Twas on one April Morning
Apr. 18th, 2026 08:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenwoodsideSomething I often think, but rarely write about, is how much I love Dreamwidth. I keep an eye on LinkedIn for work-related reasons and it somehow manages to get continually worse, and I listen to a fair bit of spoken word radio; some parts of which, sadly, seem to be falling under the shadow of Mordor adopting aspects of mainstream social media's PR slop bucket. But then there's Dreamwith, and it's full of people writing about diverse, fascinating subjects for free, sharing their enthusiasms and being nerdy and down to earth at the same time. It's my internet Good Place. Long may it survive.
In the news
Cool news from the South (of Wales): a dig in the cavern under Pembroke Castle has turned up prehistoric animal bones including hippopotamus and signs of ancient human and earlier Neanderthal habitation. I'm normally a rewilding enthusiast -- surely you would need to have no heart to be undelighted by the return of beavers and storks to parts of Britian -- but I'm quite happy the climate is no longer conducive to maintaining a population of terrifing hippos. I'm sure they could make river walks and canal towpaths more exciting. And now I'm imagining a territorial male nesting in one of the ornamental ponds that feature at the centre of up-market out-of-town business parks
vivdunstan posted about the death of Moya Brennan, harpist and lead singer of Clannad. Growing up, I had a few Clannad CDs which got much playing. I loved her traditional repertoire, including Two Sisters, Téir Abhaile Riú and Dúlamán. The Guardian obituary mentioned her appearance on RTE in 2020 when she sang a capella Gaoth Barra Na dTonn. and brought tears to the eyes of the host. A beautiful moment.Welsh elections to the Senedd are due in May. Wales normally returns Labour pluralities, and Labour forms the government. This time, polls are showing people turning away from Labour, and heading in some very different directions: Plaid Cymru, the Greens and to the Hitler gigolos in Reform. At the same time, the number of aelodau Seneddol is increasing from 60 to 96. I'll have to look closely at my constinuency and the voting trends here before deciding how to cast my vote. It won't be like UK general elections which run on First Past the Post, where I mostly vote on a 'don't split the Left' principle.
Books
Shadows of the Apt -- Finished the final three books in Adrian Tchaikovsky's huge invertebrate-soaked steampunk-soap-opera-battle-fantasy.
I never need to worry about running out of adventure stories to read; I just check Adrian Tchaikovsky's Amazon profile page and find out he's published a new book in the time between me starting and finishing a Dreamwidth post.
While he's not a writer typically viewed as a comic novelist, around once per book or more he makes me lean back in my chair with laughter when something catches my fancy. In Doors of Eden, maybe my joint least favourite, it's the feline aliens who infect primates with a parasite that causes intense cat-related feelings of worship and reverence. In the last Apt book it was this moment, nestled in the middle of a sincere conversation about personal histories between eccentric one-woman army Castre Gorenn from distant lands, and Straessa, a rather more down-to-earth accidental army officer:
<..Gorenn talks about the war in her homeland>
Straessa stared at her hands, not knowing what to say.
"I did not know what it would be like, to serve with the Apt," Gorenn went on awkwardly. "It has not been easy. I have made many adjustments, as you have seen."
Straessa, who had seen nothing of the sort, wisely said nothing. <...>
Looking at the line more closely to see why it appealed to me, I think it must have been the shift -- pathos to bathos. Solemn talk about battles and suffering dropping into a waspish flicker of social comedy before, in the larger scene, reverting to the solemn. I have a weakness for that. Plus it tweaks at theme of how we see ourselves vs how others see us, something that has always both interested and alarmed me in maybe equal measure. And of course Castre Gorenn is awesome, and is a character-type I enjoy: largely unselfconscious, totally self-confident and a bit mad.
Previously read Days of Shattered Faith in his Tchaikovsky's Tyrant Philosophers series. SPOILERS follow!
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Clearly noticed for the first time a reused Major Plot Event where a male character kills his female lover in obedience to an external source of authority. Tynan kills Mycella in obedience to orders from his Empress; embattled heir to the throne Dekamran kills Gil, ambassador of an expansionist threatening Empire, in order to gain credibility with his allies as an independent agent. With world enough and time, I'd go through Tchaikovsky's back catalogue and hunt out other recurring plot tropes, to see if they form a big picture. Something a fellow Dreamwidther has mentioned (alas, I forget who) is that Tchaikovsky writes about people learning to understand and accept the Other. In this case, both Tynan and Dekamran had done this, at least partially, since their lovers were representatives of rival powers. But their apparent recognition of Gil and Mycella's worth and full humanity doesn't stand against the demands of their state. We don't know what the long-term consequences are for Dekamran; for Tynan, it becomes key to his later decision to rebel against his Empress, though he is only able to do this because a coalition of different interest groups want the same thing.
Now at the start of yet another series from Tchaikovsky, The Tiger and the Wolf, which would make for good winter fireside reading, it being set in a snow-bound land full of shape changers and shadow.. It's spring here, but *hands* Also, there are lots of mammals. So many. On every page, even. Non-human mammals aren't a regular feature of Tchaikovsky books, this being the author that's given us a Frog God and ascended Octopuses.*
* Okay, since I wrote that, I've reached book 2, and the goodest-presenting character in the book is a snake priest and can turn into a snake at will. Still, they're not an invertebrate!
I'm listening again to the audiobook of The Dawn of Everything by archaeologist David Wengrow and the -- alas, late -- anthropologist David Graeber, which hammers home the point that different societies had hugely different -- and successful -- ways of organising themselves. I'm planning to get hold of a hard copy so I cannot annotate it and translate parts into a spreadsheet. It's one of the few books that can offer crumbs of hope about the human capacity to adapt and be different in different circumstances, when social darwinist tech capitalists and would-be dictators want us to believe there is only one way, and it is their way.
But back to Tchaikovsky -- his Tiger and Wolf books centre around tribes with totemic animals; each tribe has its own mores and traditions. So it makes for good companion reading to the Graeber/Wengrow, with the rider that Tchaikovsky's tribes are more given to choosing single, powerful chiefs than the ones in Dawn of Everything. So far there hasn't been much election through lottery or through Old Woman's approval. (Huh, I lie -- exactly that latter thing has just happened. Guess Tchaikosky did some reading on the Wendat.)
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The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard
A novella set in space with a Sherlock Holmes influence. I liked it a lot, but didn't love it. The tone had that slight therapeutic tinge that is quite possibly highly valued in some writing circles and amongst some audiences. I find that and the associated neuroticism/introversian can get in the way of delineating varied characters and has a somewhat flattening effect, because they're very interested in themselves and their trauma and other people's trauma, but rather less concerned with what other people say and do. Also, I'm neurotic and introverted, and I do not want more of that *****. Meanness now indulged, I'm free to say that there was still a lot to appreciate, and I will likely also read The Red Scholar's Wake from the same universe.
Audio Books
While work on the house and garden continued, I listened to lots and lots of audio books. Here are a few:
Benjamin January series (books 1 through 11). Short version: a free man of colour in 1830s New Orleans solves crimes. Ben January is a trained surgeon, professional musician and speaks multiple languages. Possibly he's too much of a perfect paladin, but given the times, I'm not going to complain; spending fictioning time with someone who's thoughtful and kind feels as if it's buttressing RL, especially those moments that involve the international news. Ron Butler is an excellent narrator: warm and getting the level of character differentiation just right.
My favourite regular characters are Livia, January's complicated mother, a former slave who has socially climbed in search of the security of wealth with more determination than the most intrepid mountaineer; Minou, his sister, the mistress of a wealthy white planter; and Shaw, the police lieutenant whose large reason for existence is to deliver laconic one liners. (Butler drawls them out of the corner of his mouth with deadpan refusal of irony markers, suggestive of a man who's spent so long dealing with egotistic, political bosses and brawling drunk rivermen that he's taken a massive mental step back). Hannibal, Benjamin's Irish opium-addict sidekick, I find quite disposable. As in, he takes up page space that could go to someone more interesting, such as Livia or Minou.
The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman (he of The Magicians books). I bounced off The Magicians TV show after the first few episodes, but eventually gave the books a try and found them much better, albeit not without some irritating quirks. Quentin was certainly more bearable in the books than the show, not because his personality was different, but because it was layered into the narration and allowed more context and blurred edges. Plus the meta tone of the books seemed much more successfully realised than in the show, which seemed to be striving after a hero, not just a protagonist. The Bright Sword is Grossman's take on Arthuriana.
I think by and large it's much gentler than The Magicians. Ok, it's set mainly post-Arthur with flashbacks to Camelot at its height, so lots of knights are already dead in the present at Camlann, and still more die in the course of the book. But Collum, the closest there is to a lead in a book of mixed PoVs, is rather an idealistic marshmallow compared to Quentin. There's generally a kindly sense of deeply damaged but well-intentioned people trying to do their best, yet increasingly unsure what the right thing is. I'm not sure where the novel will stand in the lists of 21st century King Arthur stories and adaptations, but I'm glad I listened to it. Recommended, though not for devoted fans of Merlin or Lancelot. (I get Merlin, he is generally my type, but are there any real fans of Lancelot out there?? The nicest version I know is from Spamalot).
The Devils by Joe Abercrombie. New series. An unlikely gang of monsters are bound to help a teenage street urchin claim her imperial birthright. As you might expect from Abercrombie, it's more complicated than that, and the monsters are the least monstrous people we encounter in the course of a rather gory travelogue. Entertaining, though not breaking new ground for Abercrombie or the genre.(I would be happy to be convinced otherwise.)
Best moment, one that worked particularly well in audio: a grandfatherly vampire turns a hostile audience into adoring disciples with hypnosis, while reminiscing wistfully and at length about the pork dumplings ("viz a little oil") that delighted him when he lived in Poland with his wife. The narration was pretty good, though Steven Pacey used a rather similar, non-descript 'foreign' accent for a lot of the characters. The differentiation still came through most of the time due to tone and attitude, but I wonder why he didn't use more distinct accents for them. Like Tchaikovsky, The Devils is partly concerned with the formation of social bonds between initially opposed, alienated, sometimes othered people. This being Abercrombie, the 'thou shalt not' slap-down is even harder when it comes. At least Abercrombie is a good enough writer to have made me both wish and -- briefly, despite my familiarity with his back catalogue -- even believe that there could be a happier outcome. Looking forward to the sequel, and not only to hear Baron Rikard once more recall the delights of pierogi in the Polish spring.
The Founding Gardeners by Andrea Wulf. Fascinating study exploring Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison's enthusiasm for horticulture, expressed in different ways. Did you know that Adams and Jefferson went on a tour of English gardens in April 1786? I didn't. They made it via postchaise from London to as far as Worcester and Stourbridge, covering most of the south-east en route, and all in a matter of days.
One thing that continually surprised me in the course of the book was how little slavery was mentioned during all the grand projects the men initiated; it was only really dwelt on towards the end, mainly with reference to the slave quarters at Madison's Montpelier plantation. The book was published in 2011 -- if she were writing it today, I wonder if Wulf would handle the material differently? Post Black Lives Matter, post the phenomenon of Hamilton with its:
A civics lesson from a slaver, hey, neighbor
Your debts are paid 'cause you don’t pay for labor
"We plant seeds in the South, we create"
Yeah, keep ranting
We know who's really doing the planting
I don't think she even explicitly acknowledged that Sally Hemmings (when mentioned in the text) was the mother of many children to Jefferson, something that even in 2011 must have been more a matter of fact than a school of thought, since over ten years ago there'd been a DNA test. One of the reasons Wulf is so readable is that she always radiates a kind of affectionate interest and sometimes admiration for the people she writes about. I think here, she may have cut her founder gardeners a little too much slack?
Tangentially, she has a new book due out in June about George Forster. That can go straight on my list of Good Things to look forward to.
The Hapsburgs: The Rise and Fall of a World Power by Martyn Rady. This was the wrong scale for me I think. My Hapsburg knowledge is poor (not helped by there having been so blinkin' many Hapsburgs) and the litany of Rudolphs, Charleses, Maximilians and Ferdinands became overwhelming. I need to approach Europe's most successful/ubiquitous dynasty in small cuts, I think.
Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire by Nandini Das. In contrast, this was just right. Thomas Roe, a minor and rather threadbare courtier in the reign of James I, is sent as England's first envoy to the Mughal Empire, then ruled by Jahangir. I loved this book so much. It's scholarly and well-written, but also takes time to relish the nightmare comedy of the sub-official embassy. Roe is dogged, honest, and out of his depth, comparatively a country mouse despatched to the most glorious city in the world.
Never mind getting the Emperor to pay attention to him, exerting any authority over his own countrymen was hard enough. The gifts brought by Roe -- pathetic by Mughal standards -- included a carriage, in which the upholstery had all rotted in the course of the voyage, unable to withstand the tropical heat. Complimenting Das's portrait of Roe is her presentation of Jahangir, an complicated, changeable man, an alcoholic patron of the arts, indulgent of the unimpressive emissary sent to him from a distant land, on the occasions he remembered his existence. (Did Roe speak or learn Persian or any relevant language? Of course he didn't. But his experiences in India must have served him well. He went on to have a distinguised career as a diplomat and intelligencer in the Ottoman Empire and Europe).
The book goes much further than being a courtly comedy of manners. It's another one I'd be happy to revisit -- it's just got the right combination of the personal (1) and the grand. Neither Roe nor Jahangir could have foreseen the final trajectory of East India Company, Roe's employers. They're just there together in Agra in a little window in history, and the big things they're concerned with are the damned Portuguese (Roe) and his squabbling, ambitious family (Jahangir). And the window closes, and they're gone. But Das knows what will happen, and that awareness permeates the book.
(1) I originally mispelled this as 'personol' which is how the word is written in Welsh. They don't put that on the list of the benefits of learning a second language as an adult!
Podcast
Fall of Civilisations. I think I've heard the majority of the episodes now. The 'because Europe' episodes (e.g. the Inca, Easter Island) are hugely depressing; still, Easter Island was one of my top two, essential listening and good to see the Toki School of Music and Art promoted, along with the Nabataeans. I also appreciated the chance to learn a little about civilisations which I confess I'd never heard of: Bagan, Vijayanagara, Songhai.
TV
Treme (Season 1). Watched this off the back of the Benjamin January series, because I needed more New Orleans. It was great and I loved the opening credits so much that at one point I was watching/listening to them three times a day. But I'm not sure I'm going to continue, because I feel as if a lot of what it was about was explored in the first season? I guess I worry it may turn into more of a soap opera, albeit one with fantastic music.
Unlike most people, I wasn't annoyed by Steve Zahn's forty-going-on-fourteen white jazz nerd because the show was doing the work of being annoyed for me. While still not writing him off as a complete waste of space. Despite Katrina, and the pervasive racism, and the suicide of one character, Treme Season 1 felt like some of the most hopeful TV I've seen. There can't be that many other shows from the last few decades that are about coming back from a disaster to rebuild and try to make things better? Clarke Peters's role felt a bit flat compared to his Wire character -- though with some splendid cinematic moments as the Big Chief of a gang of Mardi Gras Indians -- but Wendell Pierce's dissolute, directionless trombone player Batiste who fumbles every chance he's given seemed like the role of a lifetime.
Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and House of the Dragon: Entertaining, enjoyed the battles, but also not the kind of thing I think about much or remember, since it was all retreading fairly similar ground to A Song of Ice and Fire. Twelve was good as creepy uncle Daemon though his character development felt a bit awkward in Season 2; it was a delight to see harp-of-my-heart Eve Best as a regular supporting character. She illuminates anything she's in.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Liked this more than Discovery or the episodes of Strange New Worlds I caught. I think it was the irreverence filtering through from Lower Decks that made the difference, maybe through Tawny Newsome's influence. When I heard it would be a show focusing on Young 'Uns, I was worried it would all be romance and love dodecahedrons, but my fears were unfounded. I still have the last couple of episodes to watch since my Paramount subscription ran out before I could reach the end.
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Date: 2026-04-19 01:16 am (UTC)Absolutely! DW is the best! <3
I really enjoyed Starfleet Academy too! it's too bad it's been cancelled, so there will be just one more season! :(