Trismegistus

Holy crap, is it already Wednesday Thursday again? This week has been a whirlwind of work, family stuff, music practice, and socializing. I've, alas, done very little reading.

What I Finished Reading This Week

Nada. *cough*


What I Am Currently Reading

Lexicon – Max Barry
I'm about a fourth of the way through and waiting for a non-hectic weekend so I can tackle the rest in a dedicated sitting.

Irish Tin Whistle Tutorial vol. I – Mary Bergin
I was on the fence about buying the first volume given that it's for "beginners" and depending on how one defines the term, potentially not of any use to me (i.e., I don't need to spend time on fingering, producing notes, or reading staff notation). Luckily, Bergin primarily defines it as "tonguing" and as that's something I could use work on (my abilities having been largely overwritten by a flute-appropriate approach) I'm getting a lot of mileage out of this book.

The Book of Night – Holly Black
I picked at this one this week, nothing more.

Gardener’s Magic and Other Old Wives’ Lore – Bridget Boland
A library book sale buy and thus far delightful.

Galatea – Madeline Miller
Well written and very heavy for its exceedingly short word count; thus, not something I want to continue reading right before bed.

Zodiac Connections – Alise Morales
This is absolute empty calorie brain candy fluff, which was about what I could handle last week.


What I’m Reading Next

This week I acquired Mary Bergin’s Irish Tin Whistle Tutorial vols. I, II, & III, Bridget Boland’s Gardener’s Magic and Other Old Wives’ Lore, Jean Hersey's The Woman's Day Book of House Plants, and Liz Garton Scanlon and Chuck Groenink's Full Moon Pups.


これで以上です。

Challenge #9

Rec Us Your Newest Thing. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Right now, everything old is my Newest Thing again. Maybe it's because chez lebateleur has recently emerged from the bout of seasonal illness we thought we'd successfully avoided, or the recent snowfall (the most accumulation since 2016 🥳), but my recent fandom consumption is very old favorite focused.( Read more... )

As far as earworms go, I have been all over Pádraic Keane, Páraic Mac Donnchadha, and Macdara Ó Faoláin's live album Beo since the first time I heard it. These guys get what the tunes are about (And as one Bandcamp commentator put it, that bass drone.) It's good, good stuff.

これで以上です。

For whatever reason, this was a banner week for me in terms of reading books, and acquiring new ones.

What I Finished Reading This Week

Tutor for the Feadόg Stáin – Micháel Ó hAlmhain & Seamus Mac Mathúna
I feel like this is one of the better pennywhistle tutors I’ve encountered, for all that it’s one of the earliest. I very much appreciate its emphasis on learning tunes in chunks, by ear, which is the best way to acquire them if you want to play them with proper lift, phrasing, and ornamentation. That said, I’m not sure how well this tutor would prepare any students with little or no prior familiarity with the instrument or genre to learn anything beyond how to play the tunes presented in the accompanying audio with the proper lift, phrasing, and ornamentation. The authors were obviously limited to how much audio they could fit onto a standard cassette tape, but the written explanations grow sparser the further into the tutorial one progresses, while the complexity of the material increases. The authors also break with standard convention by correlating the names of notes to the finger one raises to sound them, e.g., calling the finger one lifts to produce the note “A,” the “A” finger, versus referring to the lowermost finger on the instrument when playing “A” as the “A” finger. This begs several questions, not least of which being of how one describes the fingering needed to produce the lowest note on the instrument, when all fingers are down. I’m able to shrug these issues off because I already know what I’m doing, but I imagine they would be highly frustrating to beginners. These concerns aside, the playing on the tape is top notch, and there’s something delightful about how unstudied it is compared to today’s highly polished media standards: you can hear people talking in the background, and the instructor regularly clearing spit out of his instrument throughout. So again, while I'm not sure this would be an ideal resource for a complete beginner, it is a good resource, and I'm glad I read it.

Blackheart Knights – Laure Eve
This book’s premise is awesome: King Arthur’s court, except the knights ride motorcycles and fight in televised arena events that determine the outcome of legal disputes. Awesome, right? But Eve fumbles the execution by trying to land a Big Reveal that will be blindingly obvious to any reader who’s even glancingly familiar with the Matter of Britain. Far from building narrative tension, this turns much of the book into a slog as Eve repeatedly hammers home that This Character Has A Big Dangerous Secret And They Aren't Going To Tell You What It Is. Think: Character has “spent her life in preparation for what comes next”, which is “the most dangerous game she has ever played”, for the goal “she has craved since she was eight years old”, that is “the meaning of her hard-edged existence”, which will set her free if she wins and kill her if “anyone finds out what her true intentions are” belaboring of the "mystery." Over and over. In every chapter in which Character appears. And just:
( Read more... )
WE ALREADY KNOW!
This is especially frustrating because there’s so much fascinating stuff about this world and the characters who populate it, from the warring state districts of Eve’s (possibly post-apocalyptic) London, to the Sumo-esque stables that train the knights, to the Hunger Games-ish cottage industries of ateliers and fashion houses that get them screen-ready, to this society’s attempts to stamp out hereditary magic and deal with poverty and social inequality through armed combat of champions, to how those systems are open to corruption and abuse, to Eve's razor-edged explorations of how fame and power isolate and corrode as often as they elevate, and, and, and. But instead of being explored for their own sake, these elements exist to pad out the page count until it’s time for the big-revelation-that-isn’t. Other than that, there are some hot sex scenes, there's the arbitrary nonbinary character to boost diversity (apparent because Eve sometimes slips up and refers to them with the pronouns of the male character they're based on), and there's an incredibly effective and affecting scene in the closing chapters that I wish had been the norm and not the outlier for the book.

I realize this review makes me sound like I hated this book and I didn't; it's better written than a good deal of recent Arthurian fiction. I'm just supremely frustrated that Eve sacrificed so much narrative potential to focus on the least intriguing thing about the story, and I wish Blackheart Knights had hit the insanely high mark Eve set with The Graces and The Curses.

Herbs for the Mediaeval Household – Margaret Freeman
Published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my copy is one of the 3,000 printed for the second edition. It is, first of all, a very pleasing object to hold: thick, textured paper; wide margins, gorgeous blackletter typesetting, and printed in high-quality red and black ink that hasn’t faded a whit in 67 years. The text is also a delight, filled with quotations from 14^th through 17¹⁷ century English, French, and German herbals that strike my 21^st century ear as wonderfully whimsical and earnest. It’s also refreshing in that Freeman provides this information without much editorial comment, save for the occasional “these uses are not recognized today.” It’s a far cry from herbals published in the ‘80s and beyond, with their myriad caveats and warnings about everything from skin sensitivities to. Most of the herbs and their previous and current uses were familiar to me, but I still enjoyed reading them, especially alongside the woodcut illustrations.

Guided Tarot – Stefanie Caponi
This is very much a paint-by-numbers “modern” guide to reading Tarot, by which I mean that it offers some basic readings for each card with no discussion of why those meanings belong to said cards in the first place. They’re generally on the mark; however, Caponi’s interpretations are very zeitgeisty in their insistent unwillingness to acknowledge that anything inherently uncomfortable or unpleasant can exist in the word. Rather, everything is an opportunity for self-actualization, self-care, or growth. This makes for some real honkers, such as when Caponi describes the Ten of Swords as a “card of new beginnings.” And, sure, your house burning to the ground with your entire family in it is a “new beginning” if looked at from a certain angle, but no one in that situation is going to be looking at it from that angle. So, yeah. If you're new to Tarot you could do far worse than this book as resource to learn the basic meanings of the cards, but it doesn’t really offer much more than what you’d get in a Little White Book.

The Qabalistic Tarot – Robert Wang
This is hands down the best volume on the Qabalistic underpinnings of the modern occult Tarot. Wang’s text is remarkably approachable without sacrificing complexity, depth, or nuance. Moreover; he uses standard academic language as opposed to what I think of as the “standard ceremonial magician affectation” of, say, Lon Milo DuQuette’s Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot (which I still recommend reading in conjunction with this book for a comprehensive understanding why Tarot cards are interpreted as they are). That said, The Qabalistic Tarot isn’t entirely without faults. It’s sloppily edited: we’re talking not just misspellings or typographical errors, but the incorrect use of words and in some cases entire Tarot cards being omitted from the text. And while he’s far from the only author to do so, Wang is very much of the male/active, female/passive mindset that drives me up the wall. (And if that correspondence makes sense to you, let me ask you this: Between a wet dream and childbirth, which would you say is active, and which is passive?) Anyway. If you want to know what’s going on under the hood of Tarot as a system, you’re going to need to read this book.

蟲師 9 – 漆原 友紀 (Mushishi vol. 9 – Urushihara Yuki)
This volume is very much in keeping with the eight that preceded it. So if yomikiri about the mushi of the week are your thing, there’s more of that here. If you wish there were just a little bit more plot continuity, well, this book does have a one-off where we get a brief glimpse into Ginko’s past, but that’s about it. The chapters Nokoribeni and Aomu Mizu rank among my favorites in the entire series, but oh, the latter will crush you.

蟲師 10 – 漆原 友紀 (Mushishi vol. 10 – Urushihara Yuki)
This final volume, again, is very much of a piece with the preceding nine. I really dug the final two chapters—Suzu no Shizuku—largely because the art and storyline reminded me of Sugiura Shiho’s Silver Diamond, which it’s about time I read again. So, yeah. The lack of overarching plot is frustrating, but the art is stellar and Urushihara is second to none in his ability to capture the atmosphere of pre-modern Japanese creepiness on the page.


What I Still Need To Review: Queer City – Peter Ackroyd
Yup, still haven't written this.


What I Am Currently Reading

Keeper of Enchanted Rooms – Charlie Holmberg
I'm just getting back into this one after wrapping up so many other books this past week.


What I’m Reading Next

This week I acquired Lara Elena Donnelly’s Base Notes, Margaret Freeman's Herbs for the Mediaeval Household, Charlie Holmberg’s The Hanging City, Jacqueline O’Mahony’s Sing, Wild Bird, Sing, Alexis Schaitkin’s Elsewhere, Rebecca Stott’s Dark Earth, Cathy Yardley’s Role Playing, and 11 nonfiction/current events books I'm too lazy to list out here.

これで以上です。

I will get back on track with these!

What I Finished Reading This Week

Down the Back Lane – Grey Larsen
This book's strengths include Larsen's clear prose, subject matter expertise, commitment to gender equality, passion for the subject, and of course, his simple and elegant innovations in describing and noting articulation and ornamentation in Irish traditional music. Its weakness is its high price to content ratio, particularly given that a quarter of the accompanying recordings were taken from one of Larsen's previously released albums and aren't content original to this volume at all.

The Hebridean Baker – Coinneach MacLeod
Yes, this book has the same title as MacLeod’s second volume, which I reviewed two weeks ago and obviously enjoyed enough to pick up the first! Unsurprisingly, it's very much of a piece with its successor, although MacLeod's commercial image was somewhat less honed in this one: the introductions to each recipe are factual versus cottagecore-cutesy; electric appliances, power lines, and inclement weather are all visible in the photos; and the prose essays haven't been scrubbed of topics (e.g., religion) that PR specialists probably caution influencers to avoid. The advertainment content is about on par with the second volume (note the blink-and-you'll-miss-it aside, after all the shilling, that it will be many years before Isle of Harris Distillery produces its first batch of whisky). Still it's much less obviously advertainment than much influencer content. And anyway, the photography is gorgeous, the recipes so far have been great, and sure, the whole thing is pretty hokey, but it's my kind of hokey.


What I Finished Reading In Weeks Past

The Silver Bough vol. 4 – F. Marian McNeill
This is definitely one for the completionists. McNeill published this volume in 1965, i.e., well before the advent of the Internet, with the result that most of this book is comprised of exhaustively detailed accounts of local festivals that would just be Wikipedia entries today. This is not necessarily a bad thing per se: apparently MacNeill was the first person to ever ask "What are Scotland's local festivals?" and then collect the answers that question in one place--a valuable historical documentary function. It's just that the result is not that dissimilar to someone, for instance, setting out to document 4^th of July festivities in every US town. The geographic locations may differ but the broad strokes (and often, fine details) are the same: parade, official speech, festive meal, fireworks. By the time MacNeill hits the 30^th such iteration she's clearly struggling to describe the same template in unique ways (there are only so many ways to describe people cheering, and eating, and listening to the mayor giving a speech); she gives up entirely for the last 20 or so local festivals and mercifully just lays out the sequence of events.

Nor has all of the content aged well: the passage about tributes being sent for display during one local festival from all corners of the Empire (Cheetah skins from Africa! Exotic feathers from New Zealand!) will not inspire the awe in 21^th century readers that MacNeill intended, and I doubt many readers will agree that inventing a pseudo-historical outfit to combat the scourge of "be-sporraned girl dancers in male Highland dress" is as laudable a development as dudes at the time of the book's publication apparently thought it was. (Also, I am hereby adopting "be-sporraned girl dancer in male Highland dress" as my social media profile language of choice.)

The most interesting parts of the book were the descriptions of the few unique local festivals, the information on the development of Highland games, and the chapter on defunct winter solstice celebrations. TL;DR--I'm glad I read it, it contains some interesting information, but much of it is downright monotonous, and all but the most dedicated readers could easily give it the skip.

The Penny Whistle Book – Robin Williamson
I believe this is one of the earliest pennywhistle tutors published, and it's great fun to read. Williamson's voice is enthusiastic and often silly, and the book's lack of self-importance and even self-consciousness is refreshing when compared to the self-serious and pedantic tone of the last 15 to 20 years. It was also written before the current emphasis on purity and taxonomy in ITM, so there are American, English, Scottish, and Welsh tunes freely mixed in with the Irish, which I very much like. Each tune is introduced with some notes on its origins, or Williamson's thoughts about its merits, something few tunebooks these days do that I wish they would. (And honestly, this blending of music from geographic regions is probably a lot truer to historical practice than the current tendency to insist on publishing collections of "only" Irish tunes or tunes from a given county or whatever.) Conversely, historical clip art fills the blank spaces on many pages sans any captions to explain what the images depict or why they accompany a given tune. It's all sort of endearingly naive by modern standards. Williamson's also much less concerned with ornamentation than most modern authors, or at least, the ornamentation he introduces is not the "canon" stuff. (I'd love to get my hands on a recording of him to hear whether he's playing the turns as turns, or if that's just how he was noting long and short rolls.)

TL;DR--my original copy of this book disappeared decades ago and it was nice to get my hands on a second. This book has a good selection of tunes unpretentiously presented, and I've enjoyed reacquainting myself with them.


What I Still Need To Review: Queer City – Peter Ackroyd


What I Am Currently Reading

Guided Tarot – Stefanie Capoli
It’s not bad, but neither is it anything that hasn’t been published in dozens of other "just let your imagination guide you" Tarot books.

Blackheart Knights – Laure Eve
I think I'm just at about the halfway point in this book, which isn't bad, but as failed to grab me all the same. This probably has something to do with my having spotted the yet-to-come Big Reveal by the third chapter.

The Thorns Remain – JJA Harrow
Our early 20^th century protagonist has a glaringly anachronous 21^st century mindset, but I still inhaled a hundred pages in a go.


What I’m Reading Next

This week I acquired Ann Leckie’s Translation State, MacLeod’s The Hebridean Baker, and Seogang University’s Grammar and Supplementary Vocabulary Book: 1A & 1B. Last week, I acquired Michael O’hAlmhain and Seamus Mac Mathuna’s Tutor for the Feadog Stain, Jim Meehan’s The PDT Cocktail Book, Rich Shih and Jeremy Umansky’s Koji Alchemy, and Charissa Weak’s The Witch Collector.


これで以上です。