The Wages of Large Mammal Bias
Aug. 15th, 2019 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeI have a smartphone, so that I won't be left behind when the singularity comes. And I have a corkboard -- I don't know what kind of rapture is corkboard-reliant, but whatever it is, I'm ready. Currently the board supports one inspirational quote and the phylogeny of the eukaryotes.
I did not sign up to the Behavior and Conservation Ecology project about whether the height of chew card placement makes a difference to the accuracy of rat monitoring. I did not sign up to the project about the effects of different kinds of street lamp on moths. No, I had to sign up for seal habitat preference, because seals and the places they live are exciting. Never mind that you can't get within twenty meters of a seal to measure things like the inclination of the rock it's sitting on, or the fact that none of the five of us in our group turn out to be legally able to drive the others anywhere. From the proposal of two seal colony sites and twelve variables measured in multiple transects, we have shriveled like plant tissue in a salt bath to one or possibly two variables, measured at one site. And as a measure of the enthusiasm of the rest of the group, the fact that only one of the four of them replied to my email trying to establish whether we had a full driver's license among us before groups were locked in is not encouraging. My overall enthusiasm for my studies is still sitting at 'Good that this is their last year.' On the other hand -- the lectures for that course have made a hairpin turn in the right direction. One of the dullest lecturers I've ever been lectured by withdraws like a cloud from the sun. What we now have interesting, interested, information-dense lectures on threats to the biosphere.
...
I just finished reading A Verse From Babylon, by Jeannelle M. Ferreira. Beautifully exact writing of place and people, in moments of texture and light and gesture. The place is the Warsaw Ghetto; the people were real, and did not survive it. This is a very good book, and although it is very short I read at least two other books between starting and finishing it because I couldn't bear to read it quickly. I will lend it with enthusiasm to anyone who thinks that would work out emotionally to being a good idea.
One of the books I read between the start and the end of that one was The Scholars of Night, by John M. Ford. (Why yes, I did let myself buy a number of books on Amazon recently). There seems not much point my writing about a John Ford book having read it only once. This is a Cold War spy novel in which one of the spies is, tangentially, Christopher Marlowe, and another one may be an archangel, and questions are in play involving where games give way to reality, and where reality starts to forget that it isn't a game; given all those things, I kept expecting macro-scale twists which didn't happen, or if they happened they were too oblique for me to notice as more than a distant rustling of significance ungrasped. I'm still waiting to feel warm or affectionate towards a John Ford book, as opposed to interested and impressed -- a degree of male gaziness doesn't help, insightful and compassionate though it may be -- but the three I've read all leave me thinking that the more I read them the more I may like them. (This one certainly leaves me feeling newly enthusiastic about boardgames, which seems to be a side effect of his books generally).
I did not sign up to the Behavior and Conservation Ecology project about whether the height of chew card placement makes a difference to the accuracy of rat monitoring. I did not sign up to the project about the effects of different kinds of street lamp on moths. No, I had to sign up for seal habitat preference, because seals and the places they live are exciting. Never mind that you can't get within twenty meters of a seal to measure things like the inclination of the rock it's sitting on, or the fact that none of the five of us in our group turn out to be legally able to drive the others anywhere. From the proposal of two seal colony sites and twelve variables measured in multiple transects, we have shriveled like plant tissue in a salt bath to one or possibly two variables, measured at one site. And as a measure of the enthusiasm of the rest of the group, the fact that only one of the four of them replied to my email trying to establish whether we had a full driver's license among us before groups were locked in is not encouraging. My overall enthusiasm for my studies is still sitting at 'Good that this is their last year.' On the other hand -- the lectures for that course have made a hairpin turn in the right direction. One of the dullest lecturers I've ever been lectured by withdraws like a cloud from the sun. What we now have interesting, interested, information-dense lectures on threats to the biosphere.
...
I just finished reading A Verse From Babylon, by Jeannelle M. Ferreira. Beautifully exact writing of place and people, in moments of texture and light and gesture. The place is the Warsaw Ghetto; the people were real, and did not survive it. This is a very good book, and although it is very short I read at least two other books between starting and finishing it because I couldn't bear to read it quickly. I will lend it with enthusiasm to anyone who thinks that would work out emotionally to being a good idea.
One of the books I read between the start and the end of that one was The Scholars of Night, by John M. Ford. (Why yes, I did let myself buy a number of books on Amazon recently). There seems not much point my writing about a John Ford book having read it only once. This is a Cold War spy novel in which one of the spies is, tangentially, Christopher Marlowe, and another one may be an archangel, and questions are in play involving where games give way to reality, and where reality starts to forget that it isn't a game; given all those things, I kept expecting macro-scale twists which didn't happen, or if they happened they were too oblique for me to notice as more than a distant rustling of significance ungrasped. I'm still waiting to feel warm or affectionate towards a John Ford book, as opposed to interested and impressed -- a degree of male gaziness doesn't help, insightful and compassionate though it may be -- but the three I've read all leave me thinking that the more I read them the more I may like them. (This one certainly leaves me feeling newly enthusiastic about boardgames, which seems to be a side effect of his books generally).
no subject
Date: 2019-08-15 05:46 pm (UTC)...I am pretty sure Wagner and the other woman are the same, and the Scholar protagonist is not the same as Wagner. I think Wagner wasn't given her real name simply because JMF has this Thing about never giving any information the reader can work out herself :)
...and speaking of which, re male gaze, I'm now thinking about all the other books I've read by him and, umm, yeah. I do think his older stuff is a little worse about it, mind you.
Though at the same time it doesn't feel to me as though there's much purchase for explanations like 'The butler did it!' because everything is so braided... More like 'Chapter five turns on a pun involving rats and Edward the Seventh.'
Ha. Yes. And also "and at the same time he is commenting on current theories involving the use of rats in medieval times." gah!
But I don't know, I have trouble with both? Partially because I'm not a very analytical reader, and partially because I read them too early in life (when I was even less analytical and had much less of the relevant cultural knowledge). It took me what in retrospect seems like a very long time (several reads) to work out the fairly simple arc of Dragon Waiting being "Byzantium is trying to take over England and Our Heroes stop it." (I did understand at least some of the fascinating alternate-history Richard III/Princes/Bosworth stuff, at least.)
no subject
Date: 2019-08-16 01:38 am (UTC)Hopefully we can set up a chain of people each of whom need different bits of JMF explained! I still have no idea why it was a Faust story, or whether it was mostly one, (well, I bet it was mostly about five different things), or whether it was a good one.
and, for example, didn't even recognize Wagner as a name that would have some significance in the Faustian story.
Oh. Huh. Nor did I. I don't think I've actually read Faust so much as osmosed the story -- though I did see part of a film of the Marlowe play, which made retroactive sense of Terry Pratchett's Eric. (Sidenote: I read his Maskerade before even having heard of Phantom of the Opera. Really must read it again sometime now I know what it's a satire of).
I think Raphael (and in general his interestingly-named protagonists) is not actually an angel but that the symbolic weight of his name is always going to be leaned on a lot.
At the point when, on the page he appears, Raphael is actually described as looking like a non-human entity manifest in a human body I went, 'Okay, this has passed 'suggestive hints' and moved into 'possibly trolling the reader?' I already have the possibly-unhelpful instinct that anything stated that clearly in a JMF novel must be some level of bluff or pun.
...and speaking of which, re male gaze, I'm now thinking about all the other books I've read by him and, umm, yeah. I do think his older stuff is a little worse about it, mind you.
I did appreciate the bit in The Dragon Waiting where Wise Old Wizard is trying to solve a woman's problems and runs into an extremely socially competent duchess who proceeds to solve them better.
All this reminds me of reading Gene Wolfe, both for the complexity, and the uncaught puns and references, and for the male gaze which I don't quite know the writer isn't somehow working with deliberately. Although if the absence of sexism is deeply encoded I feel okay about saying it doesn't count.