swamp_adder | Reading

A while back,

lirazel posted about a bad book about an interesting topic -- Conspiracy Theories About Lemuria -- which apparently got most of its information from a scholarly text called The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories by Sumathi Ramaswamy.

Great! I said. I bet the library has that book, I'll read it instead of the bad one! which now I have done.

For those unfamiliar, for a while the idea of sunken land-bridges joining various existing landmasses was very popular in 19th century geology; Lemuria got its name because it was supposed to explain why there are lemurs in Madagascar and India but not anywhere else. Various other land-bridges were also theorized but Lemuria's the only one that got famous thanks to the catchy name getting picked up by various weird occultists (most notably Helena Blavatasky) and incorporated into their variably incomprehensible Theories of Human Origins, Past Paradises, Etc.

As is not unexpected, this book is a much more dense, scholarly, and theory-driven tome than the bad pop history that

lirazel read. What was unexpected for me is that the author's scholarly interests focus on a.) cartography and b.) Tamil language and cultural politics, and so what she's most interested in doing is tracing how the concept of a Lemurian continent went from being an outdated geographic supposition to a weird Western occult fringe belief to an extremely mainstream, government-supported historical narrative in Tamil-speaking polities, where Lost Lemuria has become associated with the legendary drowned Tamil homeland of Tamilnāṭu and thus the premise for a claim that not only is the Lemurian continent the source of human origins but that specifically the Tamil language is the source language for humanity.

Not the book I expected to be reading! but I'm not at all mad about how things turned out! the prose is so dry that it was definite work to wade through but the rewards were real; the author has another whole book about Tamil language politics and part of me knows I am not really theory-brained enough for it at this time but the other part is tempted.

Also I did as well come out with a few snippets of the Weird Nonsense that I thought I was going in for! My favorite anecdote involves a woman named Gertrude Norris Meeker who wrote to the U.S. government in the 1950s claiming to be the Governor-General of Atlantis and Lemuria, ascertaining her sovereign right to this nonexistent territory, to which the State Department's Special Advisor on Geography had to write back like "we do not think that is true; this place does not exist." Eventually Gertrude Meeker got a congressman involved who also nobly wrote to the government on behalf of his constituent: "Mrs. Meeker understands that by renouncing her citizenship she could become Queen of these islands, but as a citizen she can rule as governor-general. [...] She states that she is getting ready to do some leasing for development work on some of these islands." And again the State Department was patiently like "we do not think that is true, as this place does not exist." Subsequently they seem to have developed a "Lemuria and Atlantis are not real" form letter which I hope and trust is still being used today.

skygiants

Over Memorial Day weekend

genarti and I were on a mini-vacation at her family's cabin in the Finger Lakes, which features a fantastic bookshelf of yellowing midcentury mysteries stocked by

genarti's grandmother. Often when I'm there I just avail myself of the existing material, but this time -- in increasing awareness of the way our own books are threatening to spill over our shelves again -- I seized this as an opportunity to check my bookshelves for the books that looked most like they belonged in a cabin in the Finger Lakes to read while I was there and then leave among their brethren.

As a result, I have now finally read the second-to-last of the stock of Weird Joan Aikens that

coffeeandink gave me many years ago now, and boy was it extremely weird!

My favorite Aiken books are often the ones where I straight up can't tell if she's attempting to sincerely Write in the Genre or if she is writing full deadpan parody. I think The Embroidered Sunset is at least half parody, in a deadpan and melancholy way. I actually have a hypothesis that someone asked Joan Aiken to write a Gothic, meaning the sort of romantic suspense girl-flees-from-house form of the genre popular in the 1970s, and she was like "great! I love the Gothic tradition! I will give you a plucky 1970s career girl and a mystery and a complex family history and several big creepy houses! would you also like a haunted seaside landscape, the creeping inevitability of loss and death, some barely-dodged incest and a tragic ending?" and Gollancz, weary of Joan Aiken and her antics, was just like "sure, Joan. Fine. Do whatever."

Our heroine, Lucy, is a talented, sensible, cross and rather ugly girl with notably weird front teeth, is frequently jokingly referred to as Lucy Snowe by one of her love interests; the big creepy old age home in which much of the novel takes place is called Wildfell Hall; at one point Lucy knocks on the front door of Old Colonel Linton and he's like 'oh my god! you look just like my great-grandmother Cathy Linton, nee Earnshaw! it's the notably weird front teeth!" Joan Will Have Her Little Jokes.

The plot? The plot. Lucy, an orphan being raised in New England by her evil uncle and his hapless wife and mean daughter, wants to go study music in England with the brilliant-but-tragically-dying refugee pianist Max Benovek. Her uncle pays her fare across the Atlantic, on the condition that she go and investigate a great-aunt who has been pulling a pension out of the family coffers for many years; the great-aunt was Living Long Term with Another Old Lady (the L word is not said but it is really felt) and one of them has now died, but no one is really clear which.

The evil uncle suspects that the surviving old lady may not be the great-aunt and may instead be Doing Fraud, so Lucy's main task is to locate the old lady and determine whether or not she is in fact her great-aunt. Additionally, the great aunt was a brilliant folk artist unrecognized in her own time and so the evil uncle has assigned Lucy a side quest of finding as many of her paintings as possible and bringing them back to be sold for many dollars.

However, before setting out on any of these quests, Lucy stops in on the dying refugee pianist to see if he will agree to teach her. They have an immediate meeting of the minds and souls! Not only does Max agree to take her on as His Last Pupil, he also immediately furnishes her with cash and a car, because her plan of hitchhiking down to Aunt Fennel's part of the UK could endanger her beautiful pianist's hands!! Now Lucy has a brilliant future ahead of her with someone who really cares about her, but also a ticking clock: she has to sort out this whole great-aunt business before Max progresses from 'tragically dying' to 'tragically dead.'

The rest of the book follows several threads:
- Lucy bopping around the World's Most Depressing Seaside Towns, which, it is ominously and repeatedly hinted, could flood catastraphically at any moment, grimly attempting to convince a series of incredibly weird and variably depressed locals to give her any information or paintings, which they are deeply disinclined to do
- Max, in his sickroom, reading Lucy's letters and going 'gosh I hope I get to teach that girl ... it would be my last and most important life's work .... BEFORE I DIE'
- Sinister Goings On At The Old Age Home! Escaped Convicts!! Secret Identities!!! What Could This All Have To Do With Lucy's Evil Uncle? Who Could Say! Is Their Doctor Faking Being Turkish? Who Could Say!! Why Does That One Old Woman Keep Holding Up An Electric Mixer And Remarking How Easy It Would Be To Murder Someone With It? Who Could Say That Either!!!
- an elderly woman who may or may not be Aunt Fennel, in terrible fear of Something, stacked into dingy and constrained settings packed with other old and fading strangers, trying not to think too hard about her dead partner and their beloved cat and the life that she used to have in her own home where she was happy and loved .... all of these sections genuinely gave me big emotions :(((

Eventually all these plotlines converge with increasingly chaotic drama! Lucy and the old lady meet and have a really interesting, affectionate but complicated relationship colored by deep loneliness and suspicion on both sides; again, I really genuinely cared about this! Lucy, who sometimes exhibits random psychic tendencies, visits the lesbian cottage and finds it is so powerfully and miserably haunted by the happiness that it once held and doesn't anymore that she nearly passes out about it! Then whole thing culminates in ( huge spoilers )

Anyway. A wild time. Some parts I liked very much! I hit the end and shrieked and then forced Beth to read it immediately because I needed to scream about it, and now it lives among its other yellowing paperback friends on the Midcentury Mysteries shelf for some other unsuspecting person to find and scream about.

NB: in addition to everything else a cat dies in this book .... Joan Aiken hates this cat in particular and I do not know why. She likes all the other cats! But for some reason she really wants us to understand that this cat has bad vibes and we should not be sad when it gets got. But me, I was sad.

skygiants

The Boston Ballet production of Maillot's Romeo et Juliette has turned out to be not only my favorite Boston Ballet production that I've seen so far but also tbh one of my favorite Romeo and Juliets full stop. It is Taking Swings and Making Choices and some of them are very weird but all of them are interesting.

( we're just gonna go ahead and cut for length )

hamsterwoman

Too many axes for doomscrolling, this is the escapism post.

Taskmaster Oz finale -- That was a fun conclusion! ( Spoilers )

I think this might be my favorite lineup in TM Oz... I mean, I liked most people on the other seasons, too, and it could always be recency bias, but I feel like I actively like 4 of the contestants, while my previous high was 3. Tommy actually ended up being my favorite, surprising the hell out of me -- I expected to find him annoying based on the first impression, but he grew on me with each episode, until I was amazed to discover he was the one I was looking forward to the most. I can't remember that ever happening before... Anyway, Tommy's right at the top for me, followed by Waka and Lisa -- I think those two are tied for me, different as they are -- Lisa is just such a darling! and Waka is such a delightful weirdo! And Emma reliably made me laugh, as well as being a great player of the game. Hughesy was also entertaining; I would rank him last of the five personally, but I still enjoyed him, and his interplay with the other contestants, especially Tommy, Emma, and Lisa.

**

Taskmaster s19e05 -- halfway! wow, this series is going fast. ( Spoilers )

*

North of North --

tinny wrote a rec post, and in addition to the really cool premise (a comedy about an Inuk woman and various people in her life, starring and made by mostly Inuk women), the thing that caught my attention was that it was short (8 episodes of ~25 min each), on Netflix, and did not require subtitles (mostly, as it turned out; there are a couple of short scenes in Inuktitut, but in-universe translation is provided for the pivotal one). Anyway, the length was perfect to binge it in two halves over two weekends. I really enjoyed it!

The thing it most reminded me of, weirdly, was Alma's Not Normal -- I think a similar vibe of, like, a situation that one would more expect to be the subject of a Very Special Episode but allowed to be a proper comedy, with a protagonist who is allowed to be flawed and goofy and not just an object of sympathy/brave in adversity or whatever. There's even a mother who was not very motherly, although Neevee is definitely in a healthier place than Alma's mum during the timeframe of the show.

( More, with spoilers )

Anyway, really enjoyed that, and hope there's a second season to catch up with these folks again.

Also, it reminded me strongly enough of 'Alma' that it served as my impetus to track down the second series of Alma's Not Normal, which I'd been meaning to do for a while, especially after John Robins spoke so positively about it when interviewing Sophie Willan on How Do You Cope. Actually doing so required remembering which source I'd gotten the first series from, trying to download some kind of codec thing from Microsoft to be able to play the videos, and finally downloading a brad new freeware media player -- but I persevered, and then binged all six episodes (they're short, so the whole thing is <3 hours) in one night. And that was really well done, and also I totally see why, in addition to general acclaim (the second series also won a bunch of awards) it appeals to John specifically -- there's a similar mixture of "emotional heft" (to use Elis's phrase) and funny moments that release tension that I recognize from John's work, and it's a combination that works for me really well. I did not realize that the show was complete at 2 series (with a Christmas special potentially to come), so while I kind of knew what to expect from the general progression, since the show is semi-autobiographical, ( Spoilers from here )

*

Hugo homework:

( Related work )

Related Work: (6/6) Charting the Cliff, Report on Censorship (I do hope either one of these wins), Tracking Changes, Star Wars Hotel video essay, Speculative Whiteness, r/Fantasy bingo

*

You may be thinking I've been talking about Elis and John less lately (I was shocked to discover I haven't posted a roundup in 2 months!), but that's just because, delightfully,

sysann has followed me down the same rabbit hole, so I've actually had a person who is also in the grip of active obsession to talk about them with in various comment threads. But I've been continuing to make solid progress through the old 5Live episodes, backwards, and now only have ~40 episodes of that to go. I won't quite have finished them all in a year, but it'll be pretty close.

( March-May 2025 )

( Feb-Sept 2020 )

Clips from the socials:
- John's adorable sneezes
- John seems to have stopped eating chocolate/cake during/prior to the recordings, but this was from before he figured out not to do that: live cake slump and Elis, udeterred by the threat of impending tears (when John says he should feel free to speak Welsh during Cymru Connection).
- John is an outlier
- Discussing John's muscles
- Elis's commentary on a review of John
- Elis's John-centric alternatives to Cymru Conection

*

Fannish goals update: ( progress )

skygiants

I've had great luck in the past with the sort of kdrama in which an angry immortal supernatural woman has to hang out in contemporary Seoul with a nice mortal boy. We were hoping The Judge From Hell would be that sort of kdrama, and, technically, it is; I think in its heart it would love to be Hotel del Luna. Unfortunately, it has also decided that what it wants to be is a violent revenge fantasy with incoherent and punitive ethics. Interspersed with wacky shenanigans! and a healthy dose of Catholicism?

Okay, so the premise: our heroine is Justitia, the DEMON JUDGE of the UNDERWORLD, THIRD IN LINE to the THRONE OF HELL, whose job is to sentence unrepentant murderers to unending torments. However, when a nice young judge gets murdered and accidentally ends up in her domain instead of the lesser hell where she belongs, Justitia refuses to listen to her pleas of innocence, gets ready to sentence her anyway, and promptly gets her wrist slapped by her superiors: she's gotten complacent! Time to go to Earth, wearing the body of the dead judge, and learn! about JUSTICE!!!

Given that Justitia's initial mistake involved accidentally sentencing an innocent person, you might be forgiven for thinking that Justitia's job on Earth might involve perhaps getting justice for the wrongly accused, or learning to temper justice with mercy and a little bit of nuance, or even uncovering faults and corruption within the justice system as it exists. haha! no. Justitia's job is to hit a quota of Unrepentent, Unforgiven Murderers On Earth and sentence them to unending torment, just like in her day job. She does this by chasing them around a sequence of nightmare scenarios that mimic the things they have done to their victims and beating them up, then stamping them on the forehead with a little stamp that says GEHENNA while then the doors of hell open and an ominous voice roars GEHENNA!!!! and they get sucked into hell. We did not enjoy the excruciating sequences of murderers being chased around a sequence of nightmare scenarios that mimicked the things they had done to their victims, which the show obviously wants us to find cathartic and satisfying. We did enjoy the ominous voice that roared GEHENNA!!!! It made us laugh every time.

( this got long but tbh not as long as it could have been. this show was so incoherent )