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It was SUPER cold and windy out that day and our 110-yr-old stone house leaks like a sieve in the main room, so Purrcy spent Caturday curled up adorably on our bed. *So* friendly.



Purrcy and I were just waking up from a nap, and he was looking *exactly* like a loving kitty whose tummy was only a little bit of a trap. But totally worth it, I swear.

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Two weeks of books, because last week got away from me.

#25 The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie. Re-read. Because I needed to read something I'd read before where every sentence is *good*.

#26 Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, by Ada Palmer.
What an excellent way to write history! It's very much based on Palmer's teaching, on what she's learned about what works to reach people, on coming at questions from a variety of directions and styles to get students/readers to get both a feeling for the past, and a feeling for how our understanding of the past has changed.

For instance, one of the stylistic techniques Palmer uses is giving various people a Homeric-type epithet, so that it's easier to remember them and keep them sorted: Sixtus IV (Battle Pope), Innocent VIII (King Log), Julius II (Battle Pope II!); French philosopher Denis Diderot, with whom Palmer feels a particular mental connection across the centuries, is always "dear Diderot", and so on. Honestly, I really wish a historian of China would do this, it would make keeping the names straight SO much easier.

So it's a truly excellent approach to history in general and the Renaissance in particular, but I had to knock my five-star rating down to 4, because the last part of the book includes Palmer including as one of her refrains something that's a pretty obvious mistake, and *someone* should have spotted it & taken it out.

The mistake is stating that cantaloupe is a New World food, like tomatoes, and that discovering these fruits which didn't conform to the established hierarchy of which fruits are good/valuable/noble helped undermine the idea of a great chain of being, next stop! French Revolution. No. Cantaloupe is *not* a New World introduction, and people were suspicious of it & remained so for a long time because they thought it was "too cold and watery" or "distorted the humors" ... but was probably related to the fact that today cantaloupe is the item in the produce department most likely to be contaminated with Salmonella, wash it when you get it home.

It's really a pity that an obvious, checkable mistake was left in & repeated, because it detracts so much from the value of the whole book (at least for food historians). Maybe it can be fixed for a later edition. I've mentioned it to Palmer, we'll see if she ever speaks to me again ...

#27 Pretenders to the Throne of God, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The finale of the Tyrant Philosophers series, sticking the landing while leaving the world completely open. Ties up threads from all 3 previous novels, though it can be confusing especially since most characters we've seen before aren't traveling under their previous names.

As I think about it, the most curious thing about the series is that we really don't know much about the Pal's *philosophy*, what kind of Right Think they're trying to impose. Is Palaseen anti-theism where their martial success comes from, because they decant every magical or religious item they get their hands on for its power? Which of course means their whole culture is powered by a non-renewable resource their success is rapidly running them out of, whoops, which I thought was going to be more of a plot point in the series overall.

One of the constant pluses of this series is how it's focused on people who aren't rulers or bosses or the ones who get books written about them afterwards. It's the small people, the ones who don't run things (or not for long), the stretcher-bearers and soup-stirrers. Yasnic/Jack is a small man with a small god, yet he's the vector of great changes. It's not really that he's small-*minded*, except in the way he thinks only about the people (or gods) in front of him, not the "big picture" other people keep yapping about. He's a Holy Fool, but he really is holy (even when he claims he isn't).

#27 Project Hanuman, by Stewart Hotston
Big Idea SF, with contrast between humans living in a virtual worlds and those in physical reality, and machine intelligences in both, and the quantum nature of information, but the prose just ... sits there. I'm not invested enough to diagnose why the sentences seem so flat to me, but they are. Very hard for me to get through because of it.

Then over this past weekend I binged the Hilary Tamar series by Sarah Caudwell, which I'd somehow missed when it was new:

#28 Thus Was Adonis Murdered
Quite amusing, comedy-of-manners murder mystery, told for the most part in *letters!* by gad, written in that joyous era of free-floating bisexuality so aptly associated with the original Edward Gorey cover, before the Plague Years arrived. The murder plot was implausible, but the book is *fun*.

#29 The Shortest Way to Hades
Amusing enough, but I didn't LOL as I did at some of the other Hilary Tamars. Possibly because I had too much sympathy for the first victim, and I felt as though no-one else did. I think there's a British class thing going on there.

#30 The Sirens Sang of Murder
I startled my family by the volume of my LOLs. There's actually serious stuff mixed in there, along with the froth of a comedy of manners and tax law. Peak Hilary Tamar!

#31 The Sibyl in Her Grave
Yeah, this one didn't work for me. Too much of the action and the plot hinges on Maurice, an experienced CofE vicar, not having the experience or resources to deal with a mentally disturbed parishioner. But mentally disturbed parishioners who fixate on the vicar (priest, iman, rabbi) are par for the course, they happen literally all the time. Maurice is a social worker, he should be able to actually *help* Daphne, and he should have people around him to be an effective buffer against her.

Or does this reflect English society of the 90s? That Daphne is supposed to read as merely one of those "odd, unstoppable people"? Because to me she *clearly* reads as someone who's been horribly abused all her life and needs some real, *serious* therapy to become a functioning member of society.

#32 Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen.
This re-read was prompted by reading about the reception history of Jane Austen, and how at the time and for much of the 19th C readers found Austen's heroines not "feeling" enough: they really wanted heroines who were more like Marianne, less like Elinor.

Although Elinor is in many ways the most admirable of Austen's heroines, she's also the one who changes least, I think, and that makes her fundamentally the least interesting. To *grab* as a character we'd have to see Elinor change and struggle more--which is why the Emma Thompson movie is the extremely rare example of an Austen adaptation that's *better* than the book. There, I said it.

This is a 5000 word draft on Mr. Woodhouse as an autistic character in Emma that I'm posting here looking for your comments, critique, and input.

( cut for length )

It's weird for Philly & north to be expecting a foot or more of snow and for that to be the *minor* part of a winter storm. We're all battened down, here: lots of food in the freezer, extra milk for hot chocolate, we have a generator. But since not much ice is expected, "only" a foot of snow and bitter cold weather, we count as relatively OK -- this isn't anything people aren't prepared for, after all. My car is a Subaru, and this is why.

I'm thinking a lot about those of you in regions where the infrastructure & housing construction are less prepared. Send up a signal flag at fandom_checkin if you can.

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You must PET! I command it! says Purrcy and so of course I must obey. A stern taskmaster, but adorable.

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#Purrcy was playing excitedly in his box, so I stretched my phone over to see what he was playing with -- and it's a Forbidden Hair Tie, he *knows* he's not supposed to have those! I swapped it for a feather toy, less likely to get swallowed to disastrous effect.
#cats #CatsOfBluesky #Caturday

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I meant to post My Week in Books on Wednesday, but writing about Lord Shang got involved, also my back hurt. So this is the list as of Wednesday.

#9 Tales from Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
I didn't read this when it first came out in May 2001 -- I was waiting to get around it and then 9/11 happened and my concentration was shot for a year or more. This is where she really does the work of looking at the patriarchal and Western preconceptions she'd lazily incorporated into Earthsea's worldbuilding way back when (when she was young and I was a child) and asking How (in a Watsonian fashion) they got in there, before she dismantles them in The Other Wind.

#10 The Other Wind, Ursula K. Le Guin
So this is the one where Le Guin finally dismantles all the parts of her original Earthsea worldbuilding that didn't grow as she grew, that were put in lazily or because they were tropes or "archetypes" and not because they spoke the Truth of her heart.

One of these things was, why are there no female students on Roke? Another was, how does this relate to the Old Places and the Old Magic? Both of these questions Le Guin started to work with in Tehanu. But the central question is, why does the Land of the Dead look like the ashy afterlife of the mediocre dead in certain Western mythologies, where is Death that is the necessary other side of Life?

And it's pulling on that thread that unravels everything, patriarchy, Old Magic, Kargad lands, dragons, and all. To reform it into a more perfect union? Perhaps. At least one that has a chance to grow better.

And yes, I cried at the end. "Not all tears are evil."

#11 The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett. Re-read for the first time in decades. It was one of my re-re-re-reads during my childhood/teens, but I didn't read it aloud to my kids when they were young because I didn't want to attempt the Yorkshire accents, so the gap was longer than for many of my childhood faves.

I hadn't remembered how much it's a story of two rich children whose parents never wanted them. But of course when I read it then I wasn't a parent, that part didn't register. Another thing I notice now is that it's a sign that Mary and Colin are ill, neglected, and ugly that they are *too thin*, and of returning health and good looks that they become *fatter*. This was normal! This is the human baseline: too thin means undernourished and ill, plump means healthy. When Mary first comes from India her hair is lank, flat, and thin; when she becomes fatter and healthier her hair comes in thicker and glossier.

What did register, what really soaked into my brain, were the descriptions of spring coming. I wonder how much my feeling that spring is the best season is due to this book?

And now that I've been a gardener for years the gardening passages mean even more than they did to me as a child.

#12 Kim, Rudyard Kipling.
Tried reading it as a teen but could never make it out of the first chapter, this was my 1st time through. Not what I expected--I thought there'd be more of a *plot*. And I didn't expect so much of it would be about religious seeking. I knew, from "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat" in The Second Jungle Book that Kipling respected the sadhu tradition, but no-one had mentioned that Kim's most important relationship is with a lama, that spying-for-the-Empire is really his side gig. And WOW, Kipling really has zero respect for the C of E, the Catholic priest comes off a *lot* better.

I picked this up to read because, having just read The Secret Garden, I was thinking about the orphans of Empire who feature so heavily in British kidlit of the late 19th C & between the wars. Wandering through Wikipedia, I found that Kipling *was not a native speaker of English*. I hadn't realized how deeply the imperialist project had twisted him personally. Because it's clear that he loves India as his native land, even though he doesn't love the people as his people--but the English aren't truly his people, either.

People who've imagined what happened to Kim O'Hara in the future are IMHO wrong if they think he'll still be a British agent after 1922 at the latest. By the end of the novel he's still a political ignoramus, but sooner or later he's going to talk to some adult Irishmen about the connection between the most recent (1899-90) famine in India & the Potato Famine. Maybe he'll slip away to Ireland, maybe to America, maybe he'll use his skills for Indian freedom--but once he figures out he's not actually *English*, just another one of their playing-pieces, he's not going to stay loyal. It's just a Game to them, after all.

#13 The Book of Lord Shang: Apologetics of State Power in Early China. By Shang Yang, edited & translated by Yuri Pines
I picked this up because I've read some of Yuri Pines' academic articles. Lord Shang is one of the most reviled writers in traditional Chinese thought, usually for the uniform, harsh punishments he recommends for *everything*. What Pines makes clear -- and what you can see in the text -- is that Lord Shang was opposed to a lot of what were considered virtues -- filial piety, family loyalty, even human feeling (ren, 仁) -- because they were used to indulge sloppiness and corruption. He classified the teachers of such virtues -- that is, Confucian scholars -- among the worthless, wandering class, who have to be eliminated or discouraged if the state is to achieved its goal: the establishment of a unified Empire of All-Under-Heaven.

Obviously Confucian scholars, who Lord Shang hated, would more than return the favor of hating him back! But to my reading they also hated him for two additional reasons.

Lord Shang's formula for controlling the people and molding them into an unstoppable military force involved both a carrot and a stick. The stick was a very heavy punishment-based legal code, which everybody talks about in horror. More important to my mind was the system of carrots: cutting off all other methods of social advancement besides through the military, but leaving military success as a *guaranteed* route to social rising, open to foot soldiers on up. *Any* peasant who went to war and was credited with an enemy head got more land. With more success (= heads), more land, more authority, more money -- the prospect of true social advancement was there, for anyone who was willing to fight.

And this leads to the other reason later scholars hated Lord Shang: it worked. This formula to create a motivated rank-and-file military is one reason Qin overcame the other Warring States, to become the first dynasty and set much of the template for future Chinese history.

There's only been study so far comparing Lord Shang to Machiavelli and I haven't been able to read it, but there's a lot to do there. Both men were realists, advising rulers about what *really* works, talking about human behavior as much as possible stripped of their respective cultures' platitudes. Lord Shang's advice is more extreme because the situation he faced was more extreme: states with millions of people, fielding armies of tens or hundreds of thousands, warring against others for the prize of Emperor of All Under Heaven. The stakes for Machiavelli's Prince were minute by comparison, and the level of control he might exert was also limited. And he didn't propose anything as radical as offering a route for social advancement to peasants.

#14 A Most Efficient Murder, by Anthony Slayton

#15 A Rather Dastardly Death, by Anthony Slayton

First two in the "Mr. Quayle Mysteries". The first one is better, as it has a strong flavor of Wodehouse mixed in with Agatha Christie. But both owe too much to Christie IMHO in that they're *fundamentally* snobbish. Also, as pastiches written by an American, they suffer from a. Americanisms/anachronisms, b. not realizing how the passage of time works. Mr. Quayle is frequently described as a "young man", but he was in The War and this is 1928, he is no longer young.

So they passed the time, but that's about it.

His stretched-out left paw is fair warning that Purrcy's fluffy fluffy belly is indeed a trap, reach for it at your peril. But look at that innocent face!

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Sometimes you have to prove love by squooshing someone's head, sometimes you have to do it by making someone squoosh your head. It's the 🎶Circle of Squoooosh🎶

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My only resolution for 2026: I'm going to keep a list of books I read (only the ones I finish count). Re-reads count. I won't take time to rate, because then I'll slow down & give up on the list (per previous experience). My list on Bluesky starts here

#1. The Heist of Hollow London by Eddie Robson. Post-this-apoc heist, notable for most important relationship being between m & f BFFs. How often does *that* happen?!?

#2. Nine Goblins: A Tale of Low Fantasy and High Mischief, T. Kingfisher. Re-read of the version I have, which I assume is the same as the one coming out this year (??). An early T. Kingfisher, but sets up many of her familiar tropes: more than usually lively skeletons! bodies are full of fluids! never trust a unicorn! war is hell! Someone's got to make food, do laundry, plant things, pay attention to the livestock/children, that's the really *important* work. Never trust an officer. You know the drill.

#3. Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie. Re^nth read, because last week I binged all the *other* Imperial Radch books. This time I made a point of paying attention to clues, and I think Anaander Mianaai is male-bodied, which isn't what I expected -- in the back of my mind, I though the translation convention reflected something about AM, which was then generalized to the rest of the Radch. But apparently not!

Having re-read them all so recently, I conclude this one isn't one of my favorites of the Imperial Radch books, because so much of it is about Seivarden -- who I can't help seeing as looking more or less like Spike with darker hair & skin, a classic fandom woobie wet cat who thinks he's better than you but is still a wet cat. When basically he's an *incredible* snob, and I hate people like & they can't stand me, either.

#4. Guns of the Dawn, Adrian Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky mentioned it on bluesky as a book he's especially proud of, I saw it got good reviews from people I respect, so I bit.

I couldn't completely suspend my disbelief because two things about the war kept making me go whut? whut?

First & most important: if your total war is pre-industrial, you don't mass conscript women for the front lines because you MUST keep them on the farms, size of your home-grow army is limited by number of people needed to raise food, which is at least half the population. If *all* the men are in army or dead the war is already lost, because the country is starving.

If your total war is industrial (WWI+ IRL), you mass conscript or re-purpose women for industry as well as farming, because each front-line soldier has to be supported by so much materiel & logistics.

Upon reflection, this is probably just a symptom of a general problem with books about the past: modern people have *no idea* how large a percentage of pre-modern populations worked in food production. *No idea*. Also in textile production!

The other thing that bugged me started when we learned more about how the war started. (ROT-13 spoilers begin) Gur Xvat bs Ynfpnaar unq gur ehyvat ahpyrne snzvyl bs Qraynaq xvyyrq naq gubhtug ur'q gnxr bire ... jvgubhg svefg yvavat hc fhccbegref sebz gur nevfgbpenpl bs Qraynaq? Ab-bar qbrf gung!

Naq vg vfa'g cbffvoyr sbe gurer gb or n Xvat bs Qraynaq jvgubhg n Qraynaq nevfgbpenpl/byvtnepul, jub qb lbh guvax vf *va* Cneyvnzrag? (let me know if there's a better way to do spoilers).

So I feel kind of like there are aspects of the world-building where I put my foot through the canvas scenery and had to hop around for a bit like that. But I can certainly see what people like about this, and elements that will later grow into more fully mature works: the Carboniferous Levant swamps, for instance, and the very Pratchettian soldiers. But for me it suffers from the feeling that it's a game setup more than a *world*.

perclexed has mostly been posting on bluesky these days, but I suggested that she cross-post here. She's in a difficult financial situation and could use some help:

Hi. Been a while, eh?

The past few years you would’ve found me mostly on Twitter, and when that basically went tits up I was one of many who migrated over to Bluesky. Where I still am today, posting away about my current hobby obsessions (still knitting, even if I’ve lost my mojo for a couple of months, and most recently tea). And the state of me.

TL;DR: I have surgery in three weeks and at least $350 in expenses for which I do not have the money. I need to have this surgery. And I could use some help to get everything covered.

Toss something in the hat if you can, pass it on if you can't.

Purrcy had stretched up to look out the window & chitter his teeth at a bird that had been teasing him, *personally*, by flitting around the porch looking for spider eggs & frozen insects. But then! It flew to another window!



Purrcy has a very pink NOSE and set of TOEBEANS. For your edification and comfort.

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I avoided reading The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones for a long time because I don't really read or watch horror, it's usually too scary for me.* As we got into the yearly-roundup, what-did-I-miss, pre-Hugo nominations part of my reading cycle, it was showing up on too many lists for me to ignore it any longer, so I buckled up and took the plunge.

All the lists are right. It IS that good, great even. It's structured as a mostly-epistolary story, with an outer 1st-person narration by Etsy Beaucarne, a present-day white woman Communications Prof who's transcribing letters and diary entries written by her ancestor Arthur Beaucarne in 1912. Many of the diary entries transcribe a set of interviews with a Piegan Blackfoot Indian vampire, Good Stab. (Yes, I saw what Jones did there, with interviewing a vampire. I'm sure he meant to do it.) Some of the horror is vampire-related horror, but a fair bit is historical horror, especially related to the Marias Massacre.

For me, a wimp about horror, the epistolary form & the interview within it gave me enough insulation that I could read without being overwhelmed. (The lack of insulation is why visual horror is pretty much always a no-go for me, it gets too far into my brain & won't get out.) I think Jones used this structure to ease the (presumptive) white reader, though tougher than me, into the Indian POV. First we have the present-day white POV, then a blatantly racist, foolish past white POV we can easily treat as an unreliable narrator**, which makes the reader work to figure out what really happened with Good Stab, as we get his story filtered through Arthur. And because we the readers have to do so much work to piece the story together, it acts as an enthymeme: a story or argument that's more persuasive because the audience has connected some of the dots themselves.

I started to write more, but deleted it because so much of the pleasure of a book like this comes from connecting the dots yourself, from following the author's clues to get a picture of their world- (& monster-) building.

I haven't seen "Sinners" (Too Scary For Me), but the parallels are interesting. Was there something in the air? Is there something about vampires, that makes them the ideal metaphor?

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*e.g. reviews of Jones' previous book, The Only Good Indians, make me pretty sure it's Too Scary For Timid Me.

** this is a *really hard sell*, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I consider Lolita to be fundamentally a failure as a work of literary communication, because Nabokov didn't realize how many readers would never stop identifying with Humbert.

Purrcy is not supposed to be on the mantlepiece, which is quite high (5ft I guess), but very occasionally he's spotted mice up there so we're not really stringent at keeping him off, even if we could.

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Every afternoon Purrcy jumps onto his little platform next to my study chair and demands Pets! Attention! & of course I obey. There are SO many purrs.

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So early in November I stalled out on reading a bunch of new SFF because they're all books about social change through war, and I can't think that way right now.

And then it was Nov.11th, so I thought about WWI. I read:

Five Children on the Western Front, by Kate Saunders. Saunders noticed that the boys from Five Children and It & the other Psammead books were headed for the Great War, and wrote about it. To keep this being a story for children, she added a younger sibling, Edie (Edith), who's really the focus of the narrative along with the Lamb (Hilary). He's 11 in Oct. 1914, as the story begins when the Psammead re-appears in the gravel-pit the same day Lieutenant Cyril is heading off for the Front.

In the Five Children and It the children make wishes, most of them with hilarious unintended consequences. This book is more like The Story of the Amulet,[1] with the children helping the Psammead, who has lost almost all his magic. It turns out that he used to be a god in the ancient Near East, and he needs to repent of many of his careless, destructive, godly deeds lest he be stuck in a magicless world forever.

The book is structured around the Lamb and Edie learning a story from the Psammead's history that he *should* feel ashamed about, and then being granted a wish that lets them see a scene from the present day that's a parallel to that story.

Saunders uses this structure because writing about *children's* silly wishes in the context of WWI would be obscene. She's showing the Great War as the massive, unintended consequence of (thoughtless) wishes by the great & powerful, men who have godlike power over the lives of people like Cyril, Robert, the rest of the young men of Europe, and all the people who care for them.

I think you really have to have read the Nesbit books to get the full experience of reading this one. It's definitely not "more of the same", any more than WWI is "more of the same" of the Edwardian period. OTOH, the characterizations of teen/young adult Cyril, Anthea, Robert & Jane don't IMHO follow from their characterizations in the books. Saunders has made all four of them less conventional, especially Anthea (going to art school) and Jane (prepared to fight both society and Mother to become a doctor).

I think this would be a very good book for a child who's loved E. Nesbit but has gotten a bit older & more thoughtful, started to wonder about things like the passage of time and how things change. It's a good introduction to the way WWI ushered in the massive changes of the 20th century. But warning: it WILL make you cry.

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[1] It turns out I never read The Story of the Amulet as a child, only Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet. So I just started reading it now, and yikes on bikes! that's a LOT of racism & antisemitism, wow. I don't know if I can finish it TBH, though it does make The Magician's Nephew a LOT clearer. Lewis was writing a homage to Nesbit, but I have to give him credit, a little: his treatment of Calormen, especially in The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle, is *worlds* less racist than anything Nesbit wrote. And note that Nesbit was a founder of the socialist Fabian Society, while Lewis, though apolitical, was *definitely not* socialist. Nesbit, at least in what I read of Amulet, is *more* imperialist than Lewis, though that may partly be due to the passage of time.

Purrcy looks very *intent* but not necessarily *intelligent* because ... there was a MOTH! Flying much too high for him to even try grabbing, but a riveting prey item nonetheless. This was from a few weeks ago.

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Turkey day is upon us!

E&P drove down from Boston yesterday during the day yesterday, though the last part had to be in the dark because the traffic got so heavy from Danbury on, and it was raining.

I'm feeling really good about having surrendered the spatula, because the fact is I'm going through a period where I'm in pain a lot. I guess I haven't mentioned this before, but in the past month or so I've developed tendonitis in my left shoulder, the one that works the cane, and also the one that controls the mouse--because I've got such long-standing pain and weakness in the *right* hand.

The pain often (usually?) wakes me up after not-quite-enough sleep, and it really drags me down. elayna just mentioned Essentrics, which I can stream on NJ-PBS, and I'm going to try doing that 3 times a week and see if it helps. Otherwise I feel as though I'm gradually accumulating chronic pain vampires that are gradually sapping my ability to function. And I've got to find a way to beat them back other than "lie in bed for hours a day, under a heating blanket & cat, reading".

Menu this year, as last:

- roast spatchcocked chicken, plus turkey legs & thighs
- roasted garlic gravy
- Our Stuffing Recipe™
- roast veg, asst.
- "Indian Pudding"
- Our Cranberry Sauce™
- salad
- pumpkin pie, apple pie, whipped cream

Alas, my brother has a bad cold and won't be joining us. It's not COVID & not the flu, so there's that, but he's too snotty to travel. Since he won't be around I think I won't make turkey gumbo tomorrow, I'll just make stock, do the gumbo on Saturday.

There was a Costco delivery, so that means: the best kind of Purrcy box shenanigans! They're in the kitchen! They have holes! They're sturdy enough for a rumpus! Made for cat, clearly

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I've been doing too much doomscrolling again, but I've also been reading a LOT of books. So I'm going to try to use my morning Happy Light Time to write up reviews of what I've been reading lately.

Days of Atonement, Walter Jon Williams: first published 1991, set in the early 2000s New Mexico. The protagonist, Loren Hawn, is the police chief of Atocha, NM, who prides himself on on never having shot one of his people. He just wants to make sure Atocha stays *nice*, you know? And if he gets really, *really* angry with people who don't support that, and uses his fists to show them the error of their ways, well, that's part of the old-school Western lawman tradition. As is his part in Atocha's tradition of civic bribery.

I gotta hand it to WJW, this is the very, VERY rare police procedural that's aware that ACAB, including the protagonist. The reason it works is, first, the antagonist is *worse*; second, there's no-one seriously trying to clean up the town. The *threat* of cleaning up the town is there, but it's an empty threat, no-one actually means it. If the old order of corruption is swept away, it will be replaced by a new, less local one.

I can see why the book didn't really "break through" as WJW hoped: the protagonist is *not* a Good Person you can root for whole-heartedly, he's not very nice and he doesn't understand himself very well, though he does grow and learn in the course of the novel. The ending isn't altogether happy and triumphant, either. It's a fascinating and complex book, I'm glad james_davis_nicoll recently reviewed it, I missed it when it was new.

Purrcy was loving being petted while being as close to outside in the lovely fall sunshine and smells as he could get. Even though we're in NJ, we have *coyotes* as well as foxes, Great Horned Owls, & motor vehicles--it's much safer to be indoor-only, as well as better for the birds.

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This week (well, last week) Bret Devereaux continued his series on "Life, Work, Death and the Peasant" with Part IVd: Spinning Plates, about women's traditional work: household textile production. Devereaux's expertise is on Rome, broadening to the Meditteranean and premodern European more generally. I commented:

Women's textile production was *even more important* in China than in western Eurasia, believe it or not. The saying "Men till, women weave" was the classic expression of the gendered division of labor for more than 2000 years. Since the time of the Han dynasty at least both men and women were subject to taxation. Depending on the dynasty, either the household had to provide both grain and textiles, or each adult male was assessed an amount of grain, each adult female, textiles.

The cash value of the grain & textile taxes tended to be roughly equal (see, e.g. Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China, p. 186), but it's rare to see either primary sources or scholars admit it: the life-or-death significance of the grain tax, and the grain harvest, absolutely dominates everyone's thinking. But (as Bray shows) up until the Single-Whip Tax reform of the late 16thC (after which all taxes were rolled into one, to be payed in silver) women's textile production wasn't just a foundation of the home, it was a foundation of the *state*.

As is usual for premodern technology, most of the technical innovations Dr Devereaux mentions above were invented in China several centuries (at least) before they appeared further west. Originally, Chinese tax textiles were hemp in the north, silk in the south. Cotton became important starting around the time of the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty, and spread rapidly. I don't know enough about the workflow for hemp and cotton textile production to know how much of it went to spinning. The workflow for silk production is very different: silk is "reeled", because it comes off the cocoons as long threads, several of which need to be twisted together to make a workable floss.

I linked to my comment on Bluesky, and suggested that Chinese peasant households were probably more *efficient* at producing textiles than West Eurasian ones were, because they HAD to produce surplus to the household's needs: enough for the family, plus enough for taxes.

I also pointed out that although, unlike in the west, Chinese women's labor was a crucial & explicit part of the state's tax system, and the marriage system relied on bride prices, not dowries (which are supposed to be better, maybe?, for women's rights)--yet neither factor gave women rights, respect or control.

I also got to tell someone about how Iceland used to use cloth as currency.