In this Holiday Time...

Merry Christmas to all.

Found the above roaster in a second-hand shop five months ago and I am so looking forward to cooking a turkey in it tomorrow.  The cost was $5.  Canadian.  It will be the first time I've had a roasting pan of my own; used a few in various restaurants of the year, but oh, won't it be lovely not to rely upon a flimsy aluminum foil pan, or pick tin foil wrapping from the meat and bones when every bit of turkey is gleaned after the "easy meat" is cut away.

I know I've gone quiet these last four weeks.  I've been here, I haven't been especially busy.  I'm not stuck on the story surrounding getting the children into Qitai and I'm not injured or otherwise distressed.  I think, honestly, sometimes... a creative person just has to step back from the work and take a sabbatical.  Christmas was a good time to do it, but I didn't plan to do it.  Just happened.  Merely a matter of my head coming back around to these things, while in the meantime I rest, relax, pursue some vanity projects and enjoy life.  

So at this time of Saturnalia, when the sun hits bottom and starts to climb its way out, when the winter is half gone, on the verge of all the work and unbalance that the holidays bring before the holidays begin, let me wish you all a happy, merry, memorable holiday.  I wish for your fortunes to change if they need to do so, for your ills to subside, for reconciliations to be made well, and for you to give of yourself, to others AND yourself, that you may have the strength, the well-being and the inner joy to face 2025 as a person who needs only life to be happy.

Merry Christmas.

Sea of Azov

A much larger part of the Sea of Azov, skirting along the southern coast.  The right hand margin is the intended map edge for the time being, but I'll be adding to the bottom edge.  That, too, will largely be water, specifically the Black Sea, as the Timan and Kerch peninsulas meet as two narrow hands, cutting off the Azov.  As any map shows.

The swamp on the east is more than just soggy ground, it is a mixture of shallow lagoons and estuaries affected by tides, with reed beds and marshes.  The tides are only 1 to 8 inches (2 to 20 cm).  The reed beds are tall, 6 to 10 feet (2-3 meters), while the marshes are waterlogged the year round.  Spots have quagmires that can trap and sink a person attempting to cross them.  The water is brackish, the ground water affected by the saltiness of the sea.

Usually, a boat or skiff is necessary to cross or move about in these places.  The Ottoman Turks have authority here, governing through the Emir of Kubanistan.  Emirs are typically military leaders; unlike other parts of the empire that are mastered by Beys, which act as governors who take their orders from Constantinople, Emirs tend to rule as independents, often with an army that does not take orders from the Sultan or the Vizier... though the latter would be responsible for granting monies to the Emir.  The political organisation of the Ottoman Empire is interesting, but I won't go into now.

Kubanistan is beset by many tribal enemies, though not by any large organised force.  The land itself consists of a harsh steppe that is flat and subject to extreme weather conditions, particularly dry summers that make agriculture difficult.  The large swampy areas on the north resisted trade, while the better routes followed the Don River to where it was practical to cross over to the Volga, thus avoiding the northern Caucasus plains altogether (those between the Black and Caspian seas).  Flocks were raised, moving from grassland to grassland, but with raiders to the north, east and south, even this was made difficult.  It just wasn't a great part of the world, though we'll only skirt the edge of the large province, we'll show enough to demonstrate a poor infrastructure.

Books, End of November

Three months into my second year of Audible, I've completed seven books.  In all fairness, I tend to choose long books.

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Susan Faludi — never

Dracula, Bram Stoker — 2002

The Emperor of Notting Hill, G.K. Chesterton — never

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein — 2012

Raiders of Gor, John Norman — 2005

Riders of the Purple Sage, Zane Grey — never

The Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks — 2011

Certainly, an eclectic list.

First, I decided I wasn't enjoying the children's books... Little Women pretty much killed my appetite for it, so I adjusted this slot to "non-fiction."  I've been hearing people say for 30 years that I ought to read the book by Faludi, so I did.

Hm... can't imagine that many people here will care, but the book is the usual monsterous stack of anecdotal evidence, like most feminist works, pretending that a lot of examples equals "facts," which is obviously not true.  The book is very old and has nothing to say post 1989... and even at that, it's arguments did not reflect the experiences of my wife at the time, nor those of any other woman I knew then, or have known since.  But as a man, I offer that insight hesitantly.

The most annoying part of the book came when it chose to discuss film — which consisted of an extremely cherry-picked list of perpetrated aggreviances against women in the 1980s, which in turn criminally mis-read or mis-interpreted the films themselves, ignoring any film or any point of view that did not fit the author's premise.  This greatly reduced my perception of the book's value... though I did finish it, all 23 hours.  In the end, except for some interesting horror stories — which deserve to be questioned, given the falsehoods stated in the film section — there was very little substance there.

Riders of the Purple Sage was recommended as a first book to read from Grey; published in 1912, it unquestionably holds up as a work, unaffected by time.  It's a bit writers-of-the-purple-prose, what with sunsets and vast panoramas, but then it does successfully capture the sense of space and immensity that ought to reflect a desert old west story.  I'd have enjoyed it better as a younger man; as it was, I would have preferred if there had been a single plot point that escaped my predictions, as the story offered no surprises for me.  I'd recommend it, though, for those with an interest for a grounded adventure.

I have little to say about Max Brook's book about zombies.  I rather enjoyed it when it came out, and was looking for something to shake off the sort of droll run of books I read (Chesterton then Faludi then Grey).  It did not hold up on a second read.  Don't bother with the last quarter of the book, it just repeats the same theme ad nauseum.

I won't make excuses about the Gor book.  It's a matter of taste.

This was my fourth time reading Dracula.  I got very little from it as a teenager, read it in university, then in my late 30s... and just now.  Funny how my age seems to adjust the manner in which I see the book, for the motivations of the character, the youth of the desperate young men whom Van Helsing directs, all becomes more acute as I myself am closer to Van Helsing now than I am to the "boys."  I do not think it is a reader's book; at least, not for a modern reader.  It is too concerned with substantive meaning, a thing that has been lost in later works.  There are a great many instances where the fate of characters is left entirely to the imagination.  This takes a particular kind of insight to enjoy, one I certainly have as a writer, but which I don't see in many readers I encounter.  They haven't the patience to let the story be told in the time it takes; they want to rush ahead, to "see what happens," which is not at all the point Stoker is making.

I'm just working through my favourite Heinlein books with this process.  I only have two left, other than those I've read.  Neither is Stranger in a Strange Land, for the record.

This leaves the Emperor of Notting Hill.

I feared before I started that it would be absurdist.  I saw that it was going to be almost at once, within the first few pages.  There's just a way about these works.  I finished it.  I did not like it.  I'm damned if I can see any value in it.  It bears that stamp that some meaning is going to be gleaned from it, but this never emerges, as near as I could tell.  I went hunting on the internet and could find nothing there, either.  The book's Wikipedia page is just a few utterly insipid sentences.  The book, apparently, exists.  And the English prof I knew once who urged me to read it is dead now, so I have no one to ever discuss it with.  Unlike the aforementioned displeasure with which I read Little Women, I can certainly see why that book has endured and found a set of humans who can love it.  But Chesterton's book is just trash.  I doubt I'll ever read anything by him again.

P.S.,

I had been watching the series of lectures posted on youtube from the writer Brandon Sanderson, which lately I commented on obscurely in this blog.  I searched youtube for a free audio of one of his many "award-winning, best-selling" books, stumbling upon Elantris.  I'm well aware that many consider this to be not one of his better books, but I don't see a book in terms of how it provides me a sense of escapism.  I look for other things, reading books for other purposes.

I listened to an hour of the book, about one tenth.  In that time, in the first 20 minutes in fact, it presented characters who were unquestionably victims of circumstances not of their own making, enabling them to suffer dearly while being in no way responsible for their actions or anything that happened to them.  After establishing this premise, Sanderson then doubled down on it, then double downed on it again, being absolutely certain to dredge up as much suffering as he could possibly squeeze into their lives, while repeatedly, often using three paragraphs in a row, stressing the innocent victimhood of these characters.

It was insufferable.  Gosh golly gee, let me see, what group of extraordarily well-off, university attending, aggrieved white children are there in the world who angst just so damn hard about how they didn't make the world and how tremendously unfair it is, since they didn't do anything to deserve their poor, pampered lots in life.

No wonder Sanderson is popular.