BAD (Books, annals, and dating)
Jan. 20th, 2007 05:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjIt has been delicately hinted to me that my journal has been boring of late, so I will refrain from mentioning that the cat's skin condition is clearing up, or that it's so relaxing to be back in my regular daily routine, or to allude to the headless chicken dance at work in anticipation of the EU inspectors, and I will move on to more reader-oriented content.
Book un-review:
I am extremely fond of historical murder mysteries. This is why it was a great relief to me some years ago when the genre had established itself so thoroughly and prolifically that I felt enabled to dislike a significant proportion of the available offerings. I think the authors that first spurred me to this position were Paul Harding and Michael Jecks: it wasn't that the books were badly written -- it was just that I got the feeling that they authors didn't have much liking or respect for the historic eras they were writing in. I don't at all mind all the grit and tragedy and true-to-the-era mindsets, but I mind getting the impression that the author doesn't find any redeeming features in his setting or characters.
But as historical mysteries became all the rage (and thank goodness for that) we also started getting ones that are simply mediocre in their writing. And good writers found themselves squeezing out endless series long past (apparently) their own interest in and love for the characters. After holding on in forlorn hope for the last 10 books or so, I've come to the conclusion that, for me, Anne Perry has fallen into the second category. I've been following both the Charlotte Pitt and William Monk series since their beginnings and have greatly enjoyed both Perry's feel for the eras and culture and her ability to put together a complex yet potentially solvable puzzle. But it's worn thin. The characters are no longer significantly developing or being further unveiled. And while I understand the need to bring new readers up to speed on certain basics, I've gotten very bored with the endless repetition of certain formulas, as well as with the cookie-cutter sameness of most of the secondary characters. If I read one more page-long discursion on how unbearably painful it is for strangers to intrude on one's tightly-controlled private grief that must be masked to the world at large ... I may scream. And so, I find myself with a copy of Long Spoon Lane (24th ! in the Charlotte & Thomas Pitt series) and a copy of The Shifting Tide (14th ! in the William Monk series) sitting at my bedside table for the last six months each with a bookmark settled in for a long-term nap somewhere in the first half dozen chapters of the book. The reason this is an "un-review" is that I'm not going to talk about the specific content of the books at all -- I'm just going to remove the bookmarks and move them from the bedside table to the permanent bookshelves. The real test will be whether I reflexively buy the next books in the two series, but that's a test for another day.
Madeleine E. Robbins' book Petty Treason is in a different category. This is the second book in a mystery series set in Regency England, but about as far from a "Regency novel" as you could imagine. The protagonist is a "fallen woman" -- and, I might note, takes every opportunity to make sure people know of her status and to agonize about it to the reader -- who has turned herself into a sort of private investigator, with the assistance of a handful of very conveniently placed powerful friends (who, of course, couldn't invite her for dinner, but can meet her in a low dive to get her out of scrapes). The social aspects could be intriguing, but don't really seem to get resolved in a believable manner, especially given that her investigations require her to move about in all levels of society. (Oh, and just to improve her toolkit, she's skilled with a sword, a pistol, and at successful cross-dressing.) It could be quite a delightful romp of a mystery with a heroine after my own heart, but instead she ends up being tediously dreary and unbelievable (and I have extremely elastic believability standards for my historic heroines!). And on top of that, the writing is merely tolerable. Maybe it's unfair to judge a series on the basis of reading book #2 in isolation, but I look at my pile of to-be-read and just can't work up the enthusiasm for tracking down book #1. So again the bookmark is going to come out and the book heads for the shelf. I will never know who killed the Chevalier d'Aubigny and I simply don't care.
My current Welsh names data-crunching project is to finish getting the Brut y Tywysogyon -- the main set of medieval Welsh annals -- into my database. This is something I've really needed to finish up for some time because the database has a real dearth of material from Welsh-language documents, and the annals are one of the richest historic (as opposed to literary) sources of medieval Welsh names as written by Welsh people in Welsh. One difficulty has been that the database is organized around the assumption that data will come as names, that is, as simple and coherent entries giving an individual's name as recorded, for example, in a legal record. The annals, in contrast, are more on the "identifying descriptions" end of the scale. The elements describing a single individual may be strung out throughout a sentence, or may come in an unusual order, or may be hard to slice and dice between "one name" and "two names of related people". So the data is of minimal use in studying the overall formats of name structures, but is of enormous use as a source of written forms of individual elements. Once you sort out how they're affected by the grammatical context, of course. Here are some examples:
"deu vab mared'. vab ywein gruffud achynan"
(two sons of Maredudd ap Owain: Gruffudd and Cynan)
" porthmyn o hauyrford emri vab symwnt o mwnfort"
(the porter of Haverford: Aimery son of Simon de Montfort)
"gwladus verch gruffud wreic yrys yeuag vab rys mechyll"
(Gwladus ferch Gruffudd, wife to Rhys Ieuanc ap Rhys Mechyll)
None of these are what I would call "normal name formats", and yet there's lots of useful information on name structures in entries that more clearly are "normal name formats". But where is the dividing line? And is it my business to try to draw one? One of the purposes I expect my database to be used for is SCA people trying to create or document persona names. But I also expect my database to be useful to academic researchers. So I don't want to "idiot proof" the data for SCA purposes, but I want to shove enough caveats in people's faces that at least I have plausible deniability when SCA people completely misconstrue the evidence when using my site to document their name submissions. It is a puzzlement.
At any rate, last night I finished the first rough cut at getting the name data extracted into a spread sheet with initial coding for location in the source document and grammatical context. Today I plan to start going through and doing more contextual coding. At a minimum, this document will need:
* immediate grammatical context as it affects mutation
* provenance of individual: local or foreign (e.g., references in the document to the emperor of Germany are of different usefulness than references to the prince of Gwynedd)
* temporal provenance in relation to the text: contemporary with date of entry or historic with respect to that entry
* normalized form of name, especially in the case of foreign individuals (it's not intuitively obvious that "Euream" corresponds to "Abraham", and while "yarll fla~drys" might be recognizable as the Count of Flanders, it's less obvious that "yarll bolwyn" is the Count of Boulogne).
Working thorugh this data has reminded me of the aphorism various of us have developed when working with the Irish annals: If you have an entry of the form "[date] [unknown verb] [personal name]" the unknown verb almost certainly means "died in some tragic and brutal fashion".
One of my irresolutions for the year is to try to be more proactive about dating. It's been ... what ... four or five years since I last went on an actual "date" date? And clearly the whole notion of just meeting people casually in my day-to-day life is a non-starter. So just to try something different, I'm thinking of putting a listing up on one of the online lesbian dating sites, like the one at Curve magazine. (I'd rather not use one of the ones I have to pay for unless it comes very highly recommended.) But I never have any idea what sort of description to put up in a personal ad. On the "searching" side, you don't want to put up too many details of what you're looking for lest everyone figures they shouldn't bother, but on the other hand there are serious deal-breakers that should be included to save everyone a lot of wasted time. On the "self-description" side, I'm pretty hopeless, since I have no idea how to advertise my own unique charms in ways that will attract the interest of the right women.
So here's the question: if you were writing a personal ad description for me (either in first person or third person), what would you include in it? Responses are going to be public, because I'm not about to put something in an ad that I wouldn't be willing for the entire world to read.
Book un-review:
I am extremely fond of historical murder mysteries. This is why it was a great relief to me some years ago when the genre had established itself so thoroughly and prolifically that I felt enabled to dislike a significant proportion of the available offerings. I think the authors that first spurred me to this position were Paul Harding and Michael Jecks: it wasn't that the books were badly written -- it was just that I got the feeling that they authors didn't have much liking or respect for the historic eras they were writing in. I don't at all mind all the grit and tragedy and true-to-the-era mindsets, but I mind getting the impression that the author doesn't find any redeeming features in his setting or characters.
But as historical mysteries became all the rage (and thank goodness for that) we also started getting ones that are simply mediocre in their writing. And good writers found themselves squeezing out endless series long past (apparently) their own interest in and love for the characters. After holding on in forlorn hope for the last 10 books or so, I've come to the conclusion that, for me, Anne Perry has fallen into the second category. I've been following both the Charlotte Pitt and William Monk series since their beginnings and have greatly enjoyed both Perry's feel for the eras and culture and her ability to put together a complex yet potentially solvable puzzle. But it's worn thin. The characters are no longer significantly developing or being further unveiled. And while I understand the need to bring new readers up to speed on certain basics, I've gotten very bored with the endless repetition of certain formulas, as well as with the cookie-cutter sameness of most of the secondary characters. If I read one more page-long discursion on how unbearably painful it is for strangers to intrude on one's tightly-controlled private grief that must be masked to the world at large ... I may scream. And so, I find myself with a copy of Long Spoon Lane (24th ! in the Charlotte & Thomas Pitt series) and a copy of The Shifting Tide (14th ! in the William Monk series) sitting at my bedside table for the last six months each with a bookmark settled in for a long-term nap somewhere in the first half dozen chapters of the book. The reason this is an "un-review" is that I'm not going to talk about the specific content of the books at all -- I'm just going to remove the bookmarks and move them from the bedside table to the permanent bookshelves. The real test will be whether I reflexively buy the next books in the two series, but that's a test for another day.
Madeleine E. Robbins' book Petty Treason is in a different category. This is the second book in a mystery series set in Regency England, but about as far from a "Regency novel" as you could imagine. The protagonist is a "fallen woman" -- and, I might note, takes every opportunity to make sure people know of her status and to agonize about it to the reader -- who has turned herself into a sort of private investigator, with the assistance of a handful of very conveniently placed powerful friends (who, of course, couldn't invite her for dinner, but can meet her in a low dive to get her out of scrapes). The social aspects could be intriguing, but don't really seem to get resolved in a believable manner, especially given that her investigations require her to move about in all levels of society. (Oh, and just to improve her toolkit, she's skilled with a sword, a pistol, and at successful cross-dressing.) It could be quite a delightful romp of a mystery with a heroine after my own heart, but instead she ends up being tediously dreary and unbelievable (and I have extremely elastic believability standards for my historic heroines!). And on top of that, the writing is merely tolerable. Maybe it's unfair to judge a series on the basis of reading book #2 in isolation, but I look at my pile of to-be-read and just can't work up the enthusiasm for tracking down book #1. So again the bookmark is going to come out and the book heads for the shelf. I will never know who killed the Chevalier d'Aubigny and I simply don't care.
My current Welsh names data-crunching project is to finish getting the Brut y Tywysogyon -- the main set of medieval Welsh annals -- into my database. This is something I've really needed to finish up for some time because the database has a real dearth of material from Welsh-language documents, and the annals are one of the richest historic (as opposed to literary) sources of medieval Welsh names as written by Welsh people in Welsh. One difficulty has been that the database is organized around the assumption that data will come as names, that is, as simple and coherent entries giving an individual's name as recorded, for example, in a legal record. The annals, in contrast, are more on the "identifying descriptions" end of the scale. The elements describing a single individual may be strung out throughout a sentence, or may come in an unusual order, or may be hard to slice and dice between "one name" and "two names of related people". So the data is of minimal use in studying the overall formats of name structures, but is of enormous use as a source of written forms of individual elements. Once you sort out how they're affected by the grammatical context, of course. Here are some examples:
"deu vab mared'. vab ywein gruffud achynan"
(two sons of Maredudd ap Owain: Gruffudd and Cynan)
" porthmyn o hauyrford emri vab symwnt o mwnfort"
(the porter of Haverford: Aimery son of Simon de Montfort)
"gwladus verch gruffud wreic yrys yeuag vab rys mechyll"
(Gwladus ferch Gruffudd, wife to Rhys Ieuanc ap Rhys Mechyll)
None of these are what I would call "normal name formats", and yet there's lots of useful information on name structures in entries that more clearly are "normal name formats". But where is the dividing line? And is it my business to try to draw one? One of the purposes I expect my database to be used for is SCA people trying to create or document persona names. But I also expect my database to be useful to academic researchers. So I don't want to "idiot proof" the data for SCA purposes, but I want to shove enough caveats in people's faces that at least I have plausible deniability when SCA people completely misconstrue the evidence when using my site to document their name submissions. It is a puzzlement.
At any rate, last night I finished the first rough cut at getting the name data extracted into a spread sheet with initial coding for location in the source document and grammatical context. Today I plan to start going through and doing more contextual coding. At a minimum, this document will need:
* immediate grammatical context as it affects mutation
* provenance of individual: local or foreign (e.g., references in the document to the emperor of Germany are of different usefulness than references to the prince of Gwynedd)
* temporal provenance in relation to the text: contemporary with date of entry or historic with respect to that entry
* normalized form of name, especially in the case of foreign individuals (it's not intuitively obvious that "Euream" corresponds to "Abraham", and while "yarll fla~drys" might be recognizable as the Count of Flanders, it's less obvious that "yarll bolwyn" is the Count of Boulogne).
Working thorugh this data has reminded me of the aphorism various of us have developed when working with the Irish annals: If you have an entry of the form "[date] [unknown verb] [personal name]" the unknown verb almost certainly means "died in some tragic and brutal fashion".
One of my irresolutions for the year is to try to be more proactive about dating. It's been ... what ... four or five years since I last went on an actual "date" date? And clearly the whole notion of just meeting people casually in my day-to-day life is a non-starter. So just to try something different, I'm thinking of putting a listing up on one of the online lesbian dating sites, like the one at Curve magazine. (I'd rather not use one of the ones I have to pay for unless it comes very highly recommended.) But I never have any idea what sort of description to put up in a personal ad. On the "searching" side, you don't want to put up too many details of what you're looking for lest everyone figures they shouldn't bother, but on the other hand there are serious deal-breakers that should be included to save everyone a lot of wasted time. On the "self-description" side, I'm pretty hopeless, since I have no idea how to advertise my own unique charms in ways that will attract the interest of the right women.
So here's the question: if you were writing a personal ad description for me (either in first person or third person), what would you include in it? Responses are going to be public, because I'm not about to put something in an ad that I wouldn't be willing for the entire world to read.
