Life is Not a Zero-Sum Game

I've got an idea about the plotting one of my fics, but I'm not sure if the idea I've got right now is the right thing. So. . . if any of you have read my fic "Turning of the Year" — or if you feel like reading it right now — and you'd like to give your input on the future course of the story (at the risk of possibly getting spoiled), send me a message.

Yesterday I finished reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I enjoyed it, but was frustrated with the ending — it seemed like it didn't end so much as just stopped.[^1] Today, I learned from cmcmck's comment on my July book record that this is actually the first book of a trilogy. This makes me feel better about the ending — I'll give an author more leeway on an ending when I know that a book is part of a series. But even if Mantel does give us a satisfying ending at the end of volume 3, that's still not going change the fact that, as much as I enjoyed the book, it feels like slice-of-life Thomas Cromwell fanfiction. (Of course, because it was professionally published and won awards, the literary establishment would quarrel with that characterization.)

[^1] Well, it didn't just stop — it reached a stopping place where one of the subplots had just resolved — but it didn't reach an actual conclusion.

This morning I was going to listen to Funkadelic's One Nation Under a Groove, but for one reason or another it's not available on YouTube Music, which is my streaming service of choice. So instead I decided to listen to American Eats Its Young. I'm only five songs in (out of 14) and I'm just blown away. I think it's both an amazing sign of how forward-thinking George Clinton was and a disheartening sign of how similar this country is today to what it was in 1972[^1], when this album was released, that the political messages in this album are still amazingly relevant today. If you don't have an hour and 10 minutes to listen to the whole album, I'd recommend the songs "If You Don't Like the Effects, Don't Produce the Cause" and "Everybody Is Going to Make It This Time."

[^1] Whether that's a result of lack of progress or of progress followed by regression is a discussion for another time.

I do not have perfect pitch. Not only do I not have good absolute pitch (i.e. "That's a C#."), I don't really have good relative pitch (i.e. "This note is higher than that note."). Which makes it kind of funny, how much I enjoy music, both listening and playing. So that's why I've come here to borrow your ears. In "Stupid in Love" by Max and Huh Yunjin, at around 2:19 when they sing "Book a flight to Paris only one way," am I correct in thinking that he's singing a higher note than her? It sounded that way to me when I was listening to it in the car yesterday, then I started second-guessing myself, thinking it might be an illusion because he was singing in the upper part of his range while she was singing in the lower part of hers. Then I tried listening to it under headphone this morning and I started thinking that maybe they were singing the same note, and now I can't even hear it properly. And so I've come here to borrow your ears. Any thoughts?

I practically never remember my dreams, but I remember part of last night's dream. Not enough to reconstruct any sort of plot summary, but enough to remember that it contained the following elements:

• Heavy metal music (centered around a band named "Jihaad" — spelled that way to try to convey that the last syllable should rhyme with "bad," not with "sod")
• Low-quality animatronic dinosaurs (they couldn't consistently count on the stegosaurus to walk, so they had four wheeled platforms that they'd put on its feet to move it out from backstage, then they'd let it take 2 or 3 steps in front of the audience, and pray that it didn't break down during that time)
• Luchador wrestling (the wrestlers, the dinosaurs, and the band were on tour together in sort of a Mad Max type environment)
• Male menstrual cramps (which I suppose implies the existence of male menstruation, but only the cramps came up in the dream)
• Asshole bosses
• The importance of proper punctuation

A book has to really impress me to get a reaction before I've finished it, but Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance has definitely done that. I had read some of Palmer's science fiction and been very impressed by it, and I knew before reading this that she is a historian, so when I first heard of this book, I immediately requested it from my local library.[^1] Not really knowing anything about it when I requested it, I thought it was a history of how the Renaissance came to be. Then I started reading it, and from the way she talked about historians creating the idea of the Renaissance, I thought it was a Renaissance equivalent of Norman Cantor's Inventing the Middle Ages.[^2]. Then I read on and saw that it's both of those things and more. It's also Palmer's academic biography, and an explanation of how academia works, and an exploration of the processes that created the Renaissance (and that created similar shifts in society at other times and places. It's the best history book I've read recently.[^3]

Besides the major historical themes of the book, Palmer has also included a number of interesting trivia and also Easter eggs for science fiction fans: - The genetic changes in Europeans that makes the Black Death no longer the huge plague that it was in the Middles Ages took several hundred years to come about, and also caused Europeans to be more susceptible to "autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis, celiac, and (in [Palmer's] case) Crohn's disease."[^4] - She refers to Florence in the Renaissance as a "wretched hive of scum and villainy."[^5] - She uses the board game Siena as an illustration of how government worked in Renaissance Florence.[^6]

I particularly love this paragraph about the chronology of the Renaissance, and how it's exceedingly different depending on who you ask:

All agree that the Renaissance was the period of change that got us from medieval to modern, but people give it a different start date, because they start at the point that they see something definitively un-medieval. If we leave the History Lab a moment and visit my friends across the yard in the English Department, they consider Shakespeare (1564-1616) the core of Renaissance, while Petrarch's contemporary Chaucer (1340s-1400) is, for them, the pinnacle of medieval. When I cross the walk to visit the Italian lit scholars, they say Dante (1265-1321), despite being dead before Chaucer's birth, is definitely Renaissance, and often that Machiavelli is the start of modern, even though he died before Shakespeare's parents were born.

Reading this book makes me both sad and glad, in varying degrees at different times, that I never got my PhD and entered academia, depending on whether I feel at that particular moment that by having done so I would have been placing myself in cooperation or competition with Palmer. But leaving that aside, I'm exceedingly glad to be living in a time that I get to read this book, and I'm eagerly looking forward to getting to read more of Palmer's books.

[^1] Apparently a lot of other people had also heard of it, because I only got it about a week ago.

[^2] Although much more fun to read than Cantor.

[^3] I almost said "easily the best history book I've read recently," but I'm also currently reading Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, which gives Palmer some serious competition. But since I feel compelled to write a pre-completion reaction to Palmer's book and not to Parker's. . .

[^4] p. 116. All the MAGAts who keep yammering on about herd immunity with regard to COVID need to know that, but they probably wouldn't listen anyway.

[^5] p. 136.

[^6] pp. 65-8.

A South African video game studio (not a phrase I think I've ever typed before) has created a game called Relooted, a heist game where the objective is to rob museums and steal back African artifacts. I'm pretty sure my computer isn't powerful enough for me to be able to play it once it's released, but I love the idea and I look forward to seeing more games like this.

Between finally getting off of Keppra (with its side effects of lethargy and sleepiness) and finally starting to get caught up on all the things I fell behind on during my long Keppra-induced nap, I feel like I'm finally starting to get back into my usual life again. Barring unforeseen events (which is never a safe thing to do, and yet I persist on doing it anyway), you should start seeing me around here more often, hopefully even reading and commenting on your posts.