all the news that fits
Aug. 14th, 2024 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitIt took three full weeks, but I did eventually get over COVID, apart from a slight lingering cough. I'm hoping not to do that again, ever--and I know I had an easy case.
I'm here to talk about more interesting things, though. Namely, what I've been watching, reading, etc.
Watching:
Not much, although while I was sick I watched a lot of episodes of the British comedy panel show Would I Lie to You. It didn't really hold my interest once I was feeling better, though it is occasionally funny.
I want to see Deadpool & Wolverine, and I'd quite like to see it in the actual cinema but I'm also unwilling to risk Covid again.
Listening:
Various podcasts;
I'm caught up on The Magnus Protocol now (apart from most of the "statement" in the most recent episode, which I had to skip). I plan to keep listening for a while, but it's not engaging me the way TMA did; in particular, I don't care much about any of the characters. I care more about the relationship between the TMP and TMA universes, but not enough that the zillions of red string brigade posts on Tumblr don't annoy me a bit.
I still listen regularly to This Podcast Will Kill You; I wish I could find more podcasts like it. It's genuinely scientific-minded while caring a lot about the political and social contexts of medicine, and it's light on the hosts' personalities; there's very little small talk and silliness. And did I mention that both the hosts are women? If you'd like to check it out, there are very good recent episodes on celiac disease; supplements, the supplement industry, and the lack of regulation thereof; the problem of health care professionals disbelieving or not listening to patients; a miniseries on infertility and IVF; and my personal favorite, episode 147, "Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumor Disease." (I'm aware that this sounds unpromising. But it's genuinely one of my favorite episodes they've ever done. TDFTD is a transmissible cancer--that is, the cancer itself is directly transmissible from one animal to another via biting, as distinct from things like virus-related cancers where it's a potentially cancer-causing agent that is transmissible. The disease has huge implications for the study of cancer, and the effects it's had on the Tasmanian devil populations, behaviors, and their ecosystem are fascinating.)
If you paid any attention to the 2024 Olympic boxing debacle, or if you'd like more background on the Gender Critical lot's pet issue of "fairness in women's sports," you might like the 6-part podcast miniseries "Tested." It's a co-production of (US) National Public Radio's Embedded podcast and the Canadian Broadcasting Company, and it delves into the history of sex testing in women's sports, focusing on track and field aka athletics. Some of it's a bit basic, and there's a considerable focus on the personal stories of affected athletes which may or may not appeal. I think you could get a tl;dr version of it by listening to just episodes 2 "Questions of a Physical Nature," which gets into the history of various ways women athletes' bodies were policed, and why, and episode 5, "Unfair Advantage," which looks at the (often scanty) evidence about whether higher levels of testosterone confer an advantage, how much of an advantage that might be, and whether in any case some women's higher levels of naturally-occurring testosterone can be considered an unfair advantage. I'll note that "Tested" is specifically about athletes who were assigned female at birth; it's not about trans women athletes at all, apart from a few mentions as context. I'll also note that the show was produced and aired before the Olympics started, so there's nothing in here about the shameful harassment, misgendering, and outright defamation heaped on Imane Khelif online and by supposedly respectable media. (One small silver lining to the Khelif saga: since it became clear that Khelif was going to pursue legal action for libel, J. K. Rowling has not tweeted once.)
On a completely different note, I loved the 2024 special of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme. It's mostly a long monologue from John (with additional performances from the rest of the cast) about the village he recently moved to. (I don't know if he really moved out of London or if that's a fictional premise.) It's very funny, with Finnemore's trademark combination of incisiveness and empathy, and it ends with the ridiculousness becoming, somehow, sublime. You can listen to this on the BBC iPlayer, available worldwide as far as I know, and I highly recommend it.
ETA: Also listening to the enormous backlog of 99% Invisible, which is almost always worth the time. It's weird, though, to hear Roman Mars being very socially and politically aware during the actual show, and then shilling for Better Help and real estate investments during the commercials.
Reading
I've been reading a lot, a mix of new things when I feel up to it and re-reading of favorites (e.g. Jane Austen, Mary Renault) when I don't. I haven't entirely loved the new reading.
K. J. Charles's latest, A Duke at Hazard, felt like a return to her usual territory after recent baby steps outside the genre. It's fine, but it definitely doesn't feel as fresh as Charles's earlier books.
Many years ago I bounced off Sailing to Sarantium, the first book of Guy Gavriel Kay's "Sarantine Mosaic" duology. This time I finished it and its sequel Lord of Emperors, but they didn't hit the mark for me despite a potentially very interesting setting (an alt version of Byzantium under Justinian and Theodora) and some appealing characters. The story is at its best when thinking about questions of making art in hard times, and how to cope when your work has come, or will come, to nothing; it's at its worst when Kay can't decide which of the narrative's several hot women to ship his hero with, and so tries to ship him with all of them. The two strands are in tension, and not in a good way. Less than the sum of its parts.
Also less than the sum of its parts is Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke.
I know this was widely loved when it came out, and I certainly liked its opening sections a lot, but it needed to be a nice, leisurely 400-page novel instead of the fairly lean, quick story it ended up being. It felt off-balance: a huge amount of build-up, a very quick plot resolution, and a fairly unsatisfying epilogue. Reading it, I felt as I often do with books by the more ostensibly literary sff writers; Clarke seemed uncommitted to the story, to the world she had built. I had so many questions. Why was the mythic world so sterile and museum-y? Were there no myths flowing into it about agriculture, about animals other than fish and birds, about forests and meadows and swamps? Why did Piranesi survive while everyone else trapped there died? For that matter, why couldn't he and the rest find their way out again? Why did a long stay have memory-erasing, personality-changing effects? It was all . . . hollow, shallow, a sort of Potemkin-village worldbuilding. There was so little to the alt-world that I couldn't believe anyone would miss it after escaping.
Then I have a couple of peeves that are trivial and yet not. First: why on earth is a modern novelist giving us a queer villain, whose queerness and villainy are explicitly linked (i.e. his desire to be transgressive and special), and not a single other explicitly queer character? Piranesi can be ready as queer, but it's all coding and subtext, and if you have a queer villain, that's just not good enough. What the hell was Clarke thinking?
Second: clothes. I lost most of my remaining patience with the story when, in a throwaway line towards the end, Piranesi/Matthew says he no longer cares about clothes. This from someone who has carefully noted every. single. detail. of the Other's beautiful suits and shoes, and who certainly used to care enormously about clothes. It felt like Clarke wanted her story to have a moral, and all she could come up with was "material things aren't very important, really." Which, especially after Piranesi spent years suffering from cold and deprivation and hunger (he would literally have died of malnourishment if the Other hadn't supplied him with multivitamins from the outside world), seems kind of off-topic. I'd have been happier to see Piranesi deeply appreciating the convenience and relative safety of the normal world, even if there were things about the other world that he valued and missed. And happier still if it hadn't come up so obviously as a Theme, because the book didn't build up to it at all and it's not interesting anyway.
Despite its polished style, the novel felt like a first draft to me, like a story that hasn't found its focus. And, less forgivably, that shied away from any actual hard questions it encountered.
I was also a non-fan of Doctor Strange and Mr. Norrell, so I think Clarke as writer and I as reader are just incompatible.
I'm currently reading a piece of utter nonsense called Starship Repo, by Patrick S. Tomlinson. It's basically a slightly rougher-hewn version of Becky Chambers' novels, or Legends and Lattes but in space: plucky, scruffy, borderline-criminal but incredibly kind band of misfits tries to run a business, in this case a repossession firm. On second thought, I've been unkind to Chambers, whose books usually have a serious core of difficult and painful choices; Starship Repo so far is fluff all through, and I keep having to stop about every 20 pages because I get so irritated, but I also keep coming back to read a little more.
I'm here to talk about more interesting things, though. Namely, what I've been watching, reading, etc.
Watching:
Not much, although while I was sick I watched a lot of episodes of the British comedy panel show Would I Lie to You. It didn't really hold my interest once I was feeling better, though it is occasionally funny.
I want to see Deadpool & Wolverine, and I'd quite like to see it in the actual cinema but I'm also unwilling to risk Covid again.
Listening:
Various podcasts;
I'm caught up on The Magnus Protocol now (apart from most of the "statement" in the most recent episode, which I had to skip). I plan to keep listening for a while, but it's not engaging me the way TMA did; in particular, I don't care much about any of the characters. I care more about the relationship between the TMP and TMA universes, but not enough that the zillions of red string brigade posts on Tumblr don't annoy me a bit.
I still listen regularly to This Podcast Will Kill You; I wish I could find more podcasts like it. It's genuinely scientific-minded while caring a lot about the political and social contexts of medicine, and it's light on the hosts' personalities; there's very little small talk and silliness. And did I mention that both the hosts are women? If you'd like to check it out, there are very good recent episodes on celiac disease; supplements, the supplement industry, and the lack of regulation thereof; the problem of health care professionals disbelieving or not listening to patients; a miniseries on infertility and IVF; and my personal favorite, episode 147, "Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumor Disease." (I'm aware that this sounds unpromising. But it's genuinely one of my favorite episodes they've ever done. TDFTD is a transmissible cancer--that is, the cancer itself is directly transmissible from one animal to another via biting, as distinct from things like virus-related cancers where it's a potentially cancer-causing agent that is transmissible. The disease has huge implications for the study of cancer, and the effects it's had on the Tasmanian devil populations, behaviors, and their ecosystem are fascinating.)
If you paid any attention to the 2024 Olympic boxing debacle, or if you'd like more background on the Gender Critical lot's pet issue of "fairness in women's sports," you might like the 6-part podcast miniseries "Tested." It's a co-production of (US) National Public Radio's Embedded podcast and the Canadian Broadcasting Company, and it delves into the history of sex testing in women's sports, focusing on track and field aka athletics. Some of it's a bit basic, and there's a considerable focus on the personal stories of affected athletes which may or may not appeal. I think you could get a tl;dr version of it by listening to just episodes 2 "Questions of a Physical Nature," which gets into the history of various ways women athletes' bodies were policed, and why, and episode 5, "Unfair Advantage," which looks at the (often scanty) evidence about whether higher levels of testosterone confer an advantage, how much of an advantage that might be, and whether in any case some women's higher levels of naturally-occurring testosterone can be considered an unfair advantage. I'll note that "Tested" is specifically about athletes who were assigned female at birth; it's not about trans women athletes at all, apart from a few mentions as context. I'll also note that the show was produced and aired before the Olympics started, so there's nothing in here about the shameful harassment, misgendering, and outright defamation heaped on Imane Khelif online and by supposedly respectable media. (One small silver lining to the Khelif saga: since it became clear that Khelif was going to pursue legal action for libel, J. K. Rowling has not tweeted once.)
On a completely different note, I loved the 2024 special of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme. It's mostly a long monologue from John (with additional performances from the rest of the cast) about the village he recently moved to. (I don't know if he really moved out of London or if that's a fictional premise.) It's very funny, with Finnemore's trademark combination of incisiveness and empathy, and it ends with the ridiculousness becoming, somehow, sublime. You can listen to this on the BBC iPlayer, available worldwide as far as I know, and I highly recommend it.
ETA: Also listening to the enormous backlog of 99% Invisible, which is almost always worth the time. It's weird, though, to hear Roman Mars being very socially and politically aware during the actual show, and then shilling for Better Help and real estate investments during the commercials.
Reading
I've been reading a lot, a mix of new things when I feel up to it and re-reading of favorites (e.g. Jane Austen, Mary Renault) when I don't. I haven't entirely loved the new reading.
K. J. Charles's latest, A Duke at Hazard, felt like a return to her usual territory after recent baby steps outside the genre. It's fine, but it definitely doesn't feel as fresh as Charles's earlier books.
Many years ago I bounced off Sailing to Sarantium, the first book of Guy Gavriel Kay's "Sarantine Mosaic" duology. This time I finished it and its sequel Lord of Emperors, but they didn't hit the mark for me despite a potentially very interesting setting (an alt version of Byzantium under Justinian and Theodora) and some appealing characters. The story is at its best when thinking about questions of making art in hard times, and how to cope when your work has come, or will come, to nothing; it's at its worst when Kay can't decide which of the narrative's several hot women to ship his hero with, and so tries to ship him with all of them. The two strands are in tension, and not in a good way. Less than the sum of its parts.
Also less than the sum of its parts is Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke.
I'm putting the rest of this under a spoiler cut.
I know this was widely loved when it came out, and I certainly liked its opening sections a lot, but it needed to be a nice, leisurely 400-page novel instead of the fairly lean, quick story it ended up being. It felt off-balance: a huge amount of build-up, a very quick plot resolution, and a fairly unsatisfying epilogue. Reading it, I felt as I often do with books by the more ostensibly literary sff writers; Clarke seemed uncommitted to the story, to the world she had built. I had so many questions. Why was the mythic world so sterile and museum-y? Were there no myths flowing into it about agriculture, about animals other than fish and birds, about forests and meadows and swamps? Why did Piranesi survive while everyone else trapped there died? For that matter, why couldn't he and the rest find their way out again? Why did a long stay have memory-erasing, personality-changing effects? It was all . . . hollow, shallow, a sort of Potemkin-village worldbuilding. There was so little to the alt-world that I couldn't believe anyone would miss it after escaping.
Then I have a couple of peeves that are trivial and yet not. First: why on earth is a modern novelist giving us a queer villain, whose queerness and villainy are explicitly linked (i.e. his desire to be transgressive and special), and not a single other explicitly queer character? Piranesi can be ready as queer, but it's all coding and subtext, and if you have a queer villain, that's just not good enough. What the hell was Clarke thinking?
Second: clothes. I lost most of my remaining patience with the story when, in a throwaway line towards the end, Piranesi/Matthew says he no longer cares about clothes. This from someone who has carefully noted every. single. detail. of the Other's beautiful suits and shoes, and who certainly used to care enormously about clothes. It felt like Clarke wanted her story to have a moral, and all she could come up with was "material things aren't very important, really." Which, especially after Piranesi spent years suffering from cold and deprivation and hunger (he would literally have died of malnourishment if the Other hadn't supplied him with multivitamins from the outside world), seems kind of off-topic. I'd have been happier to see Piranesi deeply appreciating the convenience and relative safety of the normal world, even if there were things about the other world that he valued and missed. And happier still if it hadn't come up so obviously as a Theme, because the book didn't build up to it at all and it's not interesting anyway.
Despite its polished style, the novel felt like a first draft to me, like a story that hasn't found its focus. And, less forgivably, that shied away from any actual hard questions it encountered.
I was also a non-fan of Doctor Strange and Mr. Norrell, so I think Clarke as writer and I as reader are just incompatible.
I'm currently reading a piece of utter nonsense called Starship Repo, by Patrick S. Tomlinson. It's basically a slightly rougher-hewn version of Becky Chambers' novels, or Legends and Lattes but in space: plucky, scruffy, borderline-criminal but incredibly kind band of misfits tries to run a business, in this case a repossession firm. On second thought, I've been unkind to Chambers, whose books usually have a serious core of difficult and painful choices; Starship Repo so far is fluff all through, and I keep having to stop about every 20 pages because I get so irritated, but I also keep coming back to read a little more.
