Eisgruber's State of the University letter

Recommended read.  This essay largely does an excellent job of addressing some of the challenges "elite" schools are facing today, with one stumble, I think.  The following two sentences get their own paragraph:

'

I have little sympathy for the lingo of “safe spaces” and “microaggressions.”  They strike me as the wrong way to describe the University’s inclusivity goals.

'

... and they strike me as the words of a person whose place at Princeton was never questioned because of their race, or was advised while there that their grade in certain professors' courses could be improved by wearing a short skirt and sitting in the front row.    

I get that what Eisgruber *means* is that he would prefer a different terminology; he declares in the following paragraph that Princeton offers 'what might ... be called "safe spaces"'.  However, he offers no reason for why he'd prefer a different terminology, and provides no alternative terminology, so his little diatribe is not a useful one.  It would have been better to simply exclude that paragraph from the essay. 

Makt Myrkranna (Valdimar Asmundsson, 1901)

I read the 2016 English translation by Hans Corneel De Roos of Valdimar Asmundsson's 1901 Icelandic "translation" of Bram Stoker's Dracula, serialized into his weekly publication Fjallkonan.  It is significant because the Icelandic text differs quite a lot from the original text: the scenes in Transylvania are expanded, and the scenes in England are cut to 10% of the text in Dracula.  They are really little more than an outline, which is a shame.  It's unclear why Asmundsson cut the story short, but I can't really recommend it as a story, only for the curious. 

Some years ago I read the Icelandic sagas, so I found it interesting early on in Makt Myrkranna where Harker self deprecatingly notes, "I am too much the lawyer." (translator's note says it could also be read as "completely the lawyer")  In the sagas, poets, warriors, and those who knew the law were held in the highest regard, so this would read a little weirdly for someone coming from that tradition.

The foreward of the translation also mentions the Thames Torso Murders, which I had not heard of before.  I guess Jack the Ripper was the more acceptable serial killer for late 20th century kids to learn about?  

2023 in Reading

I've logged 61 titles in my spreadsheet for 2023 so far, way up over the mid-40's of the last few years.  What drove the increase?  Last Christmas I got a tablet sized for comic books (mentioned at the end of last year's post) and have read a bunch of graphic novels from my library through Hoopla.  Once again I was part of a Hugo awards reading group and read all the short story, novelette, novella, and novel finalists.

What stood out this year?

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.  Especially during Erica Henderson's run as the artist.  The whole run showcases Ryan North's talent for irreverant + relevant story and dialogue, and paired with Henderson's character designs, layout, spacing... it's a beautiful thing.  

The Goblin Emperor.  Sarah Monette's first novel published under the pseudonym Katherine Addison is a story of court intrigue that could have taken place in any setting, but I enjoyed this slightly new look at what Faerieland could be like.

Bea Wolf. Beautiful art and a faithful retelling of the Beowulf story for kids.  

Hild. As mentioned in last year's post, I had been avoiding Hild because it's a big, big, book.  Then I read Spear last year and finally tackled Hild, and it is formidably rich and dense and worth every minute.  As an extra benefit, Nicola Griffith published Menewood, the sequel to Hild, this year, and I have it queued up to read early in 2024.  

Babel: or the necessity of violence : an arcane history of the Oxford Translators' Revolution.  The winner of the Nebula award for Best Novel this year.  Be prepared to spend a lot of time with it.  Over the first half of the novel, it lays its groundwork very carefully, but also effeciently, spending time on certain moments that drive its points home with no passages wasted.  There's a great short bit with the daguerrotype (p171-172) where Robin thinks of how the photograph is similar to their own work of translation, and a nice in-world aphorism: "Silver accrues where it's already in use" (p175) like how any kind of wealth gets funneled to the top, and great efforts are needed to unseat it.  The style changes in the second half of the novel, which becomes more action-packed (we get to the stage of "the necessity of violence").  

Even Though I Knew the End.  There was a strong slate of novellas this year, and C.L. Polk's magical detective noir hits all the right notes as an homage and alternative to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.  The title comes from a moment when our protagonist is re-reading some F. Scott Fitzgerald, which made me want to re-read The Great Gatsby.  I was in luck, because while looking for Nghi Vo's Into the Riverlands (another Hugo novella finalist), I discovered...   

The Chosen and the Beautiful.  Nghi Vo's first novel is a retelling of The Great Gatsby from the POV of Daisy's friend Jordan Baker, instead of Nick Caraway.  In this version, Jordan was adopted from Tonkin by the Bakers.  Loved this.  Vo does a wonderful job of feeling authentically roaring 20's while doing some things stylistically that would be a no-go in publishing in the 20's.  It feels like how people might actually talk and act, rather than filtered through the publishing industry of the era.  I also loved the title playing on The Beautiful and the Damned.

Nettle & Bone.  There was also a strong slate of novels, and Ursula Vernon (writing as T. Kingfisher) took home the rocketship.  Marra has such a strong internal dialogue, and her "team" are such decent people, each struggling with their own problems but willing to work together, that it was impossible not to be charmed.  It's true I took lots more notes while reading (honorable mention) Nona the Ninth, and Nettle & Bone has a more straightforward plot, but both have a great mix of laugh-out-loud moments and human drama.

Sesame Street Christmases: Vinyl and Video

Been so happy to be able to listen to the Merry Christmas from Sesame Street album again since finding it on Spotify a couple years ago. I had it on vinyl as a kid, and it predates the Christmas Eve on Sesame Street special (which has its own associated album). It has one of my favorite renditions of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" because the gifts have been changed to be more appropriate for each of the singers... perhaps with the exception of Hard Head Henry Harris, who is the recipient of "two baby frogs" and then editorializes "what kind of jive Christmas present is that, man?"

I love that, aside from Bert & Ernie's "Gift of the Magi" story and "Keep Christmas With You", the content is different between Merry Christmas from Sesame Street and Christmas Eve on Sesame Street.

The special brings us an all-time great original Christmas song in "True Blue Miracle", as well as an all-time great running gag with Cookie Monster trying to send a letter to Santa just to set up a "Cookie Monster needs to set out cookies for Santa in the hopes of getting cookies from Santa" joke.  There's not a minute wasted, it's great from start to finish.

Watching the special and thinking about the album based on the special, I'm once again struck by how well they translated from video to vinyl: adding a narrator to clarify action that is obvious when you can see it on the screen.

When the Odds Are Ever Not in Your Favor, Wordscapes Edition

I was introduced to Wordscapes in late 2019, and still lightly compete for crowns on the weekends while getting steps.  During the week, there is a daily puzzle, but it otherwise feels like it's turned into a Tamagotchi game to give you rewards in the form of jeweled hearts (to get you more pets -- you can have one pet "active" at a time), cocoons (to hatch butterflies for a variety of settings), and binoculars (to find pieces of portraits that you can use).

For the month of October, there is a set of 12 portraits you can collect, and in order to get a portrait, you need to find 3 "pieces" of that portrait.  At this stage, where I'd collected 8 out of the 12 portraits, if the probability of finding each piece is roughly equal, I'd expect to get a new piece about 1/3 of the time.  Instead, I found 111 duplicate pieces before getting another pumpkin piece.  The probability of that happening is on the order of 10^-20, so that strongly suggests the probability of getting each piece is not equal.  Unfortunately, there's no indication of this in the interface.