Wednesday media consumption roundup

[mousetrappling]

Books

Fiction: still reading Neal Stephenson's "Reamde", which is feeling very early Stephenson at the moment and also reminding me a bit of the Stephen Bury ones (which are him under a pseudonym iirc) that I read last year. Which in some ways is a shame as I loved "Anathem" which was very different, but then again it's sucking me into the story so I'll see where it goes.

Non-fiction: still reading Gerald Harriss's "Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461" - continuing his discussion of towns with a section on whether the townsfolk identified as being part of their town (more their craft/class, I think) and the tensions between the classes within a town.

Maps: 2000-1000BCE - the rise of urbanised societies, the Bronze Age collapse in the Middle East (although he doesn't call it that), the Shang in China, the rise of urbanised societies on the western edge of Middle & South America, the beginning of iron working & the spread of writing. Also in the last timeline the founding of the Hebrew state & Jerusalem becoming the capital, which at the time seemed a minor footnote but now has much more relevance.

Listening

Podcasts: a week of catching up with podcasts - the History of Rome had a special episode plugging the host Mike Duncan's upcoming book. ep 79-82 of the History of Egypt podcast, covering more of Amenhotep II's reign plus looking at the Book of the Dead & the Amduat both of which were beginning to be used around that time. ep 144-148 of the History of Byzantium podcast - a look at the state of Byzantium in 976 just as Basil II is taking the throne.

Just started a new podcast - ep 1-2 of Renaissance English History podcast. Not, I think, to be a chronological trot through the period, but focussing on subjects of interest from roughly speaking 1500-1600 CE in England. So far so good, tho she did make me wince a bit by buying completely into the Dark Ages narrative of the Medieval period in Europe in her intro/set up episode.

Sunday podcast: ep 3 & 4 of Our Man in the Middle East - the Kurds after the first Iraq War, and conflict over Jerusalem.

Music: while running I've listened Prince - I have "The Hits/B-sides", which is 3 discs on CD but the mp3s I got with my CDs weren't split into discs so I normally just listen to the whole lot once I start.

Games

Diablo - still hitting monsters till the loot comes out, trying to level up enough to start getting Greater Rift keys to drop at the moment.

Watching

ep 1 of Reginald D. Hunter's Songs of the South - 3-part series of Hunter doing a road trip around the southern US seeing where the music came from. This ep was Kentucky & Tennessee. Fairly shallow, tho there is a fair amount of offhand remarks that make the underlying tensions of the region obvious (he's black and originally from Georgia, this was very much the white South).

How to Be a Surrealist with Phillipa Perry - rather good look at what the Surrealist movement was actually about, not just the imagery of Dali and Magritte that's stuck in popular consciousness.

ep 2 of My Family, Partition & Me - possibly some of the most difficult TV we've watched. In this final episode three descendants of families caught up in the chaos of Partition traced the journeys their families made and the horrors they saw. As it's 70 years ago there aren't many left who saw it, but the programme did find several people who were willing give accounts of what they saw as children. All of it awful. Worth having watched though.

In Search of Arcadia - Janina Ramirez talking about the English Englightenment's attempt to build Arcadia in their gardens along the Thames. More waffle about gardens & less art history than we'd expected. But a nice piece of fluff to offset the Partition episode.

ep 3 of From Russia to Iran - Lev travels from Azerbaijan to Georgia, referencing a few times the war between Azerbaijan & Armenia which has apparently been going on for much of my adult life but I don't think I knew about it.

Talks

"Ancient Egyptian Justice" Alexandre Loktionov - he's a PhD student at Cambridge interested in how the justice system of Ancient Egypt actually functioned. It was a talk heavy on texts, demonstrating both how legal jargon has always been impenetrably dense but also about what you can glean from the documents that the authors didn't even realise they were telling you.