ursula: bear eating salmon (Default)
comments on endings

Aster Glenn Gray, The Wolf and the Girl. I thought briefly... )

fiction in progress

N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky. Alabaster's journals; Hoa's comments on what you can choose about being loved.

Nghi Vo, The Empress of Salt and Fortune. The cover copy here has a lot to say about the empress and her love affairs, and very little to say about the clever cleric and their even cleverer bird, though the cleric's questions about the past form the frame story.

news

Will Oremus, What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage. Argues that the reason you can't find toilet paper in stores is that far more people are spending far more time at home, and retail toilet paper is different from the stuff sold to businesses.

SCA

Paul Buell and Eugene Anderson, A Soup for the Qan. A translation of a dietary manuscript written for a Mongol Qan, with lots of notes and historical context. The last time I had access to this book, I was in grad school and mostly cooking vegetarian food; I remember being frustrated that everything was based on mutton. These days I'm more carnivorous, so there might be more interesting recipes to try! I enjoyed the complaint that another translator had rendered as "kumquat" a word that in the context of the steppes made more sense as "acorn".

art

'No Flakes, a Flickr album of paper cutout "snowflakes" and the templates to construct them. Check out the intricate octopus snowflake or the ankylosauruses.
ursula: Gules, a bear passant sable (bear)
I'm skimming through The Secret History of the Mongols for an SCA project. This is a thirteenth-century chronicle; I'm using Igor de Rachewiltz's translation, which has excellent and copious footnotes.

I was struck by the segment where Činggis Qa'an's mother is kidnapped (by Činggis Qa'an's father):

history is tragic )

In the footnotes, de Rachewiltz comments that "Never forget to breathe my scent!" is literally "Go smelling my smell," with a form of the verb "to go" that suggests continuous activity. I think "Go on smelling my smell" is more evocative than his prettier translation.

This passage is simultaneously tragically romantic and pragmatic in a way that I'm not used to seeing in Western literature: I'd expect either Čiledü or Hö'elün to die here, in older stories, or one of them to kill Yisügei later, in newer ones. (Instead Hö'elün and Yisügei have five children, and then Yisügei is poisoned by some Tatars.)

May 2025

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