Also, my daily quota of exclamation point.
I stumbled across a book called Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. The Introduction and Preface are absolutely charming (in particular, the author’s stance on postmodernism), and the Prologue thus far is delightful. It’s a selection of origin myths, following a certain formula, from a number of different people. The epigram for the chapter (in a Cyrillic original and an English translation) is from Janghar, the Kalmyk national epic. Why had nobody mentioned this fount of unbelievable awesomeness? (To be fair, one of my best electives in collitch was a class called Nomads, Steppes, and Cities, which did hint at it quite a bit.)
What can I say? It’s research.
(Also, the Epilogue should be pretty great: it’s called The Barbarians, and claims to unpack the history of Western cultural stereotypes about barbarians…)
Also, due to a small ’splosion of ire on my internets a few days ago, I am thinking about the lines between joking about something harmful in order to make it possible to process it and joking about something in a way that trivializes it. Because, of course, I read a fair number of SF blogs, and some YA blogs, and there’s quite often an undercurrent of how we deal with race & cultures & other things that aren’t our own. It’s a big issue.
And for fun, I write novels. (Sometimes.) Believe me, I worry about how my “cultural appropriation” comes across. I like to think of myself as someone who does it mostly so I can learn, rather than contributing to glorification of various hideously colonialist misinterpretations. Or, you know, whatever. (Hence the research. My current project is an alternate/second world history of part of the Mongol empire. Kinda.)
(Also, I don’t necessarily think that abnormal should have a negative connotation. Just sayin’…)
But what I really want to be doing (aside from reading history) is embroidering a rug. Which is, clearly, a long-term project. And one I don’t have the materials for. But apparently there’s a technique which uses chain stitch on sturdy backing, and makes fabulous spirals and curves, and I really like the idea of making rugs. (Although, really, latch hook is pretty fun. Despite a certain similarity in result to shag carpeting, and therefore something out of the ’70s. Not everything about the ’70s was awful, though. I’m pretty sure.)
And I’ve been watching Hill Street Blues, which I haven’t watched in, oh lordy. Probably more than fifteen years, tho’ I don’t want to dwell on that. It’s still really good. (And I’m surprised by how much of it I remember, and by the fact that one of the more delightful secondary characters from Star Trek (hi, I’m a huge geek, just so you know) was in an episode. So my facial recognition skills aren’t as bad as I thought they were.)
Now I’m just procrastinating. I bet there’s a more productive way to avoid doing things that might be misconstrued as work…
