La Bella Roma

I went to Rome! For a week, and though I originally planned to go with some friends, in the end the dates didn't work out (a lot of the friends who would have wanted to come along are archaeologists, and July is Dig Season), so I ended up going with my brother, mother, and nan. It was fun! I get on well with my family, so that wasn't a problem. What was more of a problem was that we went in the first week of July, during the pan-European heatwave. I got used to having 35 degrees as a baseline heat, and it often got up to 40 in the afternoon. :( Consequently, we decided to do as the Romans do and not go out in the afternoon. Our routine was to get up early, leave the apartment we were staying in by 8-8.30 AM, go out sightseeing until about 1 PM, then come back, have lunch, and read/sleep/watch Italian TV until 6 or so, when we'd go out again in the slightly cooler evening.

Despite the heat, I had so much fun. It's one thing to read about and see photos of these monuments, and quite another to see them. And they're so big.

Nan, mum, brother, on our first day in Rome.

I really like the lines in this photo.

Trajan's Column, baby! My brother used a lot of the scenes on it (which are essentially An Idiot's Guide to the Roman Army) as sources for his Latin GCSE coursework on the Roman army, so he was especially excited to see this.

The Parthenon! Which only exists on the outside, the inside has been turned into a church and is a lot more boring.

A bunch of photos from the Palazzo Altemps, one of the most important museums of Greek and Roman sculpture. Featuring a truly GIANT head, and my mum in a pink dress.

Now we get to the day when we decided to go down the Via Appia and visit the Tomb of Cecilia Metella (my mum's name is Cecilia so there's a vested interest there) and the catacombs of St Callixtus. The Via Appia itself wasn't too far from our apartment so we got up early, left the building at 8 AM so it wasn't too hot, and walked all the way. It turned it to involve a lot more walking than we were expecting, and my nan in particular suffered a lot, but I really enjoyed the day.

On our way, we got completely lost because nothing was signposted, and I ended up asking an early morning jogger directions to the Via Appia Antica in my very bad Italian. He directed us to use this, calling it a short cut. I'm pretty sure we just walked straight through some farmer's private land.

Even though my hair isn't great and I have no makeup on, I'm including these because I just like them. My mum took photos of me in secret when we were recuperating at a café.

We eventually found the Via Appia, and it is so incredibly straight. I loved walking down it, it was great to feel really immersed in that environment.

Some nice buildings on the Via Appia, the tomb of Cecilia Metella from the outside, and flowers on the road.

That evening, my nan was too tired to do anything but my mum, brother and I decided to visit the Baths of Caracalla. The photos don't do them justice because they are unbelievably huge and look like they were designed for giants!

Like I said, huge! I'm very glad we went there in the evening, we got lovely golden light all over the brick.

The Arch of Constantine!

 The Arch of Titus! With carvings depicting the sack of Jerusalem and enslavement of Jews. You're such a dick, Titus. But you have a really nice arch.

 We decided not to go to the Colosseum that day because the crowds were huge; it was the first Sunday of July, when the Forum, Palatine Hill, and Colosseum are free. While it was easy to get into the Forum and Palatine, going to the Colosseum would have involved standing in a queue for at least an hour!

 Me falling over in front of the Temple of Athena.

This gives you a pretty good idea of what the majority of the Forum looked like. It was very cool! But lots of arches, columns, temples, etc.

Because all the museums were closed on Monday, the next day we decided to go to churches! My family visits an awful lot of Catholic churches on holiday considering we're non-religious. The following photos are from the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. My favourite parts were the Byzantine frescoes, which were gorgeous - so elaborate and gilded! The gold in the ceiling, we were told by a tour guide, comes from the gold Columbus brought back from his expedition to the Americas.

We also went to the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, which was built inside the frigidarium of the Baths of Diocletian. It was also designed by Michelangelo! In a way, it gave you a much better idea than the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla of what they would have been like when they were in use, with their columns and high ceilings.

It was a nice place. But if you went out the back you got to the original ruins of the Baths, which were cool to look at too. Also, I saw a nun with a suitcase. Maybe she was going on holiday?

Noice. Also, we went to the Colosseum in the end but how interesting can Colosseum photos be, really? This post has taken me a week to write and it's very long and photo-heavy, so I'm just going to stop here. However, I did go to Ostia and took tons of photos there, and Ostia is REALLY COOL so that will be another post, that will hopefully not take me as long to write.

A Varied Miscellany

I am going to Italy tomorrow! It'll be my first holiday with my new camera, so I can take even more weird pictures of windows than I usually do. It's funny, when I was younger I used to make fun of my dad for his desire to take artistic photos, usually of doors or other architectural features, when we went on holiday, while I and the rest of my family was happy to take the usual touristy snapshots. Now, in the last couple of years, I too have gone over to the "artistic photos of doors" side...

Anyway, this seems like a good excuse to offload some interesting articles/sites I've had open in my tabs. I hope they're interesting.

• Polygon Map Generation demo - create maps (2D and 3D) of imaginary islands with this generator. Great for fantasy writers, or just people who like looking at maps and random islands, like me.
• Scars of Sarajevo - photoessay on Sarajevo 20 years after the end of the war, focusing on the physical damage like the bullet holes, Sarajevo Roses, etc. Some really good photographs here.
• Pictures of Kyrgyzstan - exactly what it says! I've become more interested in Central Asia and its history recently, and this tumblr is full of gorgeous photos. I seriously want to go to Kyrgyzstan some day!
• An Ancient Babylonian Customer Service Complain Inscribed on a Clay Tablet Around 1750 BC - this has made its rounds up and down the internet, but I still love it so much. Nothing more remains of Ozymandias, but we still know that Ea-nasir is a shitty merchant.
• Yakuza 3 reviewed by Yakuza - I've never played the game, but this review is hilarious. Choice quote: "S: I don't know any ex-yakuza running orphanages.
  K: There was one a few years ago. A good guy.
  M: You sure it wasn't just a tax shelter?
  K: Sure it was a tax shelter but he ran it like a legitimate thing. You know."
• Books Set In ...  - find books set in any continent, country, or city you want. Very useful database.
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: the danger of a single story - I'm just putting this here in the hope that it'll remind me to actually watch this talk.
• Proportional Pie Chart of the World's Most Spoken Languages - who doesn't love pie charts? There are some interesting surprises there; the huge size of Chinese is obvious, but I had no idea about languages like Malay and Tagalog having so many speakers.
• Owls with Stupid Expressions on their Faces - :')

Review | The Murdstone Trilogy: A Novel

Philip Murdstone is washed up. He is known as a writer of serious, quasi-literary children's fiction about sensitive, disabled boys, but his star is waning and he is behind the times when it comes to what the reading public wants. Fantasy - specifically, epic fantasy - is what sells, and Philip's ruthless agent is determined to get her client on the bandwagon to save his sinking career.

So begins The Murdstone Trilogy. Philip is not a fantasy reader, and does not enjoy or appreciate the genre, but help comes to him in the form of Pocket Wellfair, a gnome-like creature who narrates, in a distinctive and earthy style, a book that comes to Philip in a vision when he passes out drunk at a local tor. This book, Dark Entropy, catapults Philip to the top of the bestseller list and brings him fame and fortune. But it comes at a price - he makes a Faustian bargain with Pocket to acquire the novel, transmitted into his consciousness, and as he gets more desperate for additional books, he becomes more entangled in the dark business of Pocket's world.

This book is skillfully written; the narration style is arch and sardonic, though also vividly descriptive, frequently breaking out into inspired metaphors. When things take a decidedly darker turn in the second half of the novel, Peet manages to segue his narration into an uneasy, claustrophobic atmosphere - and I commend anyone who can make the vast expanse of the Himalayas seem cramped and terrifyingly hemmed-in. The parody of epic fantasy tropes, while more present in the first half of the novel, is amusing enough, although I've seen it done better by Diana Wynne Jones, who (unlike Peet) actually writes fantasy, in her books such as The Tough Guide to Fantasyland and Dark Lord of Derkholm.

The main failing of this book is the misanthropic contempt for humanity that is present in the narration. No one, from Philip to a community of Tibetan monks to the big cheeses of the publishing industry, is respite from scorn and disdain. I have happily read novels in which every character is unlikable, selfish, and not someone you would want to meet in real life, but the utter contempt for just about everyone in the book is a troubling undercurrent in this otherwise enjoyable satire. It gets particularly bad regarding the people of Devon, where Philip Murdstone lives in splendid isolation in a stone cottage on Dartmoor. I live in Devon myself (my town even got a mention in the book!), and I enjoyed the familiar names and places and feelings from the parts of the book set in Devon, including the hilarious scene in which the Tower Building of Exeter College, where I studied for two years, becomes the burning College of Thaumaturgy from the fantasy world Philip draws his books from. But the author seems to find the local people inherently stupid, small-minded, and worthy of derision. He writes out local accents and dialect phonetically, which almost never works in published fiction unless the author is someone like Irvine Welsh, and there is not an exception here in The Murdstone Trilogy. Every quirk of the local dialect is drawn out, exaggerated, and mispelled as though Devonians were speaking a foreign language. The neutral, RP-influenced Southern English of Philip Murdstone and his agent Miranda Cinch is, of course, left in correctly spelled English. But when it comes to the population of Flemworthy, Philip's adopted village, there is no such courtesy. Not only do they speak in phonetic dialect, but they are what Batman would refer to as a cowardly and superstitious lot. Late in the novel, Philip returns from several months of global travel to find that his fence is covered in various objects to ward off evil, including voodoo dolls, rosaries, and wooden crosses. They are, furthermore, so stupid that various characters cannot properly say "condensation" or "exorcism", the latter of which they demand the local priest perform on Philip's house. There is room for criticism and satire of rural England, but here, it is bitter enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Having said that, The Murdstone Trilogy is an enjoyable read, and it's quick to plough through - I finished it in a few hours. The first half, at least, is a hilarious and sardonic take-down of contemporary epic fantasy - there's even an expy of Christopher Paolini - and anyone who has found themselves slogging through an uninspired Swords and Sorcery doorstopper will find some wry familiarity in it.

Just Around the Riverbend...

It's been a while. Sorry about that - term has been incredibly hectic, I've had to write even more essays than usual, I had a death in the family, and I just haven't had the time to post. There are so many things I did that I'd have liked to blog about, but there's no point dredging them up now. So I thought I'd share some photos from when I went punting yesterday! They're terrible phone-quality photos, because I was paranoid that if I brought my camera I'd drop it in the water or my bag would go overboard with the camera in it, so I settled for bad photos rather than the stress of wondering whether my camera would make it out alive.

Yesterday wasn't the best day for punting, being fairly dull and cloudy, but it at least wasn't actually raining by the time we went in the late afternoon. While I'm fairly good with most types of boat (my mother ensured I could sail effectively by the age of 10 or so, and yet at 20 I still can't drive...), I'm terrible at punting, so I left it to more capable people and just lounged around eating and drinking. Also a lot of these photos feature Abbey (in the light blue jacket) because she was sitting opposite me in the punt.

A view of the lovely river, looking far too cloudy for bloody JUNE.

My lovely friend Abbey, my purple DMs, and my friend Jenny's boots next to me. The other punt on the right contains my other friends; the punts have a maximum of five occupants so we had to rent two.

More river.

Our snacks, a Polish... THING... which I found very confusing taste-wise. They're the exact texture of Cheesy Wotsits, so I ate them expecting something very savoury, but they're chocolate-flavoured. Nice, but odd.

 A third punt arrives, captained by Liska! I wish I'd got a proper photo, because she looked amazingly dramatic, up there all in black and barefoot, confidently steering the punt down the river.

This is from the point we took a break to drink Pimm's and eat more Polish snack food. The girl sticking her tongue out in the top photo is Judith; also present is (l-r) Francesca, Essi, Judith's friend Anna.

Ducks! Bridge!

A glimpse of St Hilda's in the very background of the first photo, and Abbey's mad rowing skills in the second.

Abbey took some photos which are much better than mine and also feature me and Jenny, so here they are, ripped off Facebook.

I'm the one with the glasses, by the way. And WOULD YOU JUST LOOK AT THE DUCKS?!

Anyway, after we got the punts back to the boathouse it was 7 PM and Jenny and I went for Malaysian food (she's half-Singaporean Chinese, so she grew up on what is essentially Malaysian food). OM NOM NOM MALAYSIAN FOOD.

And now I have to sadly drag myself through the last time, featuring not one but two essays due within two days of each other! One is fairly easy (oral history) and involves recycling a couple of first-year essays, but the other is on the collapse of the Byzantine state and the Ottoman conquest of Asia Minor and the Balkans, which I really want to do justice to, but I simply don't have the time.