Category: books

Meghalayan Days

Posted on by Liz Henry

From my years working at the Geology Library at the University of Texas (for Dennis Trombatore, a wonderful person, R.I.P.) I have a smattering of knowledge in the area. Aside from hiding in the stacks reading fascinating and fusty old books (as we all did) I took some classes and then got a bit obsessed with the Roadside Geology series of books when I lived in the Southwest. (Halka Chronic fans unite!)

Someone put a copy of “Rancho La Brea: A Record of Pleistocene Life in California” from 1949 in my little free library so I am plugging through it. It is not telling a compelling story with great writing, but I love it anyway because it is a key to all the knowledge they had at the time, systematically arranged. The book goes through the history of its discovery, the geology and stratigraphy of the area, a catalogue of all the kinds of creatures and plants found, and a beautiful bibliography and index. I have a million questions and became suddenly an absolute hound searching for tar pit facts.

The wild thing you will instantly notice is this is pre “Continental Drift” ie plate tectonics, and pre radiocarbon dating. So everything is relative ages via stratigraphy and who knows how it all happened. (A bit handwavy on how or why the climate changed for example).

People had noticed the bones in the bubbling asphalt but not really grokked that they were not just cows and coyotes and deer but were instead from the Pleistocene. (We now know they were gathering bones from around 50,000 years ago till the present.)

I was wondering what the oldest tar pits are. Still the Pleistocene, though much older than La Brea! The oldest might be the Binagadi Asphalt Lake pits in Azerbajan, at 96–120 thousand years old.

Can you extract DNA from the teeth from the tar pits? Someone has thought of this and written a neat paper! https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3936381/ (Summary: probably not.)

I remember being a bit disappointed when I heard that the proposal to start a new geologic time division for the Anthropocene (1952 – ) had failed. But I never thought to look at what changes had been accepted! OMG! So many changes! I learned the word “Eonothem“! (And will be looking for some occasion to use it.) So, I learned the more recent eras as the Cenozonic (divided into Paeleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene) then Quaternary ( Pliestocene, Holocene (now)). Y’all there are so many new stages in the Cenozoic! Is the whole idea of “stages” new? Help! I feel my brain itching to memorize it all. But nowadays I don’t just automatically remember new facts and would have to work at it. (Unlikely).

Anyway, we are now in the Meghalayan Age. In case you were wondering! It started around 4200 years ago, the catchily named 4.2 kiloyear event, which seems to be hotly disputed but which is also very interesting to read about!

Reading older science books can be especially mind expanding. You get a glimpse of the state of knowledge of a particular time that is otherwise hard to grasp. Maybe tomorrow I will go up on the hallway book ladder and get down some old Encyclopedia Brittanica volumes to see if there is an article on the tarpits. I can’t remember if I have the 11th edition or the 12th.

(It is the 11th, in 1911, and Rancho Labrea is mentioned in the Los Angeles entry as containing the Salt Lake Oil Fields – nothing about the tar pits .)

Unsexist General!

Posted on by Liz Henry

I meant to come back to say that the Sector General books about the giant space station hospital (and interstellar ambulance) actually IMPROVED past book 6 or 7. That’s rare for a long running series !

And the women’s brains just can’t handle the top job thing was undone, both from alien and human women deciding it was bullshit! I think something in the 70s or early 80s happened and James White had a change of heart. Someone gave him a little talking to?!

It is lovely that he evolved – I highly approve!

Once the point of view characters started bouncing from alien to alien, the books got more interesting and White had more scope for depth! Cultures clash, people figure out how to work together across those cultures and I think you can read the entire series usefully through a disability justice lens! Whatever that means.

What I mean is that the different species, who have very different needs and abilities, work hard to accommodate each other! In a workplace and in their daily lives as well. That’s pretty exciting. It is the bit I liked the best about that one Becky Chambers novel where the dog-like alien is running a hotel.

Sexist general

Posted on by Liz Henry

I have been extremely busy in a good way and will be able to talk about my new project soon! In my down time I have been tearing through the Sector General books, which are just amazing!
The growing Galactic Federation realized that a huge space hospital would be a great way to prevent wars and promote inter-species relations. The space station hospital and its associated ambulance have wards and corridors for water, methane, and chlorine breathers, special food, artificial gravity, etc. This diversity means just a huge amount of accommodations necessary to support not just patients but all species to work together at the hospital, and they are dealt with matter of fact way that I appreciate (as a wheelchair user).

When they meet a new species, they ask permission to take a “tape” of one of their eminent physicians. Other species can absorb the tape, so a human can have all the knowledge (and personality) of an armored 6 legged chlorine breather who grew up on a planet with 6 times Earth gravity. It can be difficult to integrate the tape personalities, so usually everyone except Diagnosticians get the tapes erased. There are Psychologists around to help with the problems that come with Doctors who are tape sick, and convinced that they need to be rotating constantly or that they want to eat food fit only for giant caterpillars.

It is very “slice of life” feeling, with infodumps about alien physiology that I find enjoyable!

The whole point of this diverse federation is that bigotry, xenophobia, is unthinkable — a huge taboo.

But here is the kicker. Earth human women, while they work in Sector General and are smart, professional, and respected experts, cannot be Doctors or Diagnosticians. City sized cooperative flatworms, parasitic telepathic embryos, beings made of pure light, all fine to be Doctors. But women females of any species at all? Their brains just cannot handle being integrated with any other consciousness that doesn’t find them sexy. There was only a brief allusion in book 2 or 3 and it didn’t explain much, but now in book 6, Star Healer, we see Murchinson talking about how she tried to persuade the staff Psychologist to let her do Tapes. From Conway’s reply, it turns out it’s ALL females sapients:

“But you and the other female equivalents on the staff will have to continue using your brains, such as they are, unaided. It is regrettable, but you females have a deep, ineradicable and sex-based aversion, a form of hyperfastidiousness, which will not allow you to share your minds with an alien personality which is unaffected by your sexual . . . ”

(the Dot dot dot is in the original text)

What the hell! There are even genderless sapients like Dr. Prilcla, referred to as “it”! What the fuck!

There might be a level where it’s supposed to be sort of cute and sly and flirty (in a way you may be familiar with from dealing with gross old sexist men) But to me it reads as SO DESPERATE. It is prescriptive, it is trying so hard to train everyone that women just cannot handle certain things and it builds in some sort of biological NEED for the male gaze, to be objectified!

It is so sad and weird that James White who had such a gorgeous, expansive imagination, could not imagine just a little bit harder.

A casual dig at a beloved author

Posted on by Liz Henry

On my way to get my allergy shots I take two trains and pass from 3 to 5 little free libraries, which I often raid. The other day I picked up a children’s fantasy novel that is what they call “middle grade” level, so one short step up from “chapter book”.

My thoughts went something like this: “Oh, a book about a boggart, might be kind of dumb but I’ll read it over breakfast and put it back out on my free library.” I like myths and legends and folktales and fantasy but there is a particular strain of very twee UK, how can I put this, just kind of a smug rolling around in fairies and gnomes that mildly annoys me because it has no depth even though it lays some claim to being rooted in some real tradition.

So I read it over breakfast the next day and was incredibly irritated but finished it since it was super short. It was formulaic like a Nancy Drew book level of obviousness, which is fine, I can enjoy that and even read like 20 Nancy Drew level formula books in a row, to anesthetize myself but with the potential for analysis of the formula, the time it was written, and so on.

There was an ahistorical boggart, a loch ness mmonster who was also secretly a boggart shape shifter but swimming in the ocean, a scooby doo episode type of plot, and, mega annoyingly, a brash, horrible real estate, hotel, and golf course developer named Mr. Trout. Well THAT was not what I wanted to think about over my toast and marmalade. But fine. Ugh.

I will skip everything else (like that no one had any personality and the kids were less appealing than any old drivel from Enid Blyton) to get to the worst bit, which was right at the start where the two Canadian children visiting their old uncle in Scotland are being dropped off by their dad, who then leaves for an academic conference. I think one child, or a relative or neighbor, wished the mom were also visitng or asked after her, to which boy child responded something like “Working moms, amirite?” (Not literally but the words “working moms” and the implications were there! )

For fuck’s sake! Did I just died and go back to 1982? I have not heard anyone say that for years and years and I hope I never read or hear it again.

Later on someone says how the off screen working mom actually has a quite important good job doing some sort of ecological lawyering in Toronto. That did NOT make up for the implications of someone dissing the “Working Mother”.

As I put the book out on my little free library I noticed it was written by Susan Cooper. Here is where I shit on your entire childhood by rolling my eyes so hard at the author of The Dark is Rising series, which everyone but me loves loves loves (argh), that I can see my own hippocampus.

Women authors, amirite?

Magical boarding school but not horrible this time

Posted on by Liz Henry

I enjoyed reading The Incandescent — for once, a magical boarding school book that isn’t about horribly creating child soldiers, with the accompanying abuse, neglect, and so on, but shows us adults who are caring for, protecting, nurturing, and centering the children. A great story & fun to also read this story from an adult point of view.

I am still in the middle of an interesting book called Traveling in the Third Reich, about tourism and visitors to Germany between 1919 and 1945. It is full of gossipy quotes from diaries and letters of artists, journalists, writers, diplomats, and plain old tourists. The Mitfords make an appearance – always fun. Anyway, it seemed relevant to get a sense of the different ways that different people perceived the country and its politics.

It is not exactly a restful book so to fall asleep I have been reading Baroness Orczy’s detective stories and another early series with a “middle class detective” Martin Hewitt. I am trying to like Hewitt and can appreciate why he was an answer to Sherlock Holmes but his stories are awfully boring.

Blood on the Fog

Posted on by Liz Henry

This morning spent with the kittens, in bed, with coffee, doing the Sunday NYT crossword (though the quality has fallen off lately), tidying up until I find my notebook, my other notebook, my favorite pens, which takes a while since I have to tidy up everything I see along the way; then sitting in my reading chair again with kittens and writing and reading some old drafts and funny snippets of half-poems. Tried to work on “Generation ship” but instead worked on “Wry crips”, which feels close to done.

two siamese kittens asleep in my armchair half on my lap, alongside laptop, books, and open notebooks with a pen

As I look over my drafts and “finished” poems I have to keep repeating to myself: Not every poem is as good as my best poems. That’s ok! They can be finished and still count. It is always comforting to think that even my favorite poets have books where I only like 1 or 2 things or even just a few lines that stand out. But it is a horrible struggle and I feel faintly ill whenever I look at a poem that doesn’t go somewhere really or that feels Not Finished or like maybe I just went down the wrong path and should have thrown it all out. The perfect is the enemy of the finished. Maybe “good” or even “acceptable” or “I can see that I was trying something” can equal “DONE”.

Speaking of excellence tho my morning book after that is something spectacular. It’s Blood on the Fog by Tongo Eisen-Martin and I will be reading this book for a while / repeatedly with attention (which means it being a Pocket Poets edition is convenient). And I would really like to hear this guy read.

Did I know he was the current poet laureate of San Francisco? I did not! I just picked this up a while back as I riffled through many small books in a store somewhere in town and hit on this as instantly awesome from page 1 & then throughout. How is that assessment so fast? Like I can tell if something is gonna bore me or i’ve read something like it a hundred times.

* not prose
* not boring
* says something
* explodes in my mind a little
* language muscles flexing
* holographic
* riding a fucking tiger
* vivid images embraced
* conversational moments
* crams in a lot of thought

There is a thing I love that I don’t get to do enough which is when you get some poets talking, we all sound fucking insane-o in the best way and you can say oblique shit, heavy nonsense that is way up your own ass or your poem’s ass, and everyone understands. Oh yeah!!!!! Give me that sweet juice!!!!! that is how this book feels.

Some of these longer poems remind me of the best of Judy Grahn (Like A Woman is Talking to Death, the long poem about the mother dressing the bride as if sending to war, etc. ) in that they talk direct, they are in the world and current, not wearing some kind of weird hat, have a political awareness that is developed and centered and has compressed rage into language and action and yet also is free to range and roam.

“Will I be tied face to face with the country I murder”


Hand over my friends, Lord

Lord, I think that I am going to die in a war

That hit me hard. this whole poem is fucking great.

waiting for the cornfield to shrug
we are forgetful
but your ancestors nevertheless

slowing down the poem to the speed of sweet light

This is just little bits to tempt you to read more by the way.

and yes,

It's a simple matter
this revolution thing
To really lie to no one
To keep nothing godlike

(yes please. fuck, i’m so tired. )

More mysteries, and some unrepentant bitching

Posted on by Liz Henry

I read another Mavis Hay detective novel though the Oxford one turned out to not be very good. The subway one wasn’t really good either. They both had tiny bright spots that made them amusing or unique, but I conclude fiction was not her forte. I can’t quite recommend them! Though I am very curious about her art & craft books, like the one surveying quilting techniques of Britain. (I am not a quilter but that sounds interesting!)

On to the next one on my e-reader, Skull Castle. I hadn’t noted the author at all but was immediately struck by the punchy and exciting style. It is super gothic/romantic, atmospheric, feels like “action” even though they are just like, on a train or in a house party, characters all memorable and interesting. The Duchess is especially great so far. Then I went to look at who wrote it – oh! duh. John Dickson Carr. A known fabulous writer but somehow I have only read a few of his more famous locked room mysteries on some journey through a long list of famous locked room mysteries.

As I mentioned yesterday I am feeling irritable from pain and high steroid doses. One thing that really chaps my hide is when I get officiously lectured about some shit that doesn’t require a giant lecture from someone fucking ignorant or simply being a dick for no reason. Or because they hate their job and hate me. They should keep the hate close and save their breath because I’m not having it.

Examples.

Bus drivers who pull up at the not correct spot and then give me a lecture (yelling, over the sound of the ramp and beeping, to the entire bus and street, to tell me how i am in the wrong place, when i’m not, i’m in the little BOX that is PAINTED THERE for wheelchair users to know where to wait)

Hospital valet parking loading zone guys with little hats on, blocking my way off the ramp into the loading zone while they tell me officiously that I need to WAIT and NOT GO INTO THE STREET MA’AM you need to WAIT you CANT GO INTO THE STREET.

(OMG I must be ESCAPING!!)

Me: Excuse me. My van pickup is right there. Pardon me. (BARRELS BY HIM)
Hat guy: MA’AM
Me: *** dirty look side eye *** (ignores him completely)
Hat guy (chasing me into the loading zone, which is 2 cars wide, my van being in the 2nd lane) MA’AM!!!!!!!
Me: (Misgendered) (gets into van as van driver, thankfully, smirks to himself)
Hat guy to Driver: YOU CANT BE HERE YOU CANT BE IN THE ROAD
Van driver: Just loading my passenger! (emitting cheerful fuck-off rays) (I love him) (Great conversation with amusing driver then happens on my ride home)

Office phone answerer at the rheumatologist where my doc faxed a referral a week and a half ago who keeps telling me to wait for a call back to make the appointment, but then when I find out they NEVER GOT THE FAX (a fax…. fuck me….. i hope my doc sent it FROM THE BEACH) and I call to get the info again to double check it (which we all had correct in the first place) they lecture me again, then I call back to make sure they got the damn FAX and receive yet another exasperated lecture from office lady with a shitty job who has to deal with people like me.
Me: “I sincerely apologize for the annoyance but I will have to keep calling back at least once a day until I can confirm you GOT THE FAX.”
Her: (angrily) that isn’t how it WORKS you ahve to wait for us to call YOU once we receive the fax.
Me: Yes but I was waiting for almost two weeks and i’m not doing that again!
Her: Well I dont know what to tell you. We didn’t receive it.
Me: Yes. I know. This time, I’ll make sure you do get it. In a timely way.
Her: ** more cloud of lecturing **
Me: None of it is your fault and I’m sorry but I’ll be calling back tomorrow….

Everyone can fuck off… also I realized that the super bad van driver yesterday acts like that because he is normally a paratransit driver, who can act demeaningly to his clients because they have no other options, and who is super annoyed that I have any sort of boundaries and don’t let him do things like TOUCH ME OR MY CHAIR (it is utterly insane to act like you are going to do anything by “pushing” on the back of a power chair on a gently sloping ramp, for example) I hate a power tripping person, i am sorry, i’ve had shitty jobs too but always figured out a way to cope and not take it out on people!

The flare-ups will continue until morale improves

Posted on by Liz Henry

That’s how it works if you are Pollyanna! I am trying to be a little more active but I still can’t really leave the house except for doc appointments and I am using my manual chair inside the house for everything, still. Today I cheated and got a wheelchair van from the doctors’ office to my favorite cafe (Poesía, at 18th and Castro) for a nice sandwich in the sun at a table outside, wrote in my notebook a little, and went to Cliff’s Variety before taking the 24 home. That was actually too much but I am now in bed with my feet up for the rest of the day. My pain levels are high and I am irritable as fuck (also from the steroids), have no energy or creativity or mental oomph, can’t sit up for very long, and need to keep my feet elevated and keep icing both ankles.

This all sucks but it is also something I know how to cope with. Mostly.

Goal: get better asap and don’t end up in the CAM boots.

Smaller goal: get back to where I can do little physical therapy exercises from bed.

The construction on our house continues. We got a nifty new front gate that makes the entrance to our place more easily wheelchair accessible (at least to the back yard) and the iron worker guys are also finishing up some last touches on the handrail and footplate that goes alongside my fabulous new wheelchair ramp to the back patio and yard. It all looks fantastic. I already have been reaping the benefits of the ramp since I stopped really being able to walk at all, I can still get down the half flight of steps out front, get into my powerchair which lives in its little hidey hole and charging den under the bay window, and roll to the back yard where i can lie on a blanket in the sun. And because of the downstairs bathroom also being wheelchair accessible I can stay there all afternoon. All of that is amazing and I feel so lucky we were able to do it.

I’ll be very happy when I don’t have to deal with contractors several times a day! It has been a whole extra part time job.

One of the interesting things about the experience has been just how much I have had to argue and sit on everyone to make the accessibility work. It was never going to be actually ADA compatible but I wanted to get as close as possible. And yet every time there was a decision to make, someone would make The Absolutely Opposite of Accessible decision. No, I will NOT accept just a little inch and a half bump at the threshhold! omfg! Things like that. I had to (and am still!) pay daily attention to everything to have it not end up with access ruined unnecessarily. I guess that makes me appreciate having ADA standards more.

Reading – I re-read the first two of the Freya Marske magical Victorian smut series so that I could be caught up for the new (to me) 3rd book. They are good!

Now reading Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay. It starts out a little bit girls’ school jolly chums feeling, but then gets a little more complex. So far I have most appreciated how annoyed the characters are at how the newspapers refer to them as “undergraduettes”. The terrible (but very fancily printed) poetry book scene was also funny.

You can read a bit more about Mavis Doriel Hay:
https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/oxfordtrainees/tag/mavis-doriel-hay/
https://promotingcrime.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-golden-age-mavis-doriel-hay-1894.html

I was unable to find a photo of her to add to her Wikipedia entry, alas.

I noticed a while back in this British Library Crime Classics spree that people often say “All my eye and Betty Martin” which I assumed was some sort of cockney rhyming slang. Oblomovka took offense and claimed to have never heard it before – and it turns out to be really old and strange slang!!

All my eye and Betty Martin
“In Britain during the 1700s, the phrase was a common claim of dismissal (similar to ‘nonsense’, or ‘hogwash’), or a way to declare disbelief of an absurdity. It possibly originated as the punch line of a joke (though this is likely a folk etymology). Most variations of the joke involve a British sailor visiting Italy. He overhears a Latin prayer, “Ah! [Da] mihi, beate Martine” (which translates to “Ah! Grant to me, blessed Martin”, referring to St. Martin). The sailor mishears the prayer, and later uses the phrase as “All my eye and Betty Martin”. ”

Why it is popping up in countless 1910s-1940s british detective novels, I can’t say. Maybe it never went away, or maybe it became oddly popular around then, or maybe it was a fabulous in joke of The Detection Club, which I believe Mavis Hay was part of.

Another good thing I had to look up: “tamasha” which seems to be used to mean “hullabaloo”.

I am also passing time and enduring by doing old NYT crosswords and playing the game Roots of Pacha. Roots of Pacha is like neolithic Stardew Valley, without combat and with more “puzzles” in the mines. There is also a mini game where you play the flute to wild animals to tame them & then you can breed better quality domestic animals and try to collect all their colors. The storylines and social aspect of this game is good – I am dating every romanceable villager, am married, (Poly is OK in game!) and have an infant for the first time. I have read that the children in this game actually grow up, go to “school” which probably means they will take care of some animals or crops, and then choose a profession. It is very good, and very playable.

Nothing is quite as good as Stardew though!

I may play some more breath of the wild/Tears of the Kingdom if this flare up goes much longer. Punkgeek tries to suggest new games to me which ARE good clearly but which for one reason or another I just can’t roll with (like subnautica)

I have tried my hand at most of the 30 years old sunday crosswords and then skipped up to 20 years ago. Either way it is painfully like having to inhabit The Mind of Boomers. The best bit of it, other than actually solving an entire puzzle (MUCH harder than solving today’s Sunday puzzles!!) is getting obsolete computer terms – pre-web, for the 1994-1995 puzzles, and pre-smart-phone, for the 2005 puzzles. Compounded by the east coast flavor of cluelessness about either which is always hilarious.

Oblomovka and I watched a compilation of the “Have you ever sent a fax from the beach? YOU WILL” ads from or so.

@artiv3rse

#computer #technology #history #historyoftechnology #ai

♬ original sound – Artificial World

At at the time we sneered at these so hard (at least where I was sitting) for being goofy or, I don’t know. It’s hard to explain why they were cringy, but they were. For one, you are not going to want to send a fax from the beach and if you do want to, fuck off. For another somehow they were just “off”. They didn’t actually think hard enough on it, they weren’t informed enough either by the things imagined by actual computer using nerds or by science fiction things that had already been talked about for the last 50 years, etc. (which is odd because of course AT&T was full of knowledgeable nerds and researchers, though their marketing dept maybe was less so). Now, of course it is even funnier to think that not only do we do all these things but many of them are humorously obsolete as if they had predicted we would be sending morse code telegrams via Dick Tracy 2-way wrist radio from our commuter zeppelins.

I hope we really do get commuter zeppelins, still.

Other things:
* Missed going to CSUN, which I had a non refundable registration for 🙁
* helped a cousin with geneological research
* did a tiny bit of actual work last week and this week
* had a good long talk with dossie about her 2nd edition of Radical Ecstasy and am looking at her draft of a different book
* watching the end of Gilded Age with Oblomov
* Oblomov reading me bits of book 3 of Dance to the Music of Time, and bits of Hazlett “Plain Speaking” which is brilliant out loud
* talked with the waymo people about their wheelchair van service software problems
* missed several musical concerts I had tickets to and really wanted to see
* looking at my sister’s draft of some writing
* afternoon with yatima who brought me some groceries and did the dishes and was such good company
* spent a nice afternoon with my mom doing GOAT archiving work.

Last Binding and Witness for the Dead series

Posted on by Liz Henry

I had Katherine Addison Witness for the Dead book 3 on pre-order, so when it magically arrived on my Kindle I went back to re-read from book 1 and churned through all three books in a day. This was well worth it as the series (writing, plot, characters, world building, all of it) is subtle and beautiful. I was also in the right mood for a long suffering stoic protagonist and a moody atmosphere. Anyway, that third book was fantastic, and I love this entire series.

I also am in mid re-read for the Last Binding series by Freya Marske — charming queer Victorian magical romance novels, a bit smutty in a good way. Now about to finish my re-read of book 2 and jump into book 3. I recommend them, if you like that sort of thing! The writing is good, the magic system is interesting, and the characters delightful. I’m actually busy this afternoon (!!! yay!!) but still, will be done with book 3 probably before I fall asleep so I need to line up something else for the evening and to tide me over if I wake up in the night.

I’m still thinking about the not-yet-published book I read recently and seriously cannot WAIT for it to get published and for everyone to read it so I can talk about it. Oh, my god! Its initials are T.S.B. Sorry to be mysterious/not sorry!

More British Library crime classics

Posted on by Liz Henry

I’ve been plowing through more of the British Library Crime Classics series and finding some real gems in there. I think my favorite so far is Somebody at the Door (1942) by Raymond Postgate, which has a dreamy, sort of postmodern style, told from about 8 points of view – all the people in a commuter railway car. The stories and the structure feel like city life in a particular way – that I think about while riding the bus or train myself – just that all the people around me are going somewhere and for their own purposes and are the central characters in their own stories. I liked Postgate’s characters – they felt like people with their own lives.

Postgate turned out to be an interesting character himself! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Postgate

Shortly afterwards I read The Division Bell Mystery (1932) by Ellen Wilkinson and enjoyed that too. After I finished I looked up the author and found she was an MP herself – thus the (fairly minor) self insert character who was a Labor Party MP – She was a Fabian – And also she wrote A Workers’ History of the Great Strike – cowritten with Raymond Postgate! The conservative young MP protagonist of Division Bell has amazing moments where he thinks “Oh…. maybe these labor party people have a point after all” Because of the Bread Marches, which I had to look up but of course Danny didn’t.

The epigraph to Somebody at the Door was really good,

How often I have smiled to see, in a story which pretended to show me the life of Paris or of London, five or six persons, always the same, meet by chance in the most varying places. “From their box the Mortevilles suddenly saw the Duponts sitting in the stalls”; next, “on entering the enclosure the first pretty woman Jacques Dupont met was Alice Morteville”; next, “from the surging crowd of demonstrators Pierre Morteville saw rising the energetic head of Jacques Dupont.” The author may work as hard as he chooses after that in describing to us the immense surging crowd, the brilliant attendance in the enclosure, and paint in the background as much as he can; the poor man does not realize that his Duponts and Mortevilles, as soon as they “meet” and because they meet with such deplorable ease, annihilate all immensity around themselves, prevent me believing that Paris or London are anything enormous, where one may be lost, and make these cities suddenly little places like Landerneau…

The reader will not see this vast work arrange itself, according to traditional artifice, around a miraculously chosen central figure. He cannot count on a rectilinear action, whose movement will carry you along without troubling your laziness, nor even on a too-simple harmony between multiple actions, which in its turn becomes a convention. He will guess that very often the thread of the story will seem to break, and the interest be suspended or scattered — that at the moment when he begins to be familiar with a character, to enter into his cares and his little world, and to watch the future through the same window as he does, he will be suddenly requested to transport himself far away from there, and take up quite different disputes.

(Extracts from the Preface to Men of Good Will
by Jules Romains, restating the principles of Unanimism.)

The book didn’t disappoint.

I’m still in this autoimmune flare up and not very mobile, not working a lot of hours and not leaving the house — so let me know your book recs! I have some time to pass! I am in week 3 or is it more… of not walking at all and barely able to stand up. It is very frustrating when just recently I was walking so well and even thinking about bravely foraying out to the nearby cafe (a block and a half away) with only a cane or a walker. I was traveling confidently by myself, driving my car, walking with total freedom inside the house and going up and down stairs with barely any limp, feeling full of energy. Now I am slammed flat on my back. Actually it is too painful to even be on my back much of the time and i flop from side to side like a gasping fish. Low back, ankles, are just unspeakable and I am still on fairly high steroid dose which isn’t great either. It will pass, but It makes me so sad right when I was doing so well and getting so strong, to slide back into a giant flare up.