus; they also have a wonderful newsletter that gathers together curated links on all things foodie, crafty, cultural and local), this one (seafood), and this one, and in general I love the Mill Road area, which is home to two of the previously linked restaurants, but also a great cocktail bar, some excellent cheaper restaurants and takeaway places, and all the Asian, Eastern European, South Asian, Middle Eastern etc grocery stores in the city.

It was a good place to live — and it became more interesting, especially in a culinary sense, during the thirteen years that I lived there.

We're back for another December talking meme post. This prompt is from nerakrose: quintessentially Australian books.

This is not really a week in which I feel much like talking about quintessentially Australian anything, but I'll do my best.

I need to start out with a caveat, though. I haven't lived in Australia for more than seventeen years, and I often feel a bit out of touch from the country's contemporary politics, culture, and so on. So my answer reflects, in some ways, an Australia frozen in the 2000s, and many Australians who do actually live there now, and who have lived there in the intervening twenty-ish years may feel that my answer doesn't reflect their current reality.

( With that disclaimer out of the way, here's my answer )

This is my second time taking a December talking meme prompt and using it for a Friday open thread. Today's prompt comes from thatjustwontbreak and is: talk about your earliest experiences using the internet and how it felt to you.

( They looked towards the sun, and walked into the sky )

I imagine it won't be as ... so much as all that, but what about you? How do you define your first time using the internet, and what did it feel like?

This is a belated attempt to catch up on some book logging, and consists of stuff read while flying to, from, and within Australia, plus on some Australian train journeys. As most of the flights took place at night, I didn't read as much as I could have given the time available, so I feel this list is somewhat shorter than expected.

In any case, I read five books.

The first two were the latest to me in the Clorinda Cathcart series, Dramatick Rivalry and Domestick Disruptions. This series by LA Hall is written from the perspective of the journal entries of a comfortably well-off courtesan in 19th-century London, and the various aristocrats, wealthy businesspeople, intellectuals, scientists, playwrights, theatrical actors, Bow Street Runners, and other interesting fictional luminaries who end up in her circle. The books are written with a wryly observant tone, and each contains various high- and low-stakes challenges and conflicts that are cleverly resolved by the end. I find them extremely relaxing to read — cosy fiction is a hard sell for me, but this series works well in that regard, although I'm making my way through it quite slowly, as I find two books in succession is enough for a while.

In general, my brain focused better on nonfiction during long-haul flights, so I spent a lot of time reading Diary of an Invasion (Andrey Kurkov), which is what it says on the tin: the author's experiences in the first few months of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Kurkov is an accomplished Ukrainian author of both literary and historical detective fiction, but in those intense, frightening first few months of the full-scale war, he turned his talents to memoir, documenting his family's flight from Kyiv to the west of the country, when it felt as if the entire country and wider world held its breath, and every action was harnessed to survival, until the dawning realisation that Ukraine had withstood and pushed back against the first blow, but that what remained would be an almost unfathomably difficult military, diplomatic, economic and psychosocial marathon with no end in sight. I remember those times well: shock and outrage warring with wild hope and optimism, typified by this Onuka song. Kurkov has since followed these initial reactions with a memoir about the long years of the ongoing war, which I will certainly be seeking out.

From history to historical fiction, with Cecily (Annie Garthwaite), the first in a series of novels about the Wars of the Roses from the perspective of Yorkist matriarch Cecily Neville. This book follows Cecily from the early years of her marriage, her years manoeuvring from behind the scenes to further her husband's political ambitions, his battlefield defeat and execution, and the dawn of a new day with Cecily's eldest son Edward on the throne. I'm pretty familiar with this period of history as depicted in popular fiction, and Cecily didn't really bring anything new to the party, but I enjoyed it all the same. In terms of vibe, it's essentially Hilary Mantel meets Sharon Kay Penman: lyrical writing that luxuriates in the interiority of its protagonist's mind, and uncritically Yorkist partisanship. The term grates, but Cecily Neville really is Garthwaite's precious blorbo who can do no wrong: the most politically savvy, the one whose read on every situation is always right, whose only misfortune is to live in a time in which those skills and that intelligence must instead be harnessed to advance the cause of the men in her life, rather than on her own behalf.

Finally, I picked up Kate Elliott's latest epic fantasy doorstopper: The Witch Road, the first of a secondary world duology in which Elen, a low-ranking courier at the edge of a vast empire is suddenly thrust into an unwanted spotlight when she is required to accompany an imperial prince and his retinue on a perilous journey. Elen and her travelling companions contend with challenges both political and supernatural, in a sweeping road trip peopled with a fantastic cast of characters. Kate Elliott's considerable strengths as a writer: the meticulous world-building that gives us a fictional world that feels at once three-dimensional and lived-in, and her devastatingly perceptive depiction of the tensions inherent in navigating profoundly power-imbalanced relationships (on a national, communal, and interpersonal level) are on full display here, and I enjoyed this almost as much as I enjoyed my favourite of her series, the Crossroads trilogy.

That's it for reading so far, although I did trudge through the rain to pick up a library book today, so I may have more to say about books tomorrow. But for now, I'll draw this post to a close.

I'm back home after two weeks away visiting my family in Australia. The arrival on Saturday morning — into freezing, driving rain and dark skies, after an unpleasant, sleepless, turbulent flight — was a bit of a shock to the system, but sleeping for 11 hours last night, plus coffee and pastries for breakfast this morning have done a lot to help. The garden is waterlogged and austere, but although all the fruit trees now have bare branches, astonishingly some of the flowering plants in the raised beds still have blooms on them.

Australia was the usual whirlwind of family visits (my parents and sisters live in two different states, which obviously necessitates a domestic flight to see my dad, stepmother and three of my sisters, plus I have five aunts — two of whom live in a seaside town an hour or so outside Sydney), catching up with friends, and various other bits and pieces. This time around I also took the opportunity to have a bunch of medical appointments that would likely have been difficult or impossible to get in the UK, and it's ridiculous how astonishing and nice it felt to receive medical care in settings where the doctors, nurses and other health professionals don't seem worn down by austerity and chronic understaffing. My Australian GP is the same one attended by my mum, sister #1, one of my aunts, her husband and adult children, and also both my maternal grandparents when they were alive, and the receptionist knows that all of us are related, and told me how much she loved my grandparents, which was sweet.

Other than friends and family, I have two main priorities when it comes to Australian visits: food, and bodies of water, and I made sure I got my fill of both of them. There is nothing that compares to an Australian cafe brunch, Australian coffee is second to none, and I took every opportunity to indulge in both, as well as eating my body weight in mangoes, which are impossible to get in any good quality in the UK. When in Melbourne, Matthias and I went out for a tasting menu at this incredible place for his birthday, and (at the brilliant suggestion of sister #1) mum, sister #1, Matthias and I spent the first weekend of the trip recouperating from jetlag at this beautiful place, which also involved a couple of delicious dinners and breakfasts, and that — plus a couple of other meals out — meant we were extremely well served on the culinary front.

Bodies of water included many swims with Mum at the best outdoor swimming pool, and the ocean in various guises. I have, of course, documented this secular pilgramage with a photoset here, storing up my memory of these home oceans until the next visit.

Returning to Australia is always psychologically odd, and this trip was no different, but I'm glad to have done it, and glad to have been there at this time of the year. And, above all, I feel immensely grateful for the fact that I'm an immigrant able to return to my country of origin when I want to, rather than having to close that door forever and sever that connection. I may have made the choice to live under different skies and beside different bodies of water, but the seas and skies that made me are always a twenty-four-hour flight away, still within reach.

It's been a nice, cosy, relaxing weekend, after a long run of weeks packed with activities. I've currently got chicken stock bubbling away on the stove in the next room over, ready to be used in tonight's soup for dinner. Both the sound and smell of stock are the epitome of warmth to me.

The extra hour of sleep was extremely welcome, and it was glorious to wake up in full sunlight after weeks of dark mornings (although the months of darkness at 4pm is always going to hit me like a hammer), walk out to the pool in the freezing sunlit air (all the neighbourhood cats were sitting in their respective windows, looking out at pedestrians as if we were crazy for being outside), swim my regular 1km in an uncharacteristically empty pool, and then walk along the river and through the market with Matthias. The sun disappeared at virtually the exact moment we walked back through the door of our house, which was unintentionally impeccable timing on our part.

Other good things: the pottery taster class last week was lovely. I was spectacularly bad at it — there are just so many things to keep track of, and the smallest, most subtle hand movement or shift in the body's position can cause a pot to collapse beyond repair on the wheel — but the setting was great, the instructor was patient, and the activity was meditative. I definitely want to do more, but it will probably need to wait until next year, due to various upcoming travels and other activities. It was good to try it out, though.

Last weekend, Matthias and I also went down to London on Sunday to attend, of all things, a sumo tournament (the first outside Japan in nearly 35 years) in the Royal Albert Hall. Matthias, who's never met a sport he doesn't like (except for golf), got massively into sumo a few years back, and the serendipitous existence of this exhibition tournament in London was too good to miss. As with many of his interests, I was just happy to be along for the ride, but I ended up having a great time. I love the Albert Hall as an events venue, and it worked brilliantly here. It was packed to the rafters, including with lots of groups of youngish children who were clearly massive fans (with banners, etc).

Work has been exhausting, and my choice of reading material (mostly rereads of childhood favourites) has reflected that, although I did finally get to The Voyage Home, the concluding book in Pat Barker's trilogy of books retelling events in and around the Iliad from various female characters' perspectives. The first two books are the Briseis-centric retelling of my heart — the versions of these stories for which I'd been searching for decades, trudging through a lot of dross to get to — and I'd been a bit sad to see that Barker had decided Briseis's story was done in the second book, and moved on to other characters. Did the world really need yet another retelling of the tragedy of Cassandra, Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, and was Barker actually going to add anything to this well-trodden ground with her contribution? Even after finishing the book, I'm not sure I know the answer — I found it excellent and compelling, but unlike Barker's take on Briseis (which I talk about in more detail here), it didn't dig itself into the spaces around my heart, with truths at once obvious and devastating. Violent patriarchal honour culture is awful, and will destroy everyone, including violent patriarchs? Life goes on, and people will find a way to survive, in spite of incredible devastation, carving out their own little spaces of safety wherever they can? These are interesting enough as animating ideas, but do they justify yet another retelling?

In my wanderings yesterday, I went past the independent bookshop and bought my own copy of The Rose Field, the concluding brick of a tome in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials sequel/prequel trilogy, The Book of Dust. I've only read 150 of 600+ pages, so I'll make no firm conclusions here, other than to state I feel quite bittersweet about the whole thing. His Dark Materials was utterly formative for me (I read it at exactly the right ages, while having to wait for the second two books to be published), and it is no exaggeration to say that if not for picking up Northern Lights/The Golden Compass as a thirteen-year-old, I would not be living in this country, have done the PhD that I did, be working in the line of work that I do, nor be married to the person that I am. The message boards of a fan forum for HDM were my first experience of online fandom, and remain my gold standard for fannish community. I'm still good friends with most of the people I met through the forum, though our days of dissecting Pullman's books and speculating about future directions of the series are long gone. They've all been posting photos of their own copies of The Rose Field and seem for the most part hugely excited to see how Lyra's story concludes. I myself feel quite alienated by all this, and hesitant to raise my ambivalence. I loved the prequel of this new trilogy, but found the second book (chronologically, the first half of the 'sequel' component of the trilogy) not just a let down, but actively enraging (there's a whole vanished Twitter DM conversation between me and sophia.mcdougall consisting of me ranting in real time as I read my way further through the book), and apparently laying the groundwork for one of my few massive character dynamic squicks. It didn't change how I felt about the original trilogy, because that's so embedded in me that there's no extracting it, but it did cause a major shift in my overall thinking about Pullman as a writer. So far, I don't have such a strong Do Not Want reaction to The Rose Field, but it's early days, and my overall assessment hinges on how all the various threads are pulled together.

Rather than leaving this post on such a grumbling note, I will close with a link to a Substack post by Marie Le Conte that's been bringing me a lot of joy. In it, she talks about the rather surreal experience of her teenage years, when she and a couple of other friends had the enormous chutzpah to create and run a somewhat successful internet music fanzine. I won't go into more detail than that, except to say that the specific combination of teenage certainty and intellectual arrogance is extremely recognisable to me, although my own context was different. It's a fun read, even if there were a lot of moments of 'I'm in this picture and I don't like it.'

Happy Friday! I'm tucked up in the living room with all the string lights on, while the rain pours against the windows, and I'm looking forward to a very cosy weekend, snuggled up inside against the elements.

This week's prompt is inspired by a short podcast which was being shared approvingly among all my academic research support librarian colleagues, on the 'broken' nature of academic publishing. In it, the participants talk about all the immense problems research dissemination faces: the fact that journal prestige is treated as a proxy for quality of research in job applications and promotions, 'double dipping' by publishing companies (i.e. making university libraries pay twice for the same journal subscription: once for reading access to the articles, and a second time to make articles Open Access when a researcher from the university publishes in that journal: did you know the typical cost to make an article Open Access is £1000-£2000 per article?), the predatory publishers and citation mills that have swooped in to exploit the immense pressure on academics to publish, inadequate peer review, etc etc. At the root of all this is organisations signing the DORA declaration and then ignoring it at every stage of the academic reward process.

I don't agree with the solutions proposed by the podcast participants, and I suspect most librarians won't either, but it is nice to hear these things being talked about outside my own little professional bubble. These issues are known by all in my professional context, but in my experience are not common knowledge outside it; if you've ever wondered why not all research articles are Open Access (or why the paywalls to read closed access articles ask the most absurd prices), this is why. (The other similar issue — common knowledge in libraries, not widely understood by the general public — is the predatory pricing models that publishers use for ebooks purchased by libraries.)

So, my prompt in light of all this is: what is something that's common knowledge in your professional (or perhaps hobby/volunteer) context, but not widely known or understood by the general public?

I've had this Rebecca Solnit essay bookmarked for a few days, because it's such a clear distillation of my own personal and political outlook that rather than write the ten millionth iteration of my own 'behave as if you have agency' rant, I can now just point to Solnit's post and call it a day.

I might quibble with some of her specific illustrative examples, but the overall shape of what she's saying aligns exactly with my thinking. And while I'm on this topic, I'll add (yet again) that constant awareness raising about iniquities and atrocities absent any specific instructions about concrete action to take in response to those iniquities and atrocities provokes exactly the kind of demoralising, despairing-in-advance apathy Solnit deplores in her essay. The only people who should be raising awareness are those whose job it is to do so: people who work in the media, or people who functionally fill a media-like role (paid or unpaid) by virtue of the content they've decided to disseminate via social media, and the large audience they have there. Even in those latter cases, awareness-raising without context does more harm than good.

Hope is an action. This doesn't mean a naive, apathetic confidence in the status quo. It means being clear-eyed about the gravity of the situation and the potential societal and personal risks it causes, and using what agency remains to you as an individual, a community and a society to push back against the tide, without being overwhelmed by the knowledge that it will be a marathon, not a sprint, comprised of lots of tiny little moments of concrete action. (And being able to handle the fact that the greater the atrocities and injustices, the less likely it will be to stop them with one grand action, and to be able to acknowledge the weight of this without being steamrollered into apathetic despair.)

None of these complaints are directed at anyone on my Dreamwidth reading list, which (to my good fortune) is comprised of sensible, thoughtful people who are better than most at understanding the motivating (and demotivating) power of words and information. But I felt, in the wake of Solnit's post, that it was time to set out my own thoughts on this particular nexus of issues once again, with as much clarity as possible. (And thank you to muccamukk for giving me the push I needed to set words to screen.)

Russia has occupied less than 1 per cent of Ukraine's territory since November 2022.

'[Making "territorial concessions" would mean handing over] a region the Russians have been unable to capture fully since 2014, thanks largely to the powerful system of fortifications there. At the current pace of the Russian army’s advance, it would take them many years to seize full control.

Giving this defense belt up would enable unhindered, rapid advances of Russian equipment and threaten Ukraine’s very existence as a state. And despite breakthroughs in the Donetsk region, they still have not managed to capture cities protected by fortifications. According to a recent report by the Institute for the Study of War, capturing the cities in the fortress belt would likely take several years and cost Russia significant human lives and material losses.'

In other words, anyone presenting the current state of Russia's invasion as a stunningly overwhelming military force is either ill-informed, or presenting a false picture in order to push a particular agenda. This is not to say that life as a soldier or civilian in Ukraine is particularly easy right now, but it's important to keep these facts in mind.

'Territory' is not lines on a map, on an empty piece of paper: it is the people who live there, and 'territorial concessions' is a conveniently bloodless euphemism for condemning hundreds of thousands of people to totalitarianism and human rights abuses without justice.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, this summer left me completely physically and mentally exhausted, and regularly posting to Dreamwidth has been one of the things that suffered. This exhaustion is mostly due to good things (my sister and mum visiting, lots of fun travel) or things that are a temporarily unpleasant symptom of otherwise good things (needing to work in the office full time while new colleagues hired in the wake of my promotion are trained up, after which point I'll go back to working two days from home), so it's a good problem to have had, but still left me very tired for weeks on end. As you can presumably tell, my mum — the last of the family visitors — went home to Australia earlier this week, and (after I spent two days home sick recovering from illness) things have restored their previous quotidian equilibrium.

This weekend I elected to skip any lap swimming or classes at the gym to ensure I was fully recovered, and took the time to fully reset the house. So far, I have:

-Dusted all hard surfaces
-Cleaned both bathrooms
-Vacuumed all carpeted floors
-Wet dusted all hard surfaces in the kitchen
-Swept and mopped all hard floors
-Done two loads of laundry
-Swept the front patio and the back deck
-Swept the area around the vegetable beds and restored all the mulch (which resident blackbirds hurl all over the ground when digging for insects and worms) to the garden
-Watered all the houseplants by sticking them in a bathtub of water overnight

I've also done all the grocery shopping, cooked a bunch of stuff, picked loads of tomatoes from the garden, and started making apple cider vinegar from some of the windfall apples. We've eaten extremely well this weekend, and tonight's dinner — which is marinating in a mixture of garlic, shallots, lemongrass and fish sauce in the fridge — should be equally delicious. The house is clean and airy, and I feel relaxed in a way that I haven't done so for weeks — I need my surroundings to be like this, and a sense of enough hours in the day to get all this done, or I just feel grindingly stressed.

Last night Matthias and I resumed our Saturday film nights with the Antony Mackie Captain America film, which was about the level of cinema that our brains could cope with. We have a Disney+ subscription and I've reached the point that I'm not prepared to pay to see any Marvel films at the cinema again (and I've hit my limit completely with the TV series), and I have to say that this latest offering practically confirmed the validity of my choices. It's been a long time since I've been excited about any Marvel offering, and my response is just complete exhaustion; this film felt plodding, cynical and tired — almost like a roll call in which every actor sauntered in in order to get their name ticked off another contractually obliged appearance. There was never any sense of risk or danger — since we know most characters are due to appear in a plethora of sequels — and no one seemed particularly pleased to be there. There were a few emotionally affecting moments around the storyline relating to Isaiah Bradley, but beyond that, the cash cow was milked, and more pieces were moved into place for the next film or TV show in the production line.

As for reading, it's been a lot better. On the basis of a not exactly recommendation (but rather a description that made it clear the book would be extremely Relevant To My Interests) from dhampyresa, I picked up Cruel Is the Light (Sophie Clark). Indeed, it was everything I'd hoped: tropey enemies-to-lovers in an alternative version of the Vatican in which exorcists are at perpetual war with demons, ostensibly adult characters behaving in a very YA-ish way, and Surprising Plot Twists unlikely to surprise anyone. In other words, I can't really recommend it either, unless you like the specific things I like and have a high tolerance threshold for this sort of thing. It's frothy nonsense, but it's my kind of nonsense.

I've also just finished reading The Bewitching (Silvia Moreno Garcia), a gothic fantasy novel with three intertwined timeframes and perspectives: a Mexican postgraduate student at a liberal arts college in 1998 writing her thesis on the horror short stories of a female American author, the student's grandmother on a Mexican farm in 1908, and the horror author's time at the same liberal arts college in 1938. The book draws both on Mexican folklore and the broad corpus of New England gothic literature, and each strand focuses on its respective young woman character experiencing the slow, creeping horror of a targeted, supernatural campaign of haunting, their defenses slowly being eroded and the psychological torment ratcheting up the closer each woman gets to uncovering the identity of their tormentor(s) and finding the means to overcome them. The book is adeptly written, with lots of affection for the tropes of the genre, all of which were fairly recognisable to me by osmosis, despite the fact that the only author in this canon that I've read is Edgar Allan Poe. I imagine if you've also read Jackson, King, and cosmic horror like Lovecraft, even more would be familiar. Moreno Garcia is hit and miss for me, but this latest book definitely worked well for me.

It's now mid-afternoon, and I've finally felt that I've caught up with everything I wanted to get done this weekend (including the four Dreamwidth posts I wanted to make), so I will finish things up here. I'll leave you with a link (via vriddy to a post by sunsalute on fanworks exchanges — all the logistics and unspoken rules and potential for friction participants might not understand, but be too afraid to ask about. I know most people reading this are fairly old exchange (and Dreamwidth) hands, but it's the sort of thing that could be useful to point the perplexed towards, and I'm glad someone made the effort to write all this up. For something that's meant to be a fun hobby, exchanges can definitely cause their share of drama!