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.

"Thou Mine Inheritance, Now and Always..."

Yesterday a dear friend of mine had her confirmation. The service was at our college chapel, which is an absolutely beautiful building where I attended a memorable Christmas service last year. This was, obviously, a private service so everyone there was her family or friends. While this is the first time I've been to a confirmation, I can say I found the service lovely; my friend gave a testimony about her journey, which was both interesting and a nice way to personalise the service, and the college choir sang. I love our college choir - they're a definite asset to the place! Afterwards we had dinner in hall, at which I found out that one of the other attendees was from the same part of Devon as me, was actually neighbours with a family I'm friends with, and we have at least fifteen mutual friends & acquaintances! Devon is such a big county that I never expect to meet people from my part of it, much less people who know the same people I do. We worked out that we had, if not actually talked to each other before meeting at Oxford, at least been in the same room a couple of times. Funny how that goes.

Unlike my friend, I am not religious. I was raised in an irreligious family, and you'd have to go back to my great-grandparents' generation to find genuine religious feeling on either side of the family (my mother's parents were raised Catholic, but have been lapsed for a very long time) and barring various superstitions regarding the saints - my mum always told us to pray to Saint Anthony whenever we lost something - religion has never been a part of my life, really. I went to a CofE school for a couple of years as a child, but all I took away from that was a deep resentment at being forced to pray before lunch. I was hungry! I didn't want to thank God for what he had given me, I wanted to eat!

Sometimes, I do think it would be nice to have a faith, but I think I was raised secular enough that belief in God... I'm not wired that way. I appreciate a lot of things about religion - I love visiting churches and cathedrals (and other religious buildings, but since I'm European and mostly travel in Europe, churches are overwhelmingly what I find) and I'm awestruck by the fierce love and dedication that went into constructing such amazing buildings. I also love a lot of religious music - hymns, psalms, carols, you name it. The few times I've attended a church service, I never fail to get a rush of overwhelming emotion when the singing starts. In that way, while I appreciate the ideas and sentiment behind sects like the Quakers, the closest thing I get to religious awe and passion has only ever been at very "high-church" services. Actually, I remember visiting a Serbian Orthodox cathedral (Saborna Crkva Rođenja Presvete Bogorodice in Sarajevo) and being so overwhelmed by it all that I left reeling, head spinning, almost unsure where my body was. I was visiting with a friend who said the feeling, leaving that cathedral, was like we had been "crushed by God", and we had to go for a strong cup of Bosnian coffee to get over the experience. So yes, religious grandeur definitely does it for me.

And because I might as well, here's the hymn I quoted from in the title. It's my friend's favourite hymn, and we sung it in her confirmation. I hadn't heard it before but I think it's beautiful.

This is a Post Title

My feelings on the election can be mostly summed up as "doom, death, desolation". I didn't in my wildest dreams think the Tories would get a majority. I suppose worst-case scenario, I get a TEFL certificate and fuck off for a few years until there's a government change, although with the gains the SNP made I might not have the same country to come back to. It's a mess.

So instead I will offload the links I've had open in my browser tabs for a while, both so I can have a record of them and so you can maybe enjoy them.

• Travels in Siberia - one of my friends linked this on Facebook. It's the account of one American man's trip across Siberia, and although I haven't yet read it she said it was an excellent piece of travel writing.
• The Next Christianity - informative and terrifying, on the growing divide between Christian belief in the West and in the global South.
• Footnotes in History: Being Anglo-Indian - this article makes me so, so sad. My mother's family is Anglo-Indian and although as a British woman with a father from Yorkshire I can't, in good faith, call myself a true Anglo-Indian, that culture and history has been part of my life since I was very young. And it makes me sad, and somewhat guilty, to be part of the reason why this group barely exists any more.
• The Ancient Ghost City of Ani - gorgeous photos of churches from the city of Ani on the Turkish-Armenian border.
• In Pictures: Yugo-Nostalgists Mark Tito Anniversary - I've been to Tito's grave! And now you too can be there in spirit, and see the mostly old people who remember fondly the days of bratstvo i jedinstvo.
• Я паркуюсь как сел - Kazakh website documenting the shitty parking skills of the good people of Kazakhstan. I hope you appreciate the effort I went through to type this text in Cyrillic.
• Swedish policeman dancing - I am so confused yet charmed.

And Life Goes On...

Since I last posted, I've come back to university, and promptly not done most of my work for the past week and a half. I didn't have to hand in any essays until comparatively late, and without that initial jolt when you sit down to write your first essay of the term it's hard to get back into the swing of things. But next week I might actually go to my lectures (ha... ha...).

I voted! And want to curl up in despair. It's inevitably going to be another hung parliament, and the results are even more uncertain than last time, so who knows how long it'll take to get a parliament together. The act of voting was, as with most "adult" things, suitably anticlimatic. It was identical procedure to when I voted in the European elections, so. Soon the tortuous waiting starts, and I pray for five years of Milliband, because fuck Cameron.

After the gale-force wind of the last three days, in which I greatly suffered riding my bike directly into the wind, it was rather sunny today, and typically I didn't have enough time to wander around Oxford in the sun, although it did remind me of how much I love my city. However! There was a Jewish fair in Broad Street for Lag B'Omer, and at one of the stalls you could make challah for 50p. When I was young my parents sometimes bought challah from the bakery for a special treat (I might as well mention now that I'm not Jewish in any way, I just really love challah), but I haven't eaten it for years. So I made some there - and got praised on my plaiting skills! It didn't survive the cycle home too well...

...Yeah. But I managed to sort-of straighten it out on the baking tray, and it came out looking all right! The plaits got lost as it rose, which is a shame, but while it's not the best bread in the world, it's recognisably challah. I was given a recipe, so maybe I'll try again once I'm back in Devon (no point baking here; I have none of the implements or ingredients). Hooray for challah!

I'm now off to the pub to meet up with the fellow Oxford interns for my summer internship in the US (!!!). Hopefully I will recognise them from their Facebook profiles, because I've never actually met any of them before.

A Little Love, A Little Chaos

Today is my last day at home before I head back to university. The weather has continued throughout April - blue skies, sun, and heat every day. It hasn't rained for weeks. So yesterday was a good day to hang out with my best friend Danielle one final time, and we spent a lot of it down at the old bowling green (now essentially a park) in my town, with Coke and burgers and the sun. However, we also went to see A Little Chaos, because Danielle has an enormous crush on Alan Rickman, so I might as well write about it.

As far as period dramas go, I've seen better. I feel like something set at the French court should have been more unashamedly sleazy; a lot of pro reviewers have called A Little Chaos too sedate for the setting it's portraying, and I'd agree with that. It's also much too slow, with a beginning that goes on for ever (we know Le Notre is going to hire Sabine de Barra to do the landscape feature in Versailles, it really doesn't need to be dragged out) and a middle that could have been cut down a bit. It's not bloated so much as slow, which is at least something, because I still get angry sometimes about all the pointless, pointless filler in the Hobbit films.

There are lots of things that worked for me, though. Kate Winslet is wonderful as the widowed gardener Sabine de Barra. This film has a good cast in general, although I retain a special fondness for Stanley Tucci's flamboyant bisexual dandy, and Jennifer Ehle was enjoyable as his good-natured wife. The music was good, too - I'm tempted to get the soundtrack, which was just right for this film and really elevated some of the scenes. In terms of the plot, while I criticise the beginning and a lot of the middle, the last half hour was worth the price of admission alone. There's an absolutely marvellous scene when de Barra arrives at the court in Fontainebleau and she ends up being taken to a "secret space" where the women of the court gather; a few of them are familiar faces, such as Jennifer Ehle's character, but most are not. One of the women asks her about her marital status and she says she's widowed and had one child (who is dead now). It's something that's been hinted throughout the film, and we'll hear the full story later, because de Barra can't bear to tell it now - it's too painful. But that's OK - as we go round the circle of women, a lot of them admit that they've lost children (and a few husbands as well), and they're happy to say it out loud even though "the King doesn't allow death to be spoken of at court" (I have no idea if that's the actual line, but it's something like that). They reassure her that even though she might not be able to talk about it yet, some day she'll find the strength. It's an incredible, emotional scene that makes you feel it without being exploitative.

Anyway, it's not my favourite film but it was overall fun to watch, and what it lacked in plot and setting-appropriate sleaze it made up for in great acting, fun characters, and some genuinely touching scenes. Sadly I have no screencaps, because the costumes in this film were to die for.

What I'm Listening To

More music!

(Rapalje - Loch Lomond)

I saw Rapalje last year at a music festival in the Netherlands; I hadn't heard most of their stuff before, but my friend whom I went to visit is a huge fan and they were playing at Midwinter Archaeon Fair, so we went. This was one of the songs they were playing, and I liked it.

(La Plebe - Guerria Sucia)

I found La Plebe through another favourite band, Dubioza Kolektiv (an amaaazing Bosnian dub/ska/reggae band), since they were featured on one of the tracks on Dubioza's album Apsurdistan. I looked up the band on YT, was instantly hooked, and hope you realise that when I say "Guerria Sucia" I actually mean "the entirety of Brazo en Brazo".

(Dilek Koç - Dere Geliyor Dere)

This song is one I learnt during my time working on an EU cultural exchange programme in Turkey. I remembered it one day, and after a few Google searches found the name and searched for recorded versions on YouTube. And I found Dilek Koç! I've listened to a few of her other songs and I'm a fan, I love Turkish folk music.

(Flogging Molly - If I Ever Leave This World Alive)

Featured on one of my favourite TV shows, The Shield. I was doing a rewatch recently, this song was playing, and I... have not stopped listening since!

(Verka Serduchka - Ya Popola Na Lubov')

...There is really no excuse for this one. I admit, I love Verka Serduchka unironically. Also, I really hope the transliteration is correct!

Why the fuck did I take a translation class

It's been unusually sunny here for April, and today was no exception. Blue skies, bright sun, and I was stuck indoors with a pile of paper. Because I have a Latin translation mock in two weeks time which I haven't prepared for! And I'm going to fail!

When I settle down for a long period of translation, it tends to require a lot of work and space. For this - I was translating Tacitus, which is a big ball of WTF and OH MY GOD KILL ME NOW - I had a notebook to write the English translation in, a printout of the original to annotate, my dictionary, a commentary on the text, and a translation off the web on my laptop.

Not pictured: my laptop, or my crushing sense of despair.

To be honest, I can't do this, mostly because I haven't actually learnt the vocabulary. All the grammar knowledge in the world doesn't, it turns out, help you out if you don't know the words. So I found a vocabulary list of my textbook online - God bless the internet - and have a snazzy blue folder with it all in. I'll have to do my exam more or less blind, but at least I might remember this time what egredior means...

On Dart-a-moor so wild

I didn't spend Easter in Bristol. The house we were staying in was full of dust and cat hair, aka Asthmatic Hell, and I only managed two nights there (one of which I spent at my godmother's) before I had to come home. I would have liked to do more in Bristol - I only went to Blaise Castle, IKEA, and the harbour - but I like breathing more. So I've been at home since Saturday - went to the beach, bought discounted jeans at Gap, went down the river on one of the first truly sunny days of the year - and yesterday I went to Dartmoor. It's still dry from the winter, and the new green grass hasn't come through yet. It doesn't really look like Dartmoor in a lot of places, mostly because at the moment it's in its wintry stage but yesterday was very warm and sunny (I got sunburn!) so it was very odd. Anyway, I took a lot of photos and thought I'd share some here.

This is one of several photos I have which I can play the "Dartmoor or Eurasian steppe?" game with.

My mum and brother provide a human comparison to the vast expanse of wherever.

Stone circle yayyyy. This is what we mostly came to see.

Meee!! This is far from the best photo of me - I'm windswept, wearing my glasses and no makeup, but I quite like the photo. Mostly because my smiles in photos usually look horrifying.

Imagine this stretching as far as you can see in every direction and you'll have a pretty good idea of what it was like yesterday.

It's more like Dartmoor down by the rivers. Some of the greenery still remains.

Prehistoric stone lines and rocks and stuff.

Anyway, I liked how these photos came out. This very much isn't what Dartmoor usually looks like, though it looks more familiar in some photos, and I like the results, even if they're not as familiar as you might expect for being taken where they were.