It's Always More Complicated

What I read

Finished Blood and Mistletoe, and I do concede that it is a tour de force and covers a lot of very varied ground, in how and why people were invoking Druids and how they thought of them over a very long period. And it's interesting about how some very tenuously based motifs just do not go away, and people are still engaging with them or feeling they have at least to mention them. But o boy the whole 'making up history as traditions of various Druid-themed Orders since approx C18th', groan sigh - and I think one occasionally feels Hutton's pain, as in the case of the bloke who has writ A Book on one of these based on documents he alleges to have inherited but which he is not letting anyone else see....

And by the end I was getting very grumpy about all these people invested in this thing about which, if it even existed, the evidence is vague and contradictory, and thinking about the vast amounts of The History of Women which keeps having to be 'rediscovered' at regular intervals in spite of the fact that it is, actually, solidly documented and there is sound evidence. The peeves and the niggles were somewhat in agitation.

Anyway, for a break from this, I finished Anybody Out There, which I did not like so much as Rachel's Holiday, thought it kept swerving off into farce and went on a bit too long.

Then I discovered that Mgr Ronnie Knox's The Viaduct Murder (1925) was available from Project Gutenberg so I thought I would give it a whirl, and really, it is pretty terrible, and I think may actually contravene some of the rules he later laid down for the Detection Club? - a secret passage? Also, we gather that in the 1920s there was no 'leave the body where you found it and call the police', at least if you are sound middle-class golfers who have come across it at the foot of the eponymous viaduct.

On the go

Continuing the Middlemarch re-read.

Had vague recollections recently of Joan D Vinge's The Snow Queen (and subsequent sequels) so I found that on my shelves and am currently re-reading.

Up next

No idea.

What I read

Emily Tesh, The Greenhollow Duology: Silver in the Wood, Drowned Country (2020), following recommendations last week, and yes, just the thing for a day involving bopping around on public transport for dental scan.

Dorothy B Hughes, The Expendable Man (1963): noir thriller which I saw something about suggesting of interest for one of my side-project, so slightly skim-read it (yes, of interest).

John D MacDonald, The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper (Travis McGee #10) (1968).

Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You (2014), which was, sort-of well done litfic but somehow you could tell where it was going?

Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938) - the one in which the Spanish Civil War is a background plot point....

Martha Conley (pseud of Marta Randall), Growing Light (1993) - odd that someone who wrote such very individual and memorable sff wrote a mystery (just one, as far as I can see) which is fairly bog-standard for the period.

John D MacDonald, One Fearful Yellow Eye (Travis McGee #8) (1966).

Gave up on The Constant Rabbit and also a recent cosy mystery that just wasn't doing it for me.

On the go

Polly Stewart, The Good Ones (2023) - described as 'literary suspense'.

Up next

Well, Blood and Mistletoe has arrived well in advance of anticipation....

Don't feel particularly strongly about the issue, can see the contra-arguments, but partly in solidarity with the people on my flist to whom it does matter, and partly to see if I could, refrained from posting or commenting on Friday. Orginally thought it was a bit moot whether I would be posting anyway, as the intention was to spend the holiday weekend in the bosom of my family, but my state of health* precluded travel. Instead was stuck at home, a bit bored.

Did write the following, which I could have/might have posted, but didn't.

Dream last night, many details of which have faded, but which was interesting for various reasons. For one thing, it was a story I/my character was participating in, also something that I was reading (at least partly in rather childish comic-book form), but also writing (in particular, there were decisions about making sure characters were not all, or indeed any, pristine white persons). Also, it was example of a certain type of fantasy which has 'female-buddy' pairing, often after initial suspicion/antagonism, one is the thinker and the other is the fighter (I can think of several versions of this in things I've read, not to mention partly-written work of my own), but also with sense that they both learnt from one another the necessary skills. Plot involving diplomatic negotiations (around marriage for a ruler?), some kind of polygamous ruler set-up (yet strong sense that the male ruler was being run by women), betrayal, narrow escapes, etc.

***

And on women and adventure, am still making my way through the Adam Adamant DVDs. I think the writers, and a lot of viewers, assumed that Georgina was romantically attracted to Adam, but there is a enough subtext there for a reading that she doesn't fancy him, she wants either to be him, or she wants to be Tinker to his Sexton Blake (NB AA was whipped up as a rapid replacement for projected televisation of the adventures of Sexton Blake that didn't work out). She is active (if usually rather disastrously so) in getting involved in whatever's going on, she isn't just being Phyllis sitting around waiting to be bopped on the head or kidnapped by the swine.

This fits in with a phenomenon I've noted before - in my post here - about that mid-sixties thing about women looking for a Pied Piper to lead them into a new adventurous existence. Which because of the constraints of the time tended to be framed within a romance narrative, when it is not really about romance at all - it's the life the man represents (bohemian freedom, adventure, whatever). I think there is at least one earlyish Tanith Lee which confronts this head-on, where by way of a romance plot the female lead develops her own powers (?Sung in Shadow - years since I read this). I also think of the ending of The Golden Notebook where what Anna gets from the obsessive and claustrophobic love-affair with Saul is the descent into healing madness, and the first line that breaks her writer's block. (And is well lucky to be quit of him, no?)

***

Some links:

When author Rachel Cusk wrote A Life's Work, her disarmingly frank account of motherhood, she was shocked by the vicious reaction it provoked from other women.

Lucian Msamati cut his teeth doing political theatre in Zimbabwe. Now he has a lead role in Alexander McCall Smith's rose-tinted vision of Africa. He tells Aida Edemariam about the filming of The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.

Women's websites offering intelligent content are booming, thanks to their appeal to those who feel patronised by glossy magazines.

Druids, witches and shamans make their way to Stonehenge for equinox. Hear me go aaaargh at the following statement: 'The Stag Circle follows beliefs that go back hundreds of years BC. Members rejoice in air, water and fire and worship ancient gods'. We also note that pagans have rifts just like other religions.

From earlier in the week: Lap-dancing clubs are advertised as exclusive, glamorous entertainment for 'gentlemen'. As a former dancer tells Rachel Bell, the reality for the women who work in them is both degrading and dangerous. Are we at all surprised at this intelligence?

***

*Feeling much better now but still not 100%

[A] young man called Henry Jacob... became one of the first English experts in the new science of philology, the study of the nature and relationship of words. Based at Oxford University, he used sophisticated linguistic analysis to prove that Hercules and Joshua had been the same person. He added in passing that philology proved that the Druids had been taught the true religion of the Hebrew patriarchs by Abraham himself, and had then brought it to Britain. Poor Jacob then went completely and permanently mad.