I have a friend who's always asking if I'm writing anything. This past weekend I couldn't really say yes. There was an idea, it seemed interesting but... Every time I tried to do anything with it I lost my way.
Now I think I may have something. It's a weird idea, still, but Hugh Greene's The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes anthology is helping. I needed a structure to work with, and one of the stories therein sort of provided me with it. This is a story I can actually look forward to working on.This sounds like a potentially fascinating project, documenting the lives of men in the Middle Ages.
One of the themes that emerged at the University of Huddersfield conference was that there considerably more resistance to clerical celibacy than previously thought, said Dr Cullum.
She added that research into medieval masculinity is a much more recent development than the study of women’s lives in the Middle Ages – a well-established field.
“But we have had relatively little study of men as gendered beings, so we need to think about whether elements that we have identified as, for example, women’s piety really were that or whether they were something that men participated in as well. We are trying to explore whether men did other things or did them differently,” said Dr Cullum.
I do know men who have a sort of distorted nostalgia about this period. This was a time when men were men, had their choice of beautiful women much younger than themselves, and spent their days hunting exotic game. Well yes, nobles had those options. Most men were sources of cheap-to-free labor, and that's about it.
Of course the truth about any time is complicated, so these scholars should be turning up some unexpected stuff.
The tumblr-specific but widely-known practice of using "fuck yeah" for the titles of fan pages (case in point) makes me suspect that everyone's favorite rhyme for "duck" is becoming the equivalent of "golly gee." In which case, there's a void. We need new obscenities. Perhaps "qlood" would be a good start.
Of course having published the word "qlood" I half suspect that the post will be forcibly taken down by sunrise.1. Fleetwood Mac - Save Me a Place
That’s why depression is not a disease like diabetes. Diabetes isn’t a metaphor. It was discovered, not invented. Its cause and nature are known. Depression exists—all those disparate societies acknowledged and named it. But it is among the most conceptually malleable of illnesses. Its borders are fuzzy: at the extreme, depression is eminently disease-like, a true madness, but its mildest forms are fleeting and banal, comprising thoughts and feelings that we’ve all had a taste of. Most of all, perhaps because it affects consciousness, depression cries out for interpretation. Throughout history, each culture has given depression a meaning, or meanings. Each has told a story about it, and the story reflects much about that culture’s values, fears, and aspirations. Chemical imbalance is our chosen story, and it speaks volumes about the way we would like to approach the world.Breaking thoughts and feelings down into matters of chemistry makes them more manageable, more controllable. What's lost in poetry is, the hope goes, gained in certainty. But that control is quite likely illusory.
It's generally said that nobody else is interested in hearing about your dreams. I mean the literal, REM-sleep kind. I don't have that kind of hostile indifference to hearing about them. I have a couple of friends who retell theirs very energetically, so it doesn't come off as a bore.
I'm not sure I can get away with that myself. It depends on the audience, really. But I tend to remember them as being fragmented and kind of static to begin with. Like sometime last weekend I dreamed about working retail in men's clothing, and there was some kind of anxiety but I'm not postive what it was. Beyond my not-so-great experiences with sales and retail jobs. Still, there's something interesting about an incomplete narrative like that. Interesting to me, anyway.
I'm in the middle of this book now. Halfway through it, in fact. Not with this cover, though. The edition I'm reading was printed in the 1980s, and has a photo cover of the two series heroes. The model they have as Nero Wolfe looks right, but they gave Archie Goodwin a mustache that I don't think quite fits.
Anyway, yes, I'm halfway through it, as it's a very short novel. And oh! what fun it is too. Rex Stout writes New York, it's rough spots and its police department as a contemporary Wonderland. Making Wolfe himself... I'm going to go with the Caterpillar. It's refreshing to see a series with such a willfully difficult hero.
Peaches tend not to be ripe when you buy them. Or at least when I buy them. Thus if you put them in the fridge right away and never take them out, they never do ripen. So when you eat them, they're mainly hard pulp. This can be avoided by putting them by a window for a little while. A couple of hours before sunset, or all night if there's not enough daylight.
I include this only as an example of real basic stuff that I've only learned recently.