Recent reading and TV

The Fabulous Sylvester by Joshua Gamson (2005). Subtitled The Legend, the Music, the Seventies in San Francisco, this is a biography of the musician Sylvester, a gay African-American soul/blues/disco singer who grew up in Los Angeles and lived and worked in San Francisco in the memorable seventies. I read it for book club—having little knowledge of either Sylvester's music or the general cultural/historical background, both of which are explored in detail, I found it very interesting, although the sheer amount and arrangement of specific details got slightly confusing at times. And I didn't have much to contribute at the book club meeting, but never mind—next month's book is a sci-fi novella, so perhaps I shall have more developed opinions about that...

Finished Her Enemy, Some Friends and Other Personages, which continued both highly varied and enjoyable. Unfortunately, 'Aquae Multae Non—' is still my favourite story in the collection—it was a bit of a disappointment having that come second, so that nothing else really lived up to it, although plenty of the other stories are both good and interesting. Edward Prime-Stevenson greatly enjoys self-reccing and mischievous references: 'Out of the Sun', an otherwise rather depressing story, contains a passage describing the main character's collection of queer books, which includes Xavier Mayne's Imre and The Intersexes amongst others (it also includes The Hill and David Copperfield, which amused me—I knew I was onto something shipping David/Steerforth...). Xavier Mayne turns up a few other times, and we also get various other bits of silliness, alongside EPS's thoughts on the philosophy of art, some more fairytales and fables and a couple of religious stories. 'A Prisoner Passes', about the crucifixion of Jesus from the point of view of a Roman bystander, was another favourite of mine—perhaps the shape of the plot was a little obvious, but it was touching even so, and I loved how very EPS the description of Jesus was—he manages to imply so much about his queer reading of the Bible in a short space. The final story, 'Sunrise-Water', is an unfinished novel—I did not know this, so I was disappointed when it suddenly ended halfway through. It was building up to a nice dramatic plot about burglary and intrigue, and also briefly had a rare really interesting relationship between two female characters.

Damn' Rebel Bitches: The Women of the '45 by Maggie Craig (1997). One can never have too many Jacobite history books, and I thought this one sounded like a particularly valuable perspective on the events of the '45—Craig sets out to redress the balance of male-centric history writing, exploring the varied stories of women in the Rising. There are all sorts of fascinating stories in here, and a theme throughout is the diversity of things women did: there are women who persuaded their husbands to fight for the Cause, women who themselves raised men for Charles's army, camp-followers on the march into England, prisoners in York and London and transported to America, women escaping from prison and helping others to escape, Hanoverian women, spies and informers, a fresh look at the more famous Jacobite women Flora MacDonald and Clementine Walkinshaw, and so on and so on. All fascinating stuff! The arrangement of information could be a bit confusing at times—the short chapters are organised by broad themes, which means that the shape of the book follows neither the chronology of the Rising nor the individual stories of specific people exactly, and the resulting jumping around occasionally made things difficult to follow. But it was all very interesting indeed.

Almost as interesting as the history itself was Craig's approach to it. She discusses in some detail the process of historical research, describing her sources (which included some familiar letters from The Lyon in Mourning), who wrote them and where they came from, and the difficulties of piecing together the facts of a story from fragmentary and vague historical evidence. Her style is very informal, almost chatty—I get the sense that she's writing somewhat in deliberate contrast to the academic history which she feels has tended to leave women out—and her personality comes through very strongly, passionate, opinionated and impatiently cheerful. This made for enjoyable reading, although I thought some of the personal opinions and speculation went a bit too far at times. She talks about her own love of the history, her feelings about her historical subjects and her sympathy for them—and she also mentions, at the end of the book, other women's historical interest in the Jacobites and their place in the developing history itself, from Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne, writing romantic Jacobite ballads to what Craig calls 'the two greatest novels ever written about the '45'—The Flight of the Heron and Flemington! Clearly she's one of us. :D


I've found out that I can access some of the programmes on SVT Play, the Swedish equivalent of BBC iPlayer, which is a good resource! There are some nature documentaries, a 1960s adaptation of Pippi Långstrump and various news and current affairs programmes, amongst other things. This week I tried watching a nature documentary film called 'Den levande skogen' ('The Living Forest'), about the animals of the Swedish forest. My Swedish is not yet good enough to follow the narration properly, but I could pick up a few phrases here and there, and of course a wildlife documentary has plenty to enjoy even if you can't understand the words. And I did manage to learn some bird names—fiskgjuse, stare, trana (tranorna! <333), örn, häger (although I had already looked that one up ;D ), svan—these being the most important vocabulary to learn, of course.