Five OTHER things I've thought about this week...

[cimorene]

It's not fun to see three posts that are mostly about work in a week when I look back on my blog. For one thing, it's an unpleasant sign of how overwhelming it's become and how exhausting. For another, any week where I write about work three days is bound to be bad for my peace and equilibrium.

But also, I didn't really do nothing but resent work that week (or any week). It's just easier to post about my grievances and the bizarre things that happen, since they come together naturally in anecdote form.

I have lots of shorter anecdotes throughout the week about things like by-play observed among passers-by on the street, and things I humorously forgot due to ADHD, and hundreds of things the cats do that I just tell Wax. At the time of wanting to tell someone about these little tidbits, though, I don't think about blog posts. I'll just include five other things from this week to make myself feel better.

§ The local business owners had one of their little events, in this case an event called "Kärringkväll" (Swedish) or "Akkainilta" (Finnish), in which all the small businesses in the town stay open late (usually they close at five or six because they're so small) and offer deals aimed specifically at women. As a result, somebody actually came and swept all the gravel off the sidewalks in the center part of downtown! It collects there all winter, with more being added every time there's fresh ice on the sidewalks, so when it finally melts (it isn't all melted from the streets and driveways and lawns yet, but most of it is worn off the sidewalks, where it melts faster) there are piles and piles of it. Regular nasty road dust of gasoline, microplastic, and carcinogens settles along the roads and gets stuck to the snow all winter, trapped with the gravel, which gets ground into dust and sand from being walked and driven on, and they have accumulated a truly incredible amount of airborne black nastiness by the time of the spring thaw. So we're about two weeks now into this period of extreme airway irritation, which continues usually until well after Easter.

§ Met a beagle outside when I was walking, and got to pet it! It jumped up at me with that flattering and so relatable doggy excitement (I was excited too obvs), and the owner gave me permission to pet it. It left a cute little paw print on the knee of my jeans.

§ My sister recently had bunion surgery on one foot and has started working from home again. In celebration (she felt too anxious to ask for time off when she wasn't working lol) she bought plane tickets for her and my BIL to visit us for two weeks at the end of August!

§ There's definitely a leak in the roof. The melt made this clear. It's not a huge emergency one, but it's made a stain. We were planning to have it fixed soon, anyway. We don't really know who to hire, though. However, a couple weeks ago we were out walking and met an old schoolmate of Wax's, and exchanged greetings, and as we were leaving, we noticed that his house was pretty recently remodeled, including the roof, and it looked good. So our current hope is to see him outside again so that we can ask if they can recommend whoever did theirs. This means walking more, and specifically down the part of our street a few blocks away near the top of the hill.

§ I have been thinking some more about how incredibly wrong the voices sound in historical fiction a lot of the time, and it's always because it's a period where I'm familiar with the literature written in that era and the characters sound wrong. (Why I love Catriona Macpherson's Dandy Gilver and haven't liked any other recent mysteries set in that era that I've looked at.) It's an easy fix, albeit clearly not one everyone is interested in - you just have to read a lot of stuff written in the period. When you're talking about the 19th century onward in the anglophone countries and reading in English, this task is trivially easy; as you go further back, or try to cross language barriers, it gets harder of course, but there's not much excuse for failing at Victorian England, IMO, and far less for failing at the period between WW1 and 2. Of course not all historical fiction has this kind of evocation of the voice as a goal, and some isn't interested in it at all. There are plenty of examples of working with historical settings transformatively, and sometimes I do find them interesting and fun - though usually the ones I like also incidentally demonstrate that they are informed by real knowledge of the period and deliberate departures, rather than just not caring. In general, though, the more I am interested in the period myself, the less able I am to enjoy later fiction set in it. As an example, I don't think I've read a single piece of fanfic set in the regency that passed muster except the ones by Astolat. Oh, and some of the Austen pieces from Yuletide. I tend to trawl through the entire tag (or archive or community back in the day) when I am reading a pairing, so the odds are overwhelmingly that I've seen it if it's in any fandom I've read. Another example: I think I've at least tried about 97% of the Poirot and Jeeves and Wooster fanfic, and found like... maybe two pieces of the former and four of the latter recommendable. I sometimes see people commenting how amazingly high the quality of fanfiction in these fandoms is, but I couldn't disagree more.These two periods (early 19th century and 1920s-30s) have been favorites of mine since childhood, and I guess I seem to be more sensitive to the voice, cadence, vocabulary, etc than many people (including many more who don't care at all about it). Anyway, all of these thought processes have been bubbling for years, and I recently decided to look for some more novels from between the two wars from different genres, to get a wider sample of the sound. So far I've been a bit frustrated by my attempts to narrow by publication date (you can't filter by it at Project Gutenberg, for instance, but their transcriptions are much more easy to read than the scans at archive.org), but I've also had a bunch of fun and bemusing encounters with books that I haven't finished. Edwardian romances, for example. Yikes, and yet, haha. And now I've started the first of EM Benson's Mapp and Lucia books, which I had heard of because of the tv series without quite knowing what they were about, and the beginning has a whole section that's like a client I would make fun of on This Old House, remodeling a historical house pretentiously and removing original features that didn't look olde timey enough, then building a new wing with a fake Tudor fireplace and refusing to put electricity in it and covering the floor with rushes. I can practically see Kevin O'Connor politely asking if she's sure and explaining why electric lighting is so popular and convenient in living areas, and then saying "Well, if you're sure! You like it, and we like decisions!" with his eyebrows in his hairline.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Glad things are going well in general and hurray for the lack of gravel.

[cimorene]

So much joy about the receding of the gravel, I literally monitor the situation daily with excitement 😂

[msilverstar]

Is it not done in Finland to ask acquaintances for services recommendations via facebook, email, etc.? I find the image of you walking by the guy's house very traditional but confusing.

[cimorene]

I think it's just us really, ie the fact that we don't use Facebook. We could get this guy's contact info from someone who knows someone probably, but it feels a little awkward since Wax has only talked to him once since, like, 1992. If we run out of time we might do it, but it would be much more natural and easy for us to ask in person.

[viggorlijah]

oh yes for the voices - it's really hard to hear something authorial in a modern tone that doesn't work with the rest of the book, like an accent slipping. I'm good with the whole thing pulled apart and redone - there's some great historical romance writers who make it clear that this is Not Accurate History but Romance World History - but when they get it right part of the time, the slips are so jarring.

Is there a Finnish social reason that you can't drop a written note at his house next time you walk past with your phone number/email and the question, and instead must rely on seeing them in-person in their yard?

I ask because Emma was on a video call with her Belgian boyfriend who is at his mother's, and I said hi to him and then we said oh the two grandmothers should speak, but she went immediately oh no, I am not prepared, I am in my pyjamas and was clearly a little taken aback at not having a Proper Meeting arranged in advance, but this is how Belgians prefer things apparently.

[cimorene]

Not Finnish exactly, just us. Well, the note would be a bit weird and old fashioned perhaps? But not like, rude or anything. It's just easier for us in person.

[cimorene]

Yeah, that's it exactly too, I was thinking about it and struggling to clarify briefly. If they're not doing any historical voice at all, you can tell, and then you can read it as a translation. If they are, and you can see that in places, then the wrong bits stick out so badly! And that's the problem with most of the 19th century fanfic (there are some Holmes fanfic exceptions, and maybe some in age of sail, which I haven't read much, but in the regency it's baaaaaaad, likely because the modern regency genre is full of that issue. My mom read these when I was growing up so I read a lot of them as a teen the way I later read fanfic, and there were maybe two authors or so after Heyer who pass). And while historical romance as a broader genre had comparatively a lot of the type that aren't trying, the regency subgenre was almost entirely the sloppy failed kind. They just read the genre and then write it without really researching any more than that, and they are writing a sort of pastiche of the styles they've read, but without a thorough understanding, so it sounds oldy timey, sounds good, to THEM, but not to the reader who knows a bit more or has an ear more sensitive to the sound of Heyer and Austen, even. It's like the related issue of the bad fake medieval lingo you get sprinkled in cartoons and advertisements.