heliopausa

Just to gather up in one place the various scattered bits and pieces I have done:


( this is the collection...Collapse )


This entry was originally posted at http://heliopausa.dreamwidth.org/385.html. Please comment here or there.

E. F. Benson The Luck of the Vails.  ( Why read this? Is it recommended?Collapse ) 

Dorothy L. Sayers Unpopular opinions ( Why read this? Is it recommended?Collapse ) 

Lois McMasters Bujold Komarr and A Civil Campaign  ( Why read this? Is it recommended?Collapse )

Hannah Craik Olive ( Why read this? Is it recommended?Collapse )


This entry was originally posted at http://heliopausa.dreamwidth.org/63104.html. Please comment here or there.

We get two Junes this year!  Or something like it, anyway.  ( Mildly complex arithmetic-astronomy under the cutCollapse )
So that's how come there are two Junes this year, and why I'm justified in calling this entry Endless Summer.

For your refreshment after all that, two pictures from the endless summer - glorious bang lang trees in flower, and appropriately (since the flowering of the bang lang signals exam time for tertiary students) flowering above open-air bookstalls.








This entry was originally posted at http://heliopausa.dreamwidth.org/67862.html. Please comment here or there.

My life continues a bit fractured, so there'll be no thoughtful exploration of a single theme in this post, but once again, a jumble of bits and pieces.  First, just for your pleasure, is a link to a photo of a beautiful white kangaroo. 

Second, a concert report!  Last weekend I heard for the first time Stokowski's transcription for orchestra of Bach's Fugue in G Minor - which absolutely entranced me for the first ... oh, about two-thirds, I guess.  And then it got a bit muddied, overloaded, too much jam on a piece of toast - which was more down to the orchestra than to Bach or Stokowski, I think, having come home and listened to other versions.  Still - great to hear, and I really was entranced for most of it, and in any case that was only the curtain-raiser to the main piece of the night, which was...
Daimo Eriko on marimba, playing a wonderfully complex piece, Lauda Concertata, by Akira Ifukube.   Here's a three-minute scrap of it, but it doesn't do justice to the excitement and dynamism of the full thing (which is about thirty minutes long).  Daimo Eriko was amazing, all whirling energy and intensity and total engagement, with the piece and with the orchestra, and they with her.  Overall, she and they and the whole experience - brilliant, and very exciting.
(There was some Brahms or other after the intermission, but ... Brahms just didn't cut it after that excitement.)

Third, and less pleasingly, in the category of Things I Didn't Know: 
I've only just learned that "Tonto", which is the name I know for the Lone Ranger's offsider, means "Stupid" in Italian and Spanish, which is really depressing..  :( 
Spanish is the more relevant, I guess, but it was Italian I saw it in, and only then cross-checked to Spanish.  
(Speaking of names, by the way - Reality Winner??)

Last:  Best wishes, UK voters! 

This entry was originally posted at http://heliopausa.dreamwidth.org/67809.html. Please comment here or there.

I'm struggling a bit to get back on top of things, so this is not a very long or learned or real post... but then, what is a Real Post?  Oh well - very quickly then,in the department of things I've only just found out:

With reference to the song 'Being for the benefit of Mr Kite' (video, about two and a half minutes) - there really was a Pablo Fanque, running a circus in Britain over several decades in the nineteenth century. 
His birth name was William Darby, he was black, and very successful - which is all pretty interesting - but even more interesting is the story of how his circus employed an Irish contortionist (I think - the source says "posture master")  disguised as a Chinese man, (to be excitingly foreign and mysterious? - which I suppose is the reason for Darby's own name change) which provoked two other genuine Chinese men to investigate, fearing - after the circus refused to let them speak with the disguised man - that a countryman of theirs was being held in forced labour conditions - and they brought, successfully, a suit of habeas corpus against the circus. 
I find this wonderful and fascinating - the awareness of possible forced labour (and implicit possible human trafficking) at the time, and the brilliance of the habeas corpus law being used to fight against it. 

I love the gumption of the two Chinese men going in to bat for a possibly kidnapped and enslaved countryman.  I really want to hear of other such cases, where a real trafficked person was freed this way.



This entry was originally posted at http://heliopausa.dreamwidth.org/67523.html. Please comment here or there.

It's been a full-on few weeks, including (as was always on the cards) a funeral.  I feel like such an idiot to need to learn again and again (I am so sick of this) about the finality of death and what living in time means.  Time is change and things not being the same.  Yes, of course.  Everybody knows that.

Well.  Well, so back to LiveJournal.  What can I write about?  Books and video/television viewing?  Okay...

My reading took a huge dive - I abandoned both the books I was properly, attentively, reading, and will have to start them all over again. Mostly, I just read scraps of things picked up from what was around.  Two such things were:
Sallust, Jugurtha and The Cataline Conspiracy, as translated for a Penguin Classic, I think - it was an oldish paperback, anyway.  I read them because I was pleased to be learning even one name of an African king, even if he was a ratbag (according to Sallust), and also because I vaguely wondered if looking at pre-Caesar Roman evolutions might give me some ideas of how to look at how things are changing politically, now.  But mainly just because the book was to hand.
I also read great chunks of the Iliad, in an online translation by Ian Johnston of Vancouver Island University, in order to argue (amiably) with someone about whether Paris was a coward, whether women were uncritically presented as chattels, whether bows were seen as a contemptible weapon etc.  (I would be delighted to discuss such stuff while it's fresh in my mind, if anyone's interested.)

I've watched three oldish British television renderings of PD James novels featuring the detective Adam Dalgliesh.  The first one I saw was about the residents of a stately old abbey, stuffed with priceless art, facing the prospect of its shutting down.  The second one was about the residents of a stately-home-turned-museum, facing the prospect of its shutting down.  The third one was about the residents of a stately home, facing the prospect of... but I gave up on that one before we'd even got to the second murder, because I thought I was getting the drift.

I watched - now this is good! - parts of several episodes of an Australian six-part mystery, called Seven Types of Ambiguity - yes, of course the title's a steal, and that's not something I like, in general, but the Empson book is part of the plot, sort of.  The acting and the writing is mostly very, very good, and the cinematography as well.  I had to leave and so have missed the closing episodes, but what I saw was very good indeed, good enough to have conversations with strangers about.  (What?  I'm not sure if that's a sane measure of anything.) 

The banners in the street tell me it's the 107th annual International Women's Day - warm greetings, all international women!

To mark the day, I went to a theatre show last night based on the eighteenth-century Story of Kieu - or on part of it, because it's a long story, covering fifteen years of the protagonist's various struggles against a very oppressive and anti-woman society. ( Cut because of spolier!Collapse )

More sombrely, an article about the real-world continuing oppression of women:
The Handmaid's Tale has already come true, just not for western women.

I didn't get to see Arrival over the weekend, as hoped, nor have I yet managed to return to Nirvana in Fire.  :(  And things don't look like letting up for the next two-three weeks.  (I did manage to return to the Narnia Prince Caspian read-through, after a very long absence.)

****

And now I've checked some of your posts, and found news of the decades-long campaigner for human rights in Manipur, Irom Sharmila Chanu! Wonderful!  Brilliant!!  More power to her, and achievement of her goals, which are not just for her, but for everybody in Manipur (even the oppressors, who are without question damaged by the wrongs they inflict).  And for women everywhere working for a better world!



This entry was originally posted at http://heliopausa.dreamwidth.org/66515.html. Please comment here or there.

March - I knew it was going to be pretty hectic, and sure enough so it is - short story:  Life is getting a bit full-on again, and I may be slower to post or respond to posts for the next three weeks or so  :(

I haven't done much reading - still stuck at Chapter Three of Nation.  I haven't even been able to watch another episode of Nirvana in Fire - and I have a DVD or two hanging ... errr... fire.  Still, there's time for two quick stories of good things happening:

Even in a not too flash area of a big city, developers can come knocking on the door of a hotel with offers of big money for a sale - but this hotel-owner would rather keep the low-level good things happening there, happening. 

And in a restaurant on the other side of the world, an owner-chef appreciates the hard work and great camaraderie of the whole kitchen team - starting with the dishwasher.

And here - have a link to a couple of great musicians, whom I saw in concert late last month!  :)




This entry was originally posted at http://heliopausa.dreamwidth.org/66140.html. Please comment here or there.

This gadget sounds really useful!  I have a coconut scraper made like a small stool, with the scratching part sticking out one side.  This is fun (in a mild way) but the sharp teeth sticking out at shin level aren't the best plan for kitchen furniture.  A bench-mounted, relocatable, had-whirled scraper sounds just the ticket!

I've been reading quite a bit, here and there -

• reading the book Nation by Terry Pratchett, and thinking (so far, three chapters in) that it's very good, but erratic and a bit patchy.
• have read the book Olive, by Mrs Craik, which interesting as a record of thinking on various matters (women's art being marginalised/suppressed, physical "deformity" cutting a woman out of the marriage market, race, religion) - but is not particularly worth much as a novel.
• reading The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, which sketches out much fascinating material, so far, but isn't really catching fire (bad metaphor, in the circumstances).

And beginning to brace myself for March, which is shaping as a pretty full-on month.

This was also a test-post on cross-posting to LJ; it seems to have worked fine.


This entry was originally posted at http://heliopausa.dreamwidth.org/65984.html. Please comment here or there.

New planets!  I'm excited and agog, and also (is there anything I can't find a downside to?) thinking somewhere alongside the excitement that this discovery could foster up a feeling that now we don't have to worry about wrecking this planet because we've got somewhere else we can go.  (Of course there's no such real suggestion; I just mean how it might change people's mood about things.)  So... mixed feelings.  But still... seven planets, under a huge, cool sun.  Wow!  Oh, we live in amazing times!

So does everybody, of course - I mean, so everybody always has, whether they knew it or not.  Today's also, more or less, a hundred years since the stunning, out-of-nowhere (ha!) end of the Romanov rule over Russia, on the back of the chaotic butchery of WW1 and of riots over incipient (or actual?) famine. 
Coincidentally, on Nirvana in Fire, talk has turned to how a failure to provide relief in such crises leads to rioting and thus to regional (at least) instability - true enough, and I'm sorry Nicholas II hadn't better advisors, or (if he had them) that he'd listened more.  A sad ending for an amiable family.

Great sonnet, isn't it, by the way?  :) 

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