davidgillon | Reading

I have just finished reading THE DUKE, the romance with the premise of 'what if all the beats of a Sexy Duke regency romance, but lesbians!' To this end IMO it succeeds admirably and how much you enjoy it I suspect will depend on whether you will be excited or disappointed to see those lesbians confidently, passionately and unswervingly marching along the beat sheet. I personally did not enjoy this as much as Cowan's previous novel Untamed, which is far too unhinged to hit a single expected beat, but I do think the beat-sheet quality of THE DUKE is intentional and that Anna Cowan is in on the joke.

I, of course, am most interested in the worldbuilding. In the world of THE DUKE, as far as I can tell, everything about gender relations and regulations is as regency-romance normal except that women in England can inherit titles, allowing them to step into the highly specific gender category that is SEXY DUKE or perhaps GENDER: CRAVAT. This does not seem to trickle down through the rest of society; we never meet a female blacksmith or lawyer, though we do meet a butch valet-to-a-sexy-duke and a butch one-eyed duke's bastard-daughter-slash-personal-assassin, which leads me to believe that in this universe perhaps access to butchness is dependent on proximity to the GENDER: CRAVAT aristocracy. On the other hand, the only other societal stratus we ever spend time in is Starving French Prostitute so maybe middle-class butches do abound in England's green and pleasant land and we are simply as little concerned with them as the average regency romance is with anybody outside of an aristocratic household, which: fair! that's the beat sheet!

Anyway, the plot is that a starving French prostitute, in possession of a Sexy Duke's tragic-backstory-related compromising letter after a passionate one-night encounter in the early days of the Revolution*, decides to blackmail said Sexy Duke into launching her into society and setting her up with a good aristocratic marriage. Obviously they instead fall in love. The book briefly flirts with engaging its own premise more deeply by introducing a political plot about changing the inheritance laws back to patrilineal and disinheriting all Sexy Butch Dukes, but every time this comes up the political situation immediately collapses into a personal referendum on THE DUKE and Her New Mysterious Sexy And Charming French Ward and whether people broadly like them, so alas for me it does not tell me very much at all about the broader political context.

*we are Not Engaging with the political-philosophical debate about the French Revolution at this time. the point is, the prostitutes are starving

I did laugh out loud at the introduction of a Louche Butch Drunken Rake as well as the Butch One-Eyed DUke's Bastard Daughter-Slash-Personal-Assassin. I would not at all be surprised to see these two characters appear as romantic GENDER: CRAVAT leads in future books. I will be more surprised -- but pleased! -- if any of those hypothetical future books reveal any more information about what

genarti has described as the trickle-down gender economics of the premise. I guess we'll find out!

rachelmanija

Women and girls covered in fungal growths cut them off to make themselves into wives for human men; one girl-become-wife, Nicole, is more drawn to her fungal friend, Teagan.

If you're in the mood for weird, surreal, sapphic, feminist, mushroom body horror, this book is for you. It does a great job of presenting Nicole's very alien point of view, and also how she sees human men as the true aliens. It's novella length but could have been shorter than it was - there's a long middle stretch where nothing much is happening but a long string of lushly surreal descriptions - but what it's generally going for, it does well. Think The Stepford Wives meets The Girl With All the Gifts by way of Jeff Vandermeer.

Content notes: Violence against women, suicide, forced pregnancy, TONS of body horror. There is also detailed and pervasive rape and sexual assault, though the main character doesn't perceive it that way because she's mostly a mushroom.

cosmolinguist

I just wanted to say thank you so much to everyone who commented about D being banished from transgym. Writing that entry felt like a throwback to the heyday of LiveJournal, where I was regularly pouring my heart out but more importantly trying to figure out what I think about something -- I've always needed to talk it out, or write it out, to even have a chance of knowing what's really going on in my head.

But reading all the comments as they came in, and trying to answer them with the care and nuance that they demonstrated, was really a callback to those heady days, when interaction and community were really what made that/this place the best it can be, for me anyway.

I was dithering last night on whether to set my alarm for this morning at all, and I might not have if not for all the processing I'd been able to do here.

For all my good intentions to sneak out of bed this morning without disturbing D who hadn't come to bed until late, he woke up when I did, and immediately offered to drive me. I told him he didn't have to, but I could hear the rain and the wind outside and I wasn't exactly looking forward to having to dress for both that and the gym (I'm a sweatmonster even in shorts so there's no question of me covering more of my body than necessary in the gym, and this is the awkward time of year when the best clothes for me to wear outside and the best clothes to wear in the gym start to diverge). I was happy, and grateful, to stay warm and snuggly with him a bit longer.

And when we did leave the house, we were treated to the coincidence of our neighbor and Teddy the dog walking past. I'd just sat down in the car when I heard D say "Hello Teddy!" so I jumped out again and Teddy ran between us for pets, tail wagging madly, and even tried to jump up on me a couple of times which I've never known him to do! It was lovely to see him, and the neighbor (who caught us up on their recent trip to Crete during some really awful weather).

When I got to lift club, I felt weird and subdued, but of course I expected that. With the notable exception of our friend A (who's good enough friends with us to have heard about what happened right away), a lot of the people I would normally talk to or expect to ask after D weren't there, which suited me: I didn't want to talk to anyone.

There were three new-ish people there today, and I couldn't help but wonder if it was one (or more) of them who complained. I am trying very hard not to be bitter about this. I can truthfully say that it's my fervent hope that whoever complained, I hope they hang around for at least as long as D did -- three years! -- and get at least as much out of it as he has, because I'd really hate for it to be less meaningful to them than what has been taken from him and from me.

The instructor, S, did ask me while I was doing leg press "How's D?" Sad, I said. They said they were too, and I believe that. They said they'd forgotten all about D being a cis guy and I said that didn't surprise me (he's lovely and respectful and conscious of his minority status!), but he never forgot: he always made sure to let new people know, he only ever booked on at the last second if there were still free places because he didn't want to take up a space that a trans person could have used... I said I was proud of how gracious (thank you haggis for getting that word to me just in time!) he was about it, and S said that they'd cried reading the short e-mail he'd sent them to say thanks for letting him be a part of this and talked about the difference it'd made to him. I wasn't surprised at that either.

S asked how I was doing too, and I said I'm sad too. I didn't want to get into the complexities of "what if future trans people who'd like to participate need/would benefit from non-trans carers, so I just left it at that, and said I was touched that they'd checked in on me as well.

They said we should sort out some queer-gym thing generally, perhaps at "their" gym (where their actual personal-trainer work happens), and I meant to talk to them about Jacked Fruit, which D & I found out about at alt-Pride, but I didn't get a chance today. The trainer who steps in when S is unavailable is a trustee or something of Jacked Fruit so I think these connections might already exist but it's something I want to check because I was already excited about that as something with a wider scope (LGBTQIA+ and neurodivergent) that other people will also benefit from.

And, driving us home, D pointed out a nearby gym that's part of our ex-council-gyms membership, so he can go there while I'm at lift club, much like he's already been going to the gym next to where I do circuits because he'd rather do that than circuits anyway. And of course the two of us can go to those gyms together, as we already have on occasion.

It wasn't my best day at the gym anyway.

details with numbers

I struggled to even do 40kg bent-over row, and I've been doing closer to 50 lately; I couldn't be bothered lifting more than 45 on chest press, I only had 120 on the leg press instead of 150-160, I didn't even try to do plank taps without sinking my knees to the floor...

That could just be that I slept poorly -- I was awake in the middle of the night and thinking/feeling all the expected things about the prospect of going this morning. But normally I love all this shit and this morning I felt more like how other people talk about going to the gym: it's a miserable chore that you do out of a vague sense that it's better for you than not doing it.

The other thing that I don't want to attribute too much to is that my eyes were so sore I had to keep them closed a lot of the way home, which is really unusual. Normally they get tired and are sore like, well, a tired muscle is sore (because that is basically what's happening) but this felt awful, more like I did when I had a bad eye infection as a young kid. I knew it wasn't that, but it was unusual. I didn't think I'd done a bad job at lift club of navigating around machines and not missing things I needed to pay attention to, but I think I was extra aware of having to do all that work myself this morning, which might have tired my eyes out unusually? And again the tiredness could have played a role too. But I'm used to those things, and this felt worse. By the time we got home, there was some of the familiar facial pressure I associate with my sinuses reacting badly, and lately that often seems related to the weather, which has been wild lately -- windy and changeable.

Luckily, it didn't last once I'd gotten into the shower. It could've even been something about getting my hair cut yesterday, by a new guy who wasn't the most careful about keeping/getting the hairs off my face, or the gel he put in -- normally I love those but this one didn't feel as good.

Now, there's nothing I love more than an after-lift club after-shower nap. And this time, D had already laid back down in my bed so I gave in to the temptation to join him instead of to go to the pharmacy and the post office like I would've done in an ideal world.

We slept for a couple of hours. And normally I love a little after-lift-club nap and wake up excited about the rest of my weekend, but today I woke up feeling groggy and exhausted, and I spent the next three hours willing myself not to go back to sleep. But it's been a kind of miserable day: I did manage to wake myself up enough that I wasn't just daydreaming about going up the stairs and back to bed, but I wasn't awake enough to read much, or listen to a podcast, or watch anything. Everything felt impossibly hard, or else so easy that I kept getting distracted from it.

It was a miserable afternoon. I don't know if this is fallout from lift club, or just the effects of my sleep being a mess now that we're in the autumn where it's always a mess, or subacute sinus problems again, or what. Luckily D made an easy dinner and it's one I really like, so I ate well this evening. And we have a nice plan for tomorrow, friends and food, so there is reason for optimism.

sovay

Anyway, I will be reading tonight at Weird Providence in support of K. H. Vaughan's This Is the Table Where We Wash Our Dead (2026). After which I expect to come home and not move for a day.

Not to wade into the Torment Nexus, but the capacity of this federal government to lunge gleefully for concepts that were first presented to me as sfnal horrors is displeasing. Varos may have been full of federal snuff films, but one at least got a Martin Jarvis into the bargain.

Current Music: Cracker, "Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now)"

hunningham

The Mitfords we

Recently been to a book event with Bryan - talk by author Rachel Trethewey about her book Muv: The Story of the Mitford Girls' Mother

Interesting, enjoyable and I do not want to read the book. I had heard quite enough about Lady Sydney Redesdale, and did not care to spend any more time in her company. (Also not a Mitford fan or completist). My general impression was that Lady Redesdale sounded every inch as appalling as the most appalling of her daughters. What can you say about a woman who admired Hitler, supported the fascist cause and continued to do so after the end of WW2? Also, having a beady-eyed novelist with a satirical streak in the family can make family get-togethers difficult.

Other news - I have signed up the Libby at the local library and found I can get the London Review of Books for free. Also the New Yorker. And hundreds of other magazines & periodicals which I will probably add to my list with the best of intentions and not actually read.

lilysea posting in

awesomeers

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

oursin

Shock! Horror! Do we even dare say Infamy?

Watch on YouTube

Campaigners criticise ‘rule bound’ World Conker Championships for damaging the image of the game

The Campaign for Real Conkers continues to believe that conkers is something to be played, not watched, and above all is a game that is free for all and can be played anywhere without the need for rules
Campaign organiser Keith Flett said, we know the Championships raises money for charity and is good fun but the focus on it is damaging the image of conker playing. It promotes an image of conkers as a game for people of a certain age, while conkers lay uncollected and unused by younger generations.

The World Conker Championships are a real thing:

The World Conker Championships committee met yesterday and, following extensive analysis of the size and number of available conkers across Britain and Europe, have concluded that there are a sufficient number of large playing conkers for the event to take place.... Whilst it is possible to store conkers, this often makes them softer or harder, and affects their playing quality. Therefore, fresh ones are needed.

At least this answers the question as to whether people still play conkers, even if the answer seems to be 'people of a certain age'.

oursin

Happy birthday,

busarewski and

hano!

nanila posting in

awesomeers

sovay

My birthday will be celebrated familially when my brother and niece can make it into town, but for the day itself I walked around the granite shoulders and pine-drift of the Fells and breathed air that smelled like winters of leaves and a cold front of groundwater washing suddenly across the trail. Fallen trees had reared ragged cascades of roots out of the earth. The reed-islanded straggle of Long Pond reflected as exactly as glass. A great blue heron was perching in the maple-tinged brush at its margin; later a flight of wood ducks clattered off across the sunset glowing through the lily pads. My camera faded on me less than ten minutes in. Home, we ordered for the first time in ages from the extravagance of Muqueca, whose bacalhau à capixaba turns out to be an intricately sweet and robust stew of thick salt cod and plantains and tomatoes in coconut milk, garnished with half-slices of hard-boiled eggs and the pungent flecks of green olives. We watched the two episodes of Small Prophets (2026) currently available in this country and then the first half of The Caves of Androzani (1984). It was not a complicated time; it was nice. There was water and trees.

Current Music: Dry Cleaning, "Grass"

skygiants

I really enjoyed The Apple and the Pearl, which I would describe sort of as a bittersweet fantasy mosaic novel set in the milieu of the all-timer This American Life episode "Music of the Night after Night after Night."

The Apple and the Pearl takes place over the course of one day on a train that carries a traveling ballet theater from place to place. Every night, the company puts on the same show, "The Apple and the Pearl", in the middle of the woods or a field or a meadow -- today happening to be All Souls', it's a graveyard -- for an audience of weird haunted faerie creatures. And every day, before the show happens, they go through all the ordinary business of a ballet company: changing up the casting, endless rehearsals, setting up the backdrops, flirting, rehashing old arguments, introducing new trainees, dodging that one lighting guy who's always making uncomfortable jokes, avoiding that other musician who's been sobbing about his lost love for months now, eternal massive rounds of laundry with insufficient laundry machines.

And it's all normal! It's largely very normal, and very banal, except that you don't talk about the people who disappear with the fairies -- it happens, every once in a while -- though that's actually not what happened to the musician's lost love, she just broke up with him normally and decided not to renew her contract with the weird fantasy mystery train and got another job, which makes it extra annoying to everyone else that he's still summoning magical sorrows for the whole company every time he plays that one second act solo. And maybe one or two of the company members know a little more about the lands of fairy than the rest -- maybe some of them have even spent some time there -- but for every girl who sees ghosts or exiled changeling still looking for a way home, there's another member of the company whose biggest concerns today are 'the ballet mistress still thinks I am doing a bad job' or 'I have been dating this other dancer for sooo long and I don't know how to break up with him' or 'my son's tuition bills are stacking up again and my ex isn't helping AND the hot lesbians haven't texted me back'.

And over the course of All Souls' Day, we're going to spend a little bit of time with all of them: the dancers, the musicians, the costumers, the lighting techs, the company manager and the company cook, everybody who keeps the train going and ensures that night after night, the show goes on. It's not so much a story with a plot as a series of portraits, with a kind of increasing weight of tension as the day approaches its end; for much of the book there's nothing particularly different about this day to set it apart from any other day on the train, so of course, as the book goes on, you-the-reader start to wonder, why are we seeing this day? and wait for whatever might be coming before the book closes. But me, I'm just happy to see a ballet fantasy that is not only very good about the realities of ballet but gives equal weight to all the people who are involved in putting a show on stage, the front- and back-of-house, the glamor and the magic and the quest after an impossible perfection and the repetition and the boredom and the endless and eternal loads of laundry, and I enjoyed this one very much.

kaberett

Remember the premature giraffe calf?

Yeah, so, she's now three months old, and robust enough that yesterday she got to join the rest of the herd at the wildlife park where she's a resident (video on FB, sorry).

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3309/

People out here catching strays out here catching strays

https://xkcd.com/3309/

sovay

It is my birthday. I am forty-five years old. It must be any number of fictional people's age. Last night I lay flat on a granite block at the top of a hill and looked up into the sky-scratching glitter of the Draconids. We saw few but clear of them in the mild haze. One shot in a flash between Thuban and Aldhibah as if falling out of Polaris.

spatch sang to me at midnight. I woke to a book from my parents on queer and trans Olympians. I feel I have done too much work to reach this year, but the air is autumnally sheeting with sun.

Current Music: Scout Niblett, "Kidnapped by Neptune"

cosmolinguist

There is such an appetite in this world for covid-safer spaces.

Positive Deviance NYC was already up to $14.5K out of $30K after one day of their crowdfunding effort to establish a permanent covid-safer space in NYC.

oursin

More chelonian related news: Scientists discover 180,000 giant tortoises on one Seychelles island - we feel that giant tortoises are surely rather hard to miss, especially in such quantity.

***

Matronage over patronage: the Prado and Rijksmuseum team up to research women rulers’ impact on art:

Mary of Hungary owned Titian’s Emperor Charles V at Mühlberg (1548) and commissioned his Four Furies (1548-49) for the great hall of her palace at Binche. “Imagine the impact: a widowed queen commissioning four enormous paintings of naked male bodies subjected to terrible punishments,” Garcia Pérez says. “These were more than decorative choices; they conveyed a warning about the consequences of defying imperial authority.”

A bit limited in its reach perhaps - female regents in the C16th Habsburg Empire - but a start, I guess?

***

And further on women and rule, extract from Paula Akpan's When We Ruled: The Rise and Fall of Twelve African Queens and Warriors:

Njinga embodied transgression, especially of European norms. They commanded their own troops into battle; they wore what was understood by the Portuguese as masculine garb; they used a male-coded name, especially in military settings, and would answer to no other. Njinga had also declared themselves ‘Lady [of Ndongo]’ before their people and had sent letters to Governor de Souza from 1624 onwards as ‘Dona Anna, the senhora de Angola’. They presented a walking contradiction. What kind of dona or queen was this?

***

Steps towards identifying new Black voters in 18th-century Westminster and Hertfordshire:

This brief snapshot into the successful establishment of a family business, by people of Black heritage, is just a minor glimpse into the lives of Londoners in the eighteenth century. More work needs to be done to determine beyond doubt the family’s story. However, the findings suggest that there were many more people like them (and John London): successful business operators, who took the trouble to lodge their votes in eighteenth-century parliamentary elections.

***

Nearly 4m records of enslaved people in 20 former British colonies now searchable online:

“There are potentially millions of people who descended from the enslaved people in the archive,” Sewell-Smith said. “Oftentimes, one of the ways that people detach from enslavement is to make an insinuation that there’s nobody living connected to these people. That’s foundationally not true.”
....
The release of the collection follows the publication last week of the Register of British Slave Traders, a three-year research project that revealed the enormous scale of Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans. The register identified as many as 10,500 people who invested in the trafficking of enslaved Africans over nearly 250 years.

***

The generation raised on sugar rations – and what their health reveals 70 years later. Also a whole load of other public health interventions of the early years of the Welfare State, gone with the dodo, wonder if the codliver oil, etc also plays a part?

***

This is actually an older post: ‘The Battle of Cable Street’ – 75 Years On' (it's now 90 years on):

The wider East End population, including many from the equally impoverished Irish community that Mosley tried to turn against the Jews, came out to stop the fascists too. A human wall blocked every entrance to the East End, especially at Gardiner’s Corner, Aldgate, and a series of barricades were built in Cable Street.
Seven thousand police, including the whole of London’s mounted police regiment, could not clear a pathway through for the fascists.

***

How a 1940s US experiment tried, and failed, to create a 'super dog' (I vaguely recall that there was at one time a Superdog in the Superman comics, but it turns out that the pooch was from Krypton to begin with):

The Rockefeller Foundation had hoped certain breeds would exhibit greater cognitive capacities. Accordingly, the dogs were subjected to a range of intelligence tests – such as maze tests where they had to locate food within a labyrinthine structure – and learning tests, where they were presented with the same problem repeatedly to see if their performance improved.
Instead, it emerged that while certain breeds performed better on some tests, none exhibited a greater aptitude across all of them. Ultimately, the researchers concluded that no breed could be said to be "more intelligent" than another.
Temperamentally, there seemed to be some differences between breeds.
....
Overall, Scott and Fuller proposed that their results offered a rebuke to the eugenicists and their notions of super-dogs created through superior breeding.... The evidence from their study revealed why this was impossible. In a social animal, different traits are distributed across the population by design.

skygiants

( Dear Festividder letter )

liv

So my extremely awesome Bible prof has been setting us the most delightful assignments! The first was read a book, which as I guessed did turn out to be a springboard to discuss how you read, what are the ethical implications of reading, how to engage with book metadata like author, genre, title, date etc.

Now we are working on the somewhat obscure Biblical book Ecclesiastes / Kohelet. If non Bible nerds have heard of it at all it's probably either the opening Vanity of vanities or the poem in chapter 3 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven / A time to be born and a time to die. One assignment was to listen to the Pete Seeger song based on that poem, Turn, turn, turn. Another was to translate the opening 11 verses of the book, and the third was to write a theological autobiography in the style of the book, extra credit for doing so in Biblical Hebrew. I am reasonably proud of the two prose-poems I came up with for those assignments, so I'm putting them here.

( Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 )

( Theological autobiography in the form of a Dadaist cut-up ) Our final assignment for this block is "come prepared to discuss the meaning of life", in conjunction with studying Existentialist approaches to Ecclesiastes. So that should be fun.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: The Byrds: Turn, turn, turn

oursin

Happy birthday,

serriadh!

nanila posting in

awesomeers

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David Gillon

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David Gillon

Reading

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Wife-Shaped Bodies, by Laura Cranehill

Lift club

'Cause what the world needs now is a new kind of tension

Mitfords

Just One Thing (11 October 2026)

The Conker World Is In Conflict!

(no subject)

Just One Thing (10 October 2026)

And then I hugged the track of naked stone where the glacier used to be

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good news of the day

Dogcatcher

I've been kidnapped by Neptune

Positive defiance

Friday several

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Ecclesiastes

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Just One Thing (09 October 2026)

Profile

August 2026

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