Month: January 2020

Mixed trashy and nifty reading, lately

Posted on by Liz

Sometime in mid-December I paused on the J.D. Robb “In Death” binge read and moved on to cozier fields: detective novels by M.C. Beaton (aka Marion Chesney), who died in December 2019. I read the complete Agatha Raisin series, easily plowing through 2 in an evening, and am now up to book 25 in the Hamish Mcbeth series. Hamish has a Scottish wildcat, a dog with oddly blue eyes, a once-per-book longing for a cigarette even though he quit, and about 5 ex-girlfriends who all happen to show up at once for him to feel conflicted about as he discovers dead bodies. As a nice touch, he sometimes reads an amazingly exotic U.S. detective novel where everyone has guns and there are lots of high speed car chases.

In between ridiculous mystery novels, I read The Story of the Mongols Whom We Call Tartars by Giovanni Caprini, which was excellent and all too short. It’s an Italian ambassador’s account of his 13th century visit to Mongolia. He met Batu Khan and Güyük Khan, describing the journey and customs of the people he met, and rounded off the book with strategic advice on how to fight the Mongols. (Right at one of those turning points dear to writers of alternate histories as, if Ogedei Khan hadn’t died just about then, Batu would likely have overrun Europe.)

As a chaser I’m reading Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North. It’s a collection of travel narratives by Muslim writers from the 9th century to about the 14th and it’s also pretty great. There’s no way for this not to be interesting and I love a primary source SO MUCH no matter what.

Ibn Fadlan‘s story describes his 9th century journey through Kazakhstan and then up the Volga to the far north where he meets the Rus, at least writes about the Samoyedi, and describes a Viking (Varangian) ship burial.

The next section of the book promises to be good as it’s an excerpt from Abu Hamid al-Garnati’s Wonders of the World where he goes to the land of the Bulgurs and writes enthusiastically about how cool beaver dams are. I look forward to his complaints about the food, the cold, the 20 hours of darkness per day, and how gross it is when people eat their own lice.

I also have William Cobbett’s Rural Rides going in the background, as it’s perfect for when I wake up at 3am and don’t want something with a compelling plot, so I can fall back asleep in the middle. It’s just Cobbett riding around Sussex or somewhere describing the scenery (which when I look it up, no matter how dramatically he describes it, it just looks like gentle, boring hills; Hawkley Hangar, I’m looking at you) and enthusing about the soil quality, how early you can harvest the corn (ie barley/wheat) or the turnips and swedes and also continuing his obsession with anyone who plaits straw for hats. Notable in recent middle of the night hallucinatory Cobbett memories, he had whooping cough and to cure it, rode all day and most of the night in the freezing rain with his shirt off, somewhere in the South Downs. Best sort of book as you can congratulate yourself on being in a warm, dry bed, totally not riding around England with whooping cough.

A lucky find, diaries, and computer fiddling

Posted on by Liz

This weekend Danny and I went downtown to gawk in the aisles of Central Computers after Compupod didn’t have the external hard drive that I wanted. We combed through everything in the store just for fun. His amazing find was a tiny wireless keyboard which uses some sort of not-bluetooth protocol, and has a tiny trackpad built in, now hooked up to his Raspberry Pi which controls the projector and some lights by the bed. The interesting thing about that is he was looking it up while in the store and realized it is only available in that specific store and was probably made by the people who own it or their relatives or close connections. But it was also lovely just reading in bed and idly watching him reboot the Pi over and over as he twiddled settings on keyboard, mouse, pi, and projector and god knows what all else, including trying to control the projector through something called HDMI CEC, which barely worked and which led to much entertaining reading of forums of people cursing CEC into the ground).

I find this soothing and also extremely adorable.

Although, do you know how many fucking keyboards we have in this house?! I have at least 3 and Danny is worse. I think there are even at least 2 mini-keyboards in tiny cases and he has TWO of those artisanal wooden butterfly shaped keyboards (with cases) from Jessie and Kaya’s startup.

The other lucky find was, somewhere right around that area of downtown we saw a little pile of still-plastic-wrapped inch-and-a-half-thick Moleskin day planners. It is hard to think of something that one would pick up off the street enthusiastically in that part of SOMA but this qualified. We took all 3 of the notebooks, and I’m using one now as a simple diary.

It’s helping me feel a sense of continuity as I’ve moved away from daily blogging, and it also reminds me in a nice way of a childhood habit of writing down what I did every day. My parents started me and my sister on this with whatever printed calendar we had that year, or in little notebooks, one parent with each of us so the entries are in both our mom’s and dad’s handwriting, alternating. Then when I was around 7 I started writing some of them myself. Entries would usually be what books I’d read that day or whether I had dessert, pizza day at school, or who I played with after school. So like “Had pancakes. Read Henry Sugar. Played at horses at Chrissy’s house.” Stuff like that. I like the feeling and hope I can keep up this habit for the year.

Meanwhile my use of Habitica is still pretty good and useful. I also construct daily to do lists/schedules/shopping lists on long slips or paper or on index cards. It helps me to jot stuff down on this list as it occurs to me and to check in a few times over the course of the day. I also can see if there’s too much on the list for one day and figure out where to move errands or chores (move to a different day, put it on my calendar, put it on a more long term list, ask for help, etc.) My long term list used to be on Remember the Milk but the expense of it seemed silly after a while, so now I use Google Keep, which handily synchronizes across desktop and phone and which is free.

My 10 years old Mac Mini (Mozilla data center surplus) is still going strong, but I am upgrading it to a newer, fancier, faster Mac Mini figuring I can easily get another 10 years from it, and I want the ports, and I also have this nice new external drive so I can back up to that drive and to our Synology thingie as well. I should think harder about off site backups, maybe even as simple as taking an external drive to my storage space every once in a while.

Zine romp

Posted on by Liz

Read a bunch of zines at Rubin‘s house. He had a nice approach to recovering from surgery – invite everyone he knows to come over in about a 4 day period, more or less unstructured, to hang out with him and maybe bring food. I worked from his couch for an afternoon, admiring his smart house setup (http post to open his front door!) and then stayed for zines and all the people who dropped in after work. He has a lot of cool zines as he is collecting them to take to a queer zine archive in Hong Kong.

Breaking the MANacles: an anti-patriarchy reader. The “Are you a Manarchist? Questionnaire” is fun.

Not Trans Enough: A Compliation zine on the erasure of non passing and non conforming trans identified people. From Run Away, a poem by Taylor Heywood,

“Are you a boy or a girl?”

No!

Run away while you still can!

There is more time to escape me!

Some zines by Aisling Fae including D(N)R / O(N)R and Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me / ¿Me Follarías? Yo me follaría. Transfeminine short stories in English and Spanish.

zine pages with a cut and paste layout poem

trans panic poems /// volume 1 – an interesting group of poems assembled in a hand sewn cardboard cover

Migrantskaja Europa #1

Jouissance and a sense of agency

Posted on by Liz

Morning reading: Introduction to Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures by Christina Dunbar-Hester. This is going to be fun since everyone I know is quoted in it (often pseudonymously) But no quotes from me (I think) as during the interview phase I was having some sort of major health flare-up. And if there’s ever a book where I should be obscurely in the footnotes somewhere it’s this one!

Though “diversity in tech” discourse is emanating from many quarters in our current historical moment, it is important that the mandate of open-technology cultures is not identical to that of industry and higher education. Here, the reasons for engagement with technology nominally include experiencing jouissance and a sense of agency. This is experienced through, yet not reducible to, community members’ engagement with technology. If we tease apart the emancipatory politics from the technical engagement, we find that the calls for inclusion and for reframing power relations are not only about technical domains; rather, they are about agency, equity, and self-determination at individual and collective levels.

At that “jouissance” sentence I felt my heart sing and I felt so seen. Yes! This bodes well for the entire book’s understanding of our feelings and our context. So many histories leave out crucial things like love and fun and joy. Why have I fucked around with computers my whole life? Because love and happiness is why. They’re exciting, the Internet is still like a dream to me, the access to information and the possibilities of unfiltered/unmediated publishing or production, and consumption, still holds so much hope. Because I (we) like it that’s why. Like Mole seeing the Water Rat’s boat for the first time,

The Rat said nothing, but stooped and unfastened a rope and hauled on it; then lightly stepped into a little boat which the Mole had not observed. It was painted blue outside and white within, and was just the size for two animals; and the Mole’s whole heart went out to it at once, even though he did not yet fully understand its uses.

We still don’t, of course.

Also good, everything in this chapter about collectivity. *heart eyes emoji*

Industrious bread bakers

Posted on by Liz

Morning reading – Cottage Industry by William Cobbett. In which Cobbett, publisher of The Porcupine and The Political Register, explains the skills (and costs) necessary to run a household: brewing beer, baking bread, planting 3000 rods of cabbages and swedish turnips, keeping a cow, and so on. He really hates on “the villainous root” (potatoes) as well as on watered-down, non-nutritious beer and the Malt Tax which made it difficult for people to brew beer at home. Part of the hate on potatoes is because they’re inefficient and costly – you have to make a fire 3 times a day to boil them – while for the same cost (according to Cobbett) you could spend half a day and one fire baking a bushel of bread to last an entire week.

I like when Cobbett works up a good rant.

And what is there worthy of the name of plague, or trouble, in all this? Here is no dirt, no filth, no rubbish, no litter, no slop. And, pray, what can be pleasanter to behold? Talk, indeed, of your pantomimes and gaudy shows; your processions and installations and coronations! Give me, for a beautiful sight, a neat and smart woman, heating her oven and setting in her bread! And, if the bustle does make the sign of labor glisten on her brow, where is the man that would not kiss that off, rather than lick the plaster from the cheek of a duchess.