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Somehow, bafflingly, I managed to miss March of the Penguins when it came out, even though it exploded to an extent that few documentaries ever manage. In fact, I even missed the fact that it was a documentary, and had it vaguely confused with Happy Feet.

However, at long last I’ve rectified this situation. I watched March of the Penguins, which I enjoyed, and then watched the making-of documentary Of Penguins and Men, which I enjoyed even more. I often seem to like the making-of documentary even more than the documentary itself - apparently I just really like to see how the sausage gets made?

But in this case I think it also helped that Of Penguins and Men has far more voiceover than March of the Penguins itself. When the camera is just taking a long quiet look at something, my attention tends to wander. (A thousand documentary film makers just cried out in agony without knowing why.)

Also, Of Penguins and Men is narrated by the director, Luc Jacquet. Now, of course I understand the point of getting Morgan Freeman to narrate the English release of March of the Penguins. Everyone loves Morgan Freeman, and what’s more, everyone has heard of Morgan Freeman, and I’m sure this was a big contributor to the film’s English-language success.

But all the same, I preferred Jacquet’s narration. He’s SO French. The film crew spent a year on an Antarctic research station, nine months of it entirely cut off from the outside world, and when the documentary reached the part where they were frozen in, he declares, “We are now alone, face to face with ourselves.”

Or this description of the male penguins in a blizzard, carrying the newborn baby penguins on their feet: “A line of convicts, imprisoned by the cold, hobbled by the most precious of loads…”

I just don’t feel that an American (or indeed any native English-speaker) could deliver these lines with the absolute conviction that they require.

Also fascinating to learn about the process of making a film in Antarctica, where the temperatures in winter often dip below negative 100 degrees. At one point, both members of the camera crew got lost in a blizzard! They survived, but both had bad frostbite, and had to rest for a month. A counterpoint to the penguins’ own epic yearly survival story.

May the great E.M. Forster read-through commence! We begin with a reread of Forster’s first published novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, which I first read years ago, after A Room with a View and Howards End and A Passage to India, which set my expectations sky high.

Unfortunately, this is way too high a bar for Where Angels Fear to Tread. In fact, the first time I read it, I disliked the book so much that I discontinued all plans to explore Forster’s work further. (At that point, this basically meant that I didn’t read The Longest Journey.) I hoped to like it more this time around, but alas, I still didn’t like it very much.

The work already displays Forster’s trademark finely drawn character work, but he has not yet perfected the skill of portraying characters you might climb out of a window to avoid in real life, but nonetheless enjoying reading about because their portrayal is so exquisitely on point. (See Charlotte Bartlett and Cecil Vyse in A Room with a View.)

In particular, I disliked Philip Herriton, a sort of proto-Cecil, who looks down on everyone else on the grounds that they are all slaves of conventionality while HE is unconventional. Unfortunately, he’s one of the main viewpoint characters, so we spend a lot of time watching this mediocre man pass judgement on other people without ever wondering if perhaps his own self-satisfaction is ill-grounded.

I also disliked the ending. One, I find it hard to believe ( spoilers; )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Helene Hanff’s The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Following the success of 84, Charing Cross Road, Hanff’s publisher arranges for her to come to England, where Hanff meets Frank Doel’s widow and daughter, gets lunched up and down the isle by adoring fans, and is invited to stay indefinitely at Leo Marks’ country house, if she doesn’t mind if Marks and his wife continue to come down on the weekends. (Hanff thinks that detail is just hilarious. The apologetic way Leo and his wife Ena indicate they might wish to continue using their own house!)

Sadly Hanff doesn’t take the Marks’s up on their offer, so she has to leave England only a couple of weeks later than expected. (A well-timed check from Reader’s Digest allowed her to extend her stay.) Possibly even before Ena the famous portrait painter finishes Hanff’s portrait?

A real fairy tale come to life.

The used bookstore had E. L. Konigsburg’s A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver on clearance for $1, so what could I do but rescue it? I’ve meant to read this for ages and enjoyed it as much as I expected: it’s basically a lightly fictionalized biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, with a frame story where Eleanor is in heaven waiting to see if her husband Henry II will finally be Sent Up from Hell. While she waits, various friends and relatives recount the tale of Eleanor’s life.

What I’m Reading Now

Continuing Emily Wilson’s essay collection Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea. An interesting essay about why the Romans learned Greek and copied Greek culture when they didn’t bother to learn, say, Punic. Wilson argues that this is partly a result of Greece’s great prestige in the Mediterranean and also partly a way for elite Romans to set themselves apart from everyone else: they can speak Greek while everyone else bumbles around speaking nothing but Latin.

Related musing about the origins of the idea of a national literature as a vehicle for national prestige - nowadays we tend to assume that any great and literate nation will OF COURSE have a literature, but there's not much evidence (according to Wilson) that the ancient Egyptians, Etruscans, Carthaginians, etc. ever wrote down their epics, whatever they might have been. The idea that this is a mark of great nationhood arose the creation of Greek literature, and was strengthened when the next great empire (Rome) adopted and adapted Greek literature as the basis for its own.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve got Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat on deck to read in October.

I’ve meant to see the film 84 Charing Cross Road for ages, and with my recent dive into Helene Hanff’s work, I decided that the time is now.

Confession time: I read 84, Charing Cross Road nearly twenty years ago, and I didn’t understand the hype. I was under the impression it was romantic, but it turned out to be a bunch of business letters? Unusually lively business letters, but still. It’s so short, and nothing much happens, and honestly I found it charming but very slight. So how on earth did it become a beloved classic that spawned a movie? And surely the letters didn’t contain a movie worth of material?

In order to answer the first question, I’ll have to reread the book. But the answer to the second is that no, the letters alone are not an entire movie worth of material, but they provide the emotional throughline for the movie, while still giving the filmmakers space to explore the historical context: post-war rationing in Britain, the rise of television (Hanff became a TV screenwriter), the social upheavals of the 1960s.

They also bring in material from some of Hanff’s other books. Duchess of Bloomsbury Street provides the frame story (although the film leaves out the bit where Hanff is visiting England as a direct result of the publication of her letters with Frank Doel!). I haven’t read Underfoot in Show Business or The Movers and Shakers: The Young Activists of the Sixties yet, but I suspect the movie draws from them as well (for instance in the scene where Hanff gets arrested during a student protest). Hanff had a fascinating life!

And she’s played to perfection by Anne Bancroft, whom I had previously seen only as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. This role gives her more to sink her teeth into: Hanff is a dynamo, a generous and feisty New Yorker who isn’t afraid to scold London bookseller Frank Doel fiercely when he sends her an abridged copy of Samuel Pepys’ diary.

Anthony Hopkins plays opposite as the more restrained Frank Doel, London bookseller who gets a kick out of Hanff’s letters. The movie plays the correspondence as close to romantic, without ever crossing the line where Hopkins would actually be cheating on his wife (played by a charming Judi Dench).

Excellent performances all around. And I thought the period piece aspect in particular was so well done: the story takes place over twenty years of massive social change, and the movie does such a good job of showing that, while anchoring the story in the emotional throughline of the letters.

I saved Aubrey Hartman’s The Undead Fox of Deadwood Forest for last of the 2026 Newbery crop, because I thought I would like it best, and oh boy was I CORRECT. Our hero is Clare, the undead fox who acts as an Usher helping other animals on their way to the land of the dead, who is also more importantly THE most self-hating lonely woobie unloved sad little fox that could in the world.

ABANDONED by the side of the road as a kit! STRUCK shortly thereafter by a car! RESCUED by the previous usher, who taught Clare how to ush and then abandoned him too, friendless and alone in the Deadwood Forest! So friendless that he sometimes lies awake hugging his own tail. SO FRIENDLESS THAT HE BEFRIENDS A MUSHROOM.

Also the whole “being struck by a car” incident left Clare with a crumpled ear, a missing eye, and a generally mangled mien that makes living animals and local children run away shrieking when they see him. (He hides his fearsome visage with a red velvet cloak and a monocle.) The dead don’t seem to mind, but then the dead always move on.

Until a badger shows up. (Badgers seem to be having a moment in children’s literature, I say, on the basis of this one book plus Bad Badger.) The badger is just not sure which land of the dead she ought to be headed toward, and Clare isn’t getting any promptings from the afterlife either. So Gingersnipes has no choice but to stick around. Could she possibly become… a friend?

Thrilled to think that many children are going to discover the joys of Baby’s First Blorbo through Clare. Aubrey Hartman has rendered a noble service to literature and to fandom.

I picked up Roberto Garvía’s Esperanto and Its Rivals: The Struggle for an International Language to find a few fun facts with which to garnish my Esperanto paper, but ended up reading the whole book because I was just so fascinated by the story of the various international auxiliary languages duking it out between about 1870 and 1940.

(After World War II, English won the three-way race between English, German, and French to become the international lingua franca, at which point interest in an artificial international auxiliary language fell precipitously.)

Although dozens (possibly hundreds) of plans for international auxiliary languages were published during these decades, Garvía focuses on the main contenders, starting with Volapük, the first artificial language to collect a community of speakers. However, it squandered its head start when reformers proposed changes to the language. The creator refused to countenance any changes, the Volapük community split into opposing camps, and the language lost momentum.

This left room for a challenger, Zamenhof’s Esperanto, which (spoiler alert) won the battle to become the most popular and well-known artificial language. It didn’t rise to this status on the basis of technical perfection: as any anti-Esperantist can tell you, Esperanto is full of flaws. The totally unnecessary marking on the accusative case! The wildly irregular naming system for professions! The diacritical marks!

Nor did it rise to prominence because of any emphasis on the practical uses for an international auxiliary language. In fact, Zamenhof’s high profile backers were constantly begging him to be a bit less “peace, love, and universal human brotherhood” about the whole thing. (Garvía connects Zamenhof’s ideals to his family’s involvement in the Haskalah [the Jewish Enlightenment], his own youthful involvement and subsequent break with Zionism, and his belief, paraphrased by Garvía, that “the historical mission of the Jews was to bring forth the reunification of humanity.")

(Whenever I read about someone who believes that they personally have been tasked with a mission like bringing forth the reunification of humanity, my nut-o-meter starts flashing. But in fact Zamenhof seems to have been modest, unassuming, and wholly sane if very idealistic.)

Instead, Esperanto won because Zamenhof focused on creating a community of speakers. His first book presented his language not in sample sentences but in complete sample poems that he had written. It also included a sample letter, which the reader might send to a friend interested in international languages and/or word games. Esperanto was a way to create art and connection.

Because of the irregularities in the language, reformers also arose in Esperanto, offering a reformed version of the language they called Ido (offspring). As with Volapük, this led to a schism, but in this case the schism was quite uneven: by far the majority of Esperantists stuck with Zamenhof’s original language, because (1) they already knew how to speak it, and (2) they adored Zamenhof and considered the Idists traitorous traitors who betrayed him. They defiantly attended the planned international Esperanto conference and had a wonderful time chatting and singing and putting on plays in Esperanto.

Meanwhile, the Idists were having conferences with slogans like “We are here to work, not to amuse ourselves.” They also kept reforming the language, so if you learned to speak it in 1910, you would discover in 1914 that you could no longer understand it. Bertrand Russell helpfully suggested to a prominent Idist friend that the Idists might adopt the name “Idiot.” The friend was not amused.

I also loved the anecdote, also retailed via Russell, about two one-time Idists who eventually had a falling out so acrimonious “that in the last letters they exchanged, Couturat stopped using French and shifted to Ido, to which Peano counteracted by using his Latino - an interesting outcome coming from two people who had invented international languages to facilitate communication and understanding.”

Both Couturat and Peano bet technical perfection would attract speakers to their language. But it turns out that people don’t pick which languages to learn based on their technical perfection, which in any case one can scarcely judge before learning the language. They learn languages because they want to communicate, and Esperanto speakers created a community to communicate with - a community drawn together by Zamenhof’s dream of peace, love, universal brotherhood, and really good singalongs.

But ultimately, peace and love couldn’t compete with the size and reach of English, spread across the globe by the Royal Navy and Hollywood movies.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing on the black earth. But I say it is

What you love.

I finished Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, which translates every then-discovered fragment of Sappho, including many, many fragments that are just a word or two, floating on an otherwise blank page. I really liked some of the poems where there’s enough left to actually sink your teeth into, but for the shorter bits I kept getting distracted by questions like “how do you know the two words on this shred of papyrus are from Sappho?” Carson’s endnotes mention when a snippet of Sappho came from the quotation of another ancient author, but I would have loved some more information about the papyri too.

I also read Deborah Ellis’s One More Mountain, the fifth book in her Breadwinners series, which began with young Parvana dressing as a boy in order to support her family in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Now, twenty-odd years later, American forces have pulled out of Afghanistan, and Parvana (now thirty-two, mother of a boy and den mother of a gang of runaway girls) must cope with the Taliban’s return.

An excellent addition to the series, although on a world-historical level infuriating that the series needed another installment. Parvana deserves a break! Parvana is never going to get a break.

And I continue onward in the Newbery Honors books of 2026 with Karina Yan Glaser’s The Nine Moons of Han Yu and Luli. You may be familiar with Glaser from The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street and sequels. I’m always a sucker for a family story so I read the first book and found it nice but not memorable, and felt pretty much the same about The Nine Moons of Han Yu and Luli. Never managed to sort out Han Yu’s siblings or Luli’s classmates.

I did get more invested than I expected in Luli’s storyline. Han Yu has a magical tiger watching over him so I figured he’d always be okay, but Luli is all on her own, except for her parents and the other tenants in her building and the aforementioned somewhat fuzzily distinguished classmates - well, okay, clearly not on her own. But she has no supernatural aid to help her save her family’s restaurant in New York City in the Great Depression. Only Luli’s pushcart dim sum business stands between the Lees and eviction!

What I’m Reading Now

Emily Wilson’s Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys through Ancient Literature, which thrillingly begins with an essay on Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter. Like me, Wilson wanted Carson to include more scholarly apparatus explaining our sources for Sappho’s poems, which curiously made me feel a bit protective of Carson’s choice to present the poems standing alone as poems, even though I also found that choice frustrating as I read. I enjoy context as much as the next person, but I also think there’s value in engaging in art as art rather than a cultural artifact… not that these things are mutually exclusive, and the cultural context can deepen appreciation or engagement. But sometimes you just want to vibe.

Very interested to learn that there have been some new Sappho discoveries since Carson’s translation was published.

The second chapter is about the practice of translation and the theory of translation studies, which ignores the practice of actual translators to focus on questions like “Is translation truly possible?” and “Is a fluent, readable translation actually a form of cultural imperialism?” The theoretical answers are of course “No” and “Yes,” respectively.

What I Plan to Read Next

The final 2026 Newbery Honor book: Audrey Hartman’s The Undead Fox of Deadwood Forest.

Greyfriars Bobby is a 1961 Disney film, based on the tale of a Skye terrier who became famous in 19th century Edinburgh because he slept on his dead master’s grave for 14 years. I must confess that I watched this mostly because I happened to see a preview and sighed, “Oh for the days when the dogs in movies were real dogs.”

And indeed the movie is just full of shots of a real Skye terrier doing absolutely adorable things, so well worth seeing if you simply want to watch a dog being a very good dog.

But even aside from that, quite an enjoyable film. Obviously the beginning is a bit of a downer: Bobby’s master, an old shepherd, has been dismissed from his last position and dies of pneumonia in a cheap lodging house in Edinburgh, with Bobby at his side. Tear-jerking stuff. But although Bobby does indeed insist on sleeping on his master’s grave, he also accidentally becomes a ray of sunshine in Edinburgh, befriending the crusty old restauranteur Traill, facilitating Traill’s budding friendship with the local tenement children (who adore Bobby), and even winning over the cemetery keeper who initially tried to keep Bobby out.

At the climax of the movie, the Law tries to force Traill to pay Bobby’s licensing fees. Traill refuses, not because he doesn’t love Bobby, but because Bobby very clearly is not his dog: he belongs heart and soul to Auld Jock beneath the sod in the cemetery. The cemetery keeper comes to court, prepared to pay Bobby’s fees, and then the tenement children rush in, having collected the necessary seven shillings in farthings and ha’pence…

The judge gives Bobby the freedom of the city. Happy end!

The general language-filled atmosphere of Inventing Languages has once again filled me with enthusiasm for language learning. Aside from my adventures in Esperanto, I have also once again made a resolution to practice Spanish.

I started studying Spanish when I was eleven or twelve. I knew that the critical window for second language learning was closing (this tells you a lot about what kind of child I was) so I wanted desperately to start a second language, and my friend Micky’s mother was offering Spanish lessons (the family is originally from Argentina), so I asked my parents to sign me up.

I did indeed squeak the beginning of my Spanish studies into the critical window, which means that Spanish continues to knock around in my brain even though I neglect it disgracefully. However, since I chose Spanish because it was the only available option, it was something of a marriage of convenience. And as often happens in a marriage of convenience, I’ve achieved respect and esteem for the language, but not passion.

But, on the other hand, in college I studied Russian, and that did arise out of a passionate interest in the Russian language and history. But I still neglected it disgracefully thereafter, and because I started it so much later, I’ve forgotten almost all of it. So maybe passion is overrated! Arranged marriages and love matches tend to succeed at about the same rate, 50%, which is really no better than chance anyway.

Anyway, I’ve decided that maybe I was attempting too high a reading level with the translations of the American Girl Josefina chapter books, so I’ve knocked myself right down to picture books. I asked my friend Micky (we’re still in touch) if she had any recommendations for Spanish-language picture books (she’s raising her children bilingual), but she told me that there isn’t a strong children’s literature tradition in Spanish, which honestly goes a long way towards explaining why Spanish and I were never a love match.

However, there are a fair number of English picture books that have been translated into Spanish, and conveniently the library just got a shipment, which I helped process to put onto the shelves. So naturally I snagged a couple that looked particularly charming, starting with Palona Angelina Lopez’s Popo el Xolo (translated from English by Carlos E. Calvo), illustrated by Abraham Matias, whose rich jewel-tone colors caught my eye.

Xolo is short for Xoloitzcuintle, a breed of Mexican dog which often serves as a psychopomp in legends. Popo is a Xolo who belongs to Abuela, and one night he leads her on a journey… The rare (very rare) picture book about death which doesn’t make me want to scratch my eyes out. Actually quite liked the quest structure, and the bit at the end where she briefly sees her family again and understands what has happened, and that it is sad but also time to move on.

I also read Jacqueline Alcántara’s Tíos y primos, also originally written in English but translated into Spanish by Yanitzia Canetti. Again attracted by the colorful illustrations, drawn by Alcántara, who in fact is chiefly an illustrator - this book is the first she both wrote and illustrated. A little girl feels nervous about visiting her father’s family in Honduras because her Spanish is limited, but her aunts and uncles and grandmother embrace her, and she discovers that she can communicate with her cousins in the universal language of soccer/fútbol.

We return to the most neurotic captain in the Royal Navy! At the beginning of Commodore Hornblower, Hornblower everything he ever hoped and dreamed. His heroic exploits are stories on land and sea. He’s made a vast fortune. He recently married the woman he loves, who just happens to be the sister of the soon-to-be Duke of Wellington, and they have just bought a vast estate, which is how you show you’ve reached the pinnacle of success in early 19th century Britain.

Naturally, Hornblower is miserable. He hungers for success, but hates almost everything that comes with it, and although he is a brilliant out-of-the-box thinker at naval strategy, he appears genuinely incapable of imagining the possibility that you could win great wealth and, like, just not buy a country estate that will oblige you to be sociable in the neighborhood and go foxhunting with the neighbors and generally live a life that is everything Hornblower hates.

Fortunately for Hornblower, his influential brothers-in-law find him a new command: he will be commodore of the Baltic fleet, tasked with keeping Sweden neutral, enticing Russia to the British side, and generally causing problems for France. Will Hornblower take Lady Barbara along, like the Admiral and Sophy Croft in Persuasion? Absolutely not. Genuinely does not appear to occur to him for one single moment that this might be an option.

Instead, he takes along Bush, now a captain as a result of his part in the capture of the Witch of Endor, to be the captain for his flagship. Hornblower gets on deck and shakes hands with all his officers and reaches Bush last and the two of them shake hands and then just stand there grinning at each other like idiots.

Hornblower then looks at Barbara’s presents for his voyage and gets annoyed because they’re too thoughtful (truly this man cannot stand to be on the receiving end of love and care), but stops himself when he sees his thoughts trending toward regretting his marriage. And then he has breakfast with Bush and thinks Bush is “better than a wife.” HORNBLOWER. SIR.

If the book had gone on like this I might have simply expired, but in fact this is the slashy high point of the book. Most of the rest is naval warfare in the Baltic, the siege of Riga, and talking the Prussian army into turning on Napoleon (!) before collapsing as a result of typhus. Bush doesn’t even get to nurse Hornblower back to health. He sails the fleet home to England, leaving Hornblower behind to convalesce.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Despite the horrors of “The Swan”, I finished Roald Dahl’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, which wraps up with the tale of how Roald Dahl became an author. Dahl was serving as an air attache in Washington DC during World War II when C. S. Forester (of Hornblower fame!) walked into his office and asked if Dahl, former RAF pilot, could give him some notes so Forester could write up an article about pilots to pep up the then-new American war effort.

Dahl duly wrote up some notes, and Forester thought they were SO amazing that he sent them as written to his own agent, who found a home for them in a magazine. The magazine sent Dahl a check for $900, and Forester sent Dahl a note gushing about his talent. “Did you know you were a writer?” Forester asks. And the rest is history.

I also read Gary Paulsen’s short strange book Dancing Carl, in which two boys become obsessed with the shellshocked veteran who has been put in charge of the ice rink in their small Minnesota town in the 1950s. Carl’s thing is that he dances on the ice, not in ice skates like a modern ice dancer, but just in his sneakers, and such is the power of his personality that the people of the town do not laugh at this but accord him a strange sort of respect. Not sure this one entirely came together, but like Carl’s dancing it has a weird sort of power.

What I’m Reading Now

I got about halfway through E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, but then *spoiler* died so I’ve stalled out for the moment, although I do intend to swing back around and finish it. Starting the Forster read-through right before Inventing Languages was probably a mistake, as it means the rest of Foster’s oeuvre may have to wait until the class is over, but hey, I stopped for two years in the middle of the Jane Austen readthrough, so a hiatus is practically traditional at this point.

What I Plan to Read Next

Helene Hanff’s Apple of My Eye has come in!

I have long been a fan of Ruth Goodman’s books, and for almost as long a time I’ve wanted to watch her various historical reenactment television shows. At long last the stars aligned, and I borrowed Edwardian Farm from the library.

In Edwardian Farm, Ruth and her co-conspirators Alex and Peter set up shop in an Edwardian-era farm building in Devon, where they try their hands not only at farming skills like plowing with horses but also cheesemaking, charcoal burning, capturing and training an Exmoor pony for light hauling, making a proper clotted cream (which looks nothing like modern clotted cream), and so forth and so on.

I LOVE this sort of thing. Watching people who are good at making stuff make stuff is one of my very favorite genres. See also The Great British Baking Show. (Arguably, many of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books are a literary version.) While Ruth and company are not experts at most of these skills, they all clearly bring a lot of craft experience to bear, so although, say, Ruth’s attempt at clotted cream is not Great British Baking Show level, it’s also far above Nailed It.

One of Devon’s traditional industries is bobbin lace, and I decided to save the lacemaking episode to watch with Julie, as we recently did a bobbin lace-making class together. Julie was enchanted with the show and sought out more of Goodman’s shows on streaming, which resulted in Secrets of the Castle, narrated by none other than Certified Hottie Paul McGann.

After a brief pause for screaming, we went on to watch the show, in which Ruth (joined again by Peter, and also by Tom) spends a few months helping build Guédelon Castle, a castle in France which is being built entirely using medieval techniques. We hammer with a blacksmith! Smooth stone with a stonemason! Make the local clay into paint to paint the walls in the fashionable medieval “rocks and roses” pattern! (“We’ll repaint it after they’re done filming,” one of the castle’s artists murmurs to another in French.) Once again a fantastic time.

Eagerly awaiting the opportunity to watch the other historical farm shows. I believe we have Tudor Monastery Farm on tap to watch next.

Arika Okrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius is actually a reread, so when it was assigned for my Inventing Languages class I actually did just plan to read the assigned chapters… but I was having such a fantastic time reading it that I ended up rereading the whole book. What a fantastic time.

The book is a whirlwind tour through the history of invented languages, starting with a whistlestop at the earliest known example, Hildegarde von Bingen’s Lingua Ignota (subject of Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language, by medievalist and conlanger Sarah Higley, which I may need to read). Then we take a long pause at John Wilkins’ 17th century attempt at a philosophical language, which would represent language as clearly as the newly-created mathematical notation represented mathematical concepts.

Then we go flying onward to the plethora of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century attempts to create an International Auxiliary Language (IAL), which would serve as a universal second language so that all people would be able to communicate with each other, which would (it was hoped) lead to world peace. The most famous of these is Esperanto, which today has anywhere between 30,000 and 2 million speakers (the English-language Wikipedia lists the range; Esperanto wikipedia firmly writes “2,000,000”), including at least a thousand native speakers, who grew up speaking Esperanto as their first tongue.

Loved the sections on Esperanto culture. In fact, I see that I ended my original review “I want to know more about Esperanto culture, dammit!” This is still true! I have checked out Peter G. Forster’s 1982 The Esperanto Movement, but I’d also like something a bit more current about Esperanto culture today… Okrent makes it sound like Esperantoland is full of the world’s squarest hippies, people who earnestly believe in peace, love, and the importance of regular verb conjugations, and want nothing more than to sing around a campfire about it.

However, as much as I would like to stay in Esperantoland, this book is a whirlwind tour of the land of invented languages more generally, so onward we fly to the story of Blissymbols. Here you have a guy (Charles Bliss) who invents what he intends to be a universal pictorial language. No one seems interested, no one seems interested, and then out of the blue he discovers that a school for severely disabled children in Canada has started using his symbols. These kids don’t have the coordination to speak or use sign language, but they can point to symbols, and have rapidly learned to communicate through this medium.

Bliss is thrilled. He flies from Australia to Canada to see his symbols in action! He charms all the students and teachers with his radiant enthusiasm! But then he sees… that they are using his symbols wrong. For instance, that symbol they’re using for “vegetable”? That ONLY means “food that grows under the ground”! It does NOT include vegetables like peas that grow in the open air!

And thus began years of legal battles, featuring Bliss machine-gunning himself and his system in the foot by being a colossal pain in the ass. He was so clearly an unstable and unhappy person that it’s impossible not to feel sorry for him… but his demands were so irrational and so clearly prevented his system (which genuinely helped people!) from being more widely adopted that you end up wildly exasperated with him, too.

Then we proceed at a brisk trot through Loglan/Lojban. The second is a schismatic formation of the first, which was excommunicated by the original creator, who intended to create a logical and bias-free language with which to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. To date, Lojban enthusiasts have mostly succeeded in creating a language so complex that even they can’t speak it, but whatever, they’re having fun.

And fun brings us to the Klingon Conference, and more generally to the world of modern conlangs, which have for the most part set aside grand schemes in favor of having a good time.

And now, with the historical stage set, we set forth to invent our own languages!

A few months ago, while perusing the “recently returned” cart at the library, I snagged a documentary called Christmas in Yellowstone. (I don’t remember the exact date, but suffice it to say it was months after Christmas.) This kicked off a love affair with documentaries which began by branching off in two different directions, one direction being Lucy Worsley’s The Twelve Days of Tudor Christmas and the other being nature documentaries.

I believe Lucy Worsley is a big name in the UK, but she hasn’t made a big imprint in the US (yet), and the library has a somewhat random smattering of her documentaries. The Twelve Days of Tudor Christmas documents Tudor Christmas customs, like the Christmas carol apostrophizing the roast boar, and the mummers, who visit Lucy Worsley in torchlight which really highlights just how creepy a paper mache mask can be. In electric light they might not be so bad, but in the flickering torchlit night? Terrifying.

In general the Tudor Christmas seems to have had a creepy side which now, at least in America, has mostly been siphoned off to Halloween.

I greatly enjoyed this, so followed it up with Worsley’s Tales of the Royal Wardrobe, which is a zoom through royal fashion from the Elizabethan era to today. Particularly enjoyed the bits where Worsley tries on replicas of the fashions and talks a bit about the bodily experience of wearing, let’s say, an Elizabethan gown, with all the almost sculptural shading underneath, and the gigantic ruff.

For the nature documentaries, the absolute standout was Winged Migration, which is a bird documentary filmed mostly using ultralight flyers that actually flew alongside the birds. (I learned this from the making-of featurette which was possibly even more fascinating than the documentary itself. Always watch the making-of featurette if there is one!) Amazing footage of birds in flight. Very little voiceover. AMAZING soundtrack. "Who is singing this ethereally beautiful song?" I kept asking the screen. (It turns out the answer is usually either Nick Cave or Robert Wyatt.)

I enjoyed this so much that I also watched Microcosmos, which was made by the same director on more or less the same principles, but about insects, which to be honest I just don’t care about as much as birds. Also, no making-of featurette. 🙁

I’m not going to go through every other nature documentary I watched (there have been so many…), but the other big standout was The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, which is about a guy in San Francisco who began (more or less by accident) a prolonged close observation of the parrot colony, probably originally made up of escaped pets, which live on Telegraph Hill. He got to know them so well that he could identify each parrot by sight, knew their mates and their children and their stories, just amazing stuff all around. Animal social life is better than any soap opera. Highly recommended. There’s a book too (also called The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill), which I’m planning to read.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Vivien Alcock’s The Sylvia Game. When Emily goes to the seaside to recover from the flu, she discovers that she looks just like a painting that used to hang in a local stately home… a painting by Renoir, of a girl named Sylvia, who drowned in the lily pond at the age of twelve. The son of the house used to treat Sylvia as his imaginary friend, and ended up terrifying himself with the tales he made up about her ghost.

Enjoyed this, but wished it had an actual ghost. Who among us does not want to read a book about a haunted Renoir painting!

I also finished Helene Hanff’s Letter from New York, a collection of her five-minute radio talks for the BBC about her life in New York from 1978-1984, which is a delight, a series of bite-size glimpses into a bygone yet still recognizable New York. Perfect under any circumstances but I think especially good if you’re in a busy period where you might just have a few minutes to read at a time.

And I finished Kelsey Osgood’s Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion, a nonfiction book which for once has an accurate subtitle. Osgood herself converted to Orthodox Judaism as an adult, and she interviewed six other women who also converted to various religious traditions.

Super interesting, but I felt that the interviews needed to be more in-depth, as if often seemed as if Osgood didn’t have enough material for each chapter and ended up rounding them out with reflections on her own experiences. And those reflections are often fascinating, but I would have preferred it if, let’s say, Osgood’s musings on the Orthodox Jewish Sabbath had been moved to Osgood’s own chapter, so that the Amish chapter could spend more time on the Amish Sabbath.

What I’m Reading Now

In Roald Dahl’s short story collection The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, I came upon the short story “The Swan.” “A swan,” I thought, “how nice.”

Reader, it is not nice. A horrible boy receives a gun for his birthday present, and with the aid of his equally horrible best friend they kidnap a younger boy (a freckle-faced birdwatcher), tie him lengthwise along the railroad tracks so a train goes over him just inches away from his face, then shot a swan and tie the wings to his arms and tell him to jump out of a tree and shoot him when he refuses.

Then the magic kicks in and the boy with his swan wings flies home so his mother can call an ambulance. GOOD GOD.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve enjoyed Helene Hanff’s Letter from New York so much that I decided I simply MUST explore her other work. I started with Apple of My Eye (also about New York) because the library consortium only has one copy and I have learned from bitter experience how swiftly the last copy can vanish. But she also wrote Underfoot in Show Business, which sounds fascinating, as does Q’s Legacy, her memoir of her reading life. And, oh, surely I have to read The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, her travel memoir about England… and maybe reread 84, Charing Cross Road?

One of my friends came to visit over the weekend, and in honor of Tim Curry we decided to rewatch Muppet Treasure Island and The Three Musketeers. (We also wanted to watch Dolly Parton’s The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, but someone else had checked it out of the library, and anyway we might not have had time. Next weekend!)

At this point I’ve seen Muppet Treasure Island countless times, and yet there are still delightful little details I’ve never noticed before. For instance, in the early scene where Billy Bones is telling everyone in the tavern about Flint’s buried treasure, and all the patrons chime into his ending for the story, “Now isn’t that a tale worth the hearing,” one of the patrons is drinking from a Toby jug - and the Toby jug chimes in too! It also is a Muppet. Amazing.

Endless praise has been deservedly lavished on Tim Curry’s performance as Long John Silver - if Michael Caine treated the Muppets like fellow actors, Tim Curry acted like a fellow Muppet, etc. - but let’s not sleep on the other human actors in the movie, particularly Kevin Bishop as Jim Hawkins, who radiates friendship for his best friends Gonzo and Rizzo. (The betrayal in Gonzo and Rizzo’s voices when Jim abandons them to hang out with Long John Silver! “Well! I guess the human beings want to hang out with each other!” huffs Rizzo.)

But the humans playing the background pirates are also having a great time. This rewatch I was particularly taken with the bald guy (the one who spoofs “and me… I coulda been… a contender” in the “A Professional Pirate” song), who's always hanging out in the back grinning whenever something goes down.

I definitely didn’t get the “contender” reference as a child, and spotting the references is yet another layer of pleasure to a Muppet movie as one gets older. One of the best things about the Muppets, I think, is that the layers build on each other - as you get older you can recognize the references and spot more of the quirky touches like the Toby jug, but you can also continue to enjoy it on the original level as a rip-snorting adventure yarn.

And speaking of “A Professional Pirate,” WHAT amazing songs this movie has. Banger after banger. Simply an iconic movie in every way, amazing scene after amazing scene. Year of Sail has peaked!

The Three Musketeers is perhaps not quite as iconic, but it was a personal favorite of mine, which I watched so many times at thirteen or fourteen that I actually broke the VHS. The thrilling adventure! The camaraderie and loyalty! The delicious wickedness of characters who SWEAR, not to mention the entire scene where Milady tries to seduce D’Artagnan, who is lying in her bed shirtless as she sits watching him, and the camera sits watching her cleavage, which frankly deserves separate billing.

Or, of course, the scene where the Queen is taking a bath, and as she rises from the water someone helps her into her robe, and as she turns she discovers that someone is Cardinal Richelieu...

Whereas Long John Silver is a charming villain you love, Cardinal Richelieu is a smarmy villain you love to hate. Tim Curry is gnawing on the scenery like a hamster and loving every minute of it as he supervises the torture dungeon (does the king know he has an entire torture dungeon? Who can say), sexually harasses the queen, and plots the death of the king while swooping through the halls of the palace with his scarlet cape rippling behind him. (Like Milady’s cleavage, the cape deserves its own line in the credits.)

Now, could I argue that the plot quote unquote “makes sense”? No. Absolutely not. This movie hangs together entirely on vibes, loyalty kink, and Tim Curry’s ability to manage his cape so it takes up as much space as five people. It’s what Dumas would have wanted.

I sold a story! More details later once contracts have been signed etc, but thrilled to announce that I’ve sold my mermaid story “Singing Each to Each.”

I have been faithfully fulfilling my One Submission a Month resolution, but with flagging enthusiasm, so this was a delightful boost. I don’t think I’ll keep this specific resolution next year, since the short story is not a length I naturally gravitate toward, but I’ll definitely keep submitting when I see a place that seems like a good fit for a story I’ve already written.

Other writing news: trimming Paper Bird so it’s short enough to submit to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. A bit disturbing to discover how much I could trim without materially altering the story.

Finally, in business-of-writing news, I learned a month or two ago that Amazon now allows self-publishers to make ebooks that are available in the Amazon-exclusive KDP program also available to libraries.

This spurred me to put my m/m and m/m/f books on Draft2Digital for those sweet, sweet library circs. I’m not entirely sure how this system works, because when I look at the Overdrive site it tells me that my books are not available at any libraries, but when I look at the Draft2Digital site, it tells me that I’ve made more than $50 this month and $40 of it has been through Overdrive… A mystery! Clearly the left hand and the right hand are not communicating! As long as I get my money in the end I don’t mind.

The terms of the KDP contract also allow writers to sell paperback books wherever they wish, so the m/m and m/m/f books are now available in paperback from various retailers. The paperbacks at these other outlets are uniformly more expensive than the Amazon paperbacks, because the Draft2Digital paperbacks would have been taking a loss at the Amazon prices. (Possibly Amazon is taking a loss on every self-published paperback in order to wickedly undercut the rest of the self-publishing market? Unclear.)

As KDP is currently responsible for more than half my writing income, I feel leery of leaving it to publish my books wide. However, an experiment might be possible. Take a book from KDP for a 90-day period (KDP operates on 90-day periods), put it up on Draft2Digital, and see how the numbers compare. If the Draft2Digital numbers are terrible, I could always remove the ebook from the verboten retailers and pop it back into KDP.

Back to my interrupted post about recent adaptation watches! I enjoyed Vanity Fair so much that I continued my Andrew Davies theme with the 1995 Pride and Prejudice, which I haven’t seen since college, and honestly may not have watched in its entirety then? Honestly a shocking lapse in my Austen adaptation knowledge.

Anyway, I watched it now! And everyone is so right, this miniseries is golden. Obviously Colin Firth is great as Mr. Darcy (is this the miniseries that pioneered “let’s get the hero naked just because”? A noble tradition), and Jennifer Ehle is a sparkling Elizabeth (she DOES have remarkably fine eyes, it’s true), but I was also bowled over by the fantastic work on the secondary characters, too.

Mrs. Hurst is trying SO hard to wingwoman her sister Caroline Bingley into a marriage with Mr. Darcy. The little glances they’re always shooting at each other when Caroline’s trying to flirt with Mr. Darcy! A pity (for Caroline) that they didn’t realize bad-mouthing Elizabeth was NOT the way to Mr. Darcy’s heart. She should have tried emulating her brother, who is Darcy’s best friend in part because he’s incapable of being mean to anyone. Might not have worked but probably would have given her a better shot.

Julia Sawalha is having a GREAT time as Lydia, a far more rewarding role than Hornblower’s unloved wife in the Ioan Gruffudd Hornblower. The scene where she steals one of the officer’s swords and dances through the ball with it? Iconic. If she ever realizes how close she came to ruin when she ran away with Wickham, she’ll probably think it’s a very good joke.

Mr. Collins is so hilariously awful. The scene where he shows up at Longbourn after Lydia’s elopement to gloat! (In the book this is just a letter, but of course in a visual adaptation making it an actual visit makes it that much punchier.) Oh, he’s SO happy now that Elizabeth turned down his proposal, because that means he’s not involved in their disgrace. Asshole. Also love the way that he dramatically covers him mouth each time the Lady Catherine de Bourgh interrupts him. She needs the flattery but all the same I think she finds him insufferable.

I was so delighted by this foray into Austen adaptations that I also rewatched the 2020 Emma. In 2020, when I first watched this movie, I went in with low expectations and discovered with surprise that I liked it.

Rewatching now, with expectations set high because I liked it before, I must confess I liked it less, and in fact spent a lot of the movie thinking about how much more I like the 2009 TV series. However, the 2020 movie does have an edge in one particular aspect: I’ve always felt the 2009 Jane Fairfax was miscast, while the 2020 Jane Fairfax is elegance personified.

Of course this means that now I'm rewatching the 2009 Emma miniseries YET AGAIN, having already rewatched it barely over a year ago. No regrets! The perfect miniseries! (Well, perhaps aside from their Jane Fairfax casting. I regard this as akin to the purposefully imperfect piece that the Amish insert into their quilts so they do not attempt to rival the perfection of God.)

***

The 2009 Emma was written by my other favorite British period piece screenwriter, Sandy Welch, who also wrote the 2006 Jane Eyre and the 2004 North and South. Also Our Mutual Friend, which I attempted to watch, but midway through episode 2 the library DVD began skipping horribly, so I am for the moment STYMIED.

But I don’t despair. Our Mutual Friend has simply been added to my ongoing Half Price Books treasure hunt. Someday I WILL find it, and then the rejoicing shall be great!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, translated by Megan Backus, which turns out to be two novelettes packaged as one, both delicate explorations of grief swirled with some gender stuff. In Kitchen, after Mikage loses her last living family member, she’s invited to live with her classmate Yuichi and his glamorous mother Eriko, who (Yuichi informs Mikage with some glee) used to be his father, while in Moonlight Shadow, Satsuki’s friend Hiiragi starts wearing his girlfriend’s uniform to school after she dies.

I’m suspicious of any book described as an “exploration of grief,” since American authors tend to think they haven’t successfully Explored Grief unless you kind of want to lie down and die at the end of the book. I don’t know if this is a cultural difference or simply a Banana Yoshimoto difference, but I didn’t have that feeling with these stories - the characters are sad, but they aren’t defined by their sadness, and the book is exploring the experience of grieving without positively wallowing.

I also read Edwin Way Teale’s memoirs of his childhood summers at his grandparents’ farm in the Indiana Dunes in the early 1900s and 1910s. I love this sort of thing, so loved the book - especially fascinated by the sequence where Teale as an airplane-obsessed teenager attempts to build his own glider.

What I’m Reading Now

Continuing on in Helene Hanff’s Letter from New York, which continues to be a joy and a delight. Hanff’s friend Richard has a new sheepdog named Bentley who was the absolute hit of socialite Arlene’s New Year party, and Arlene calls the next morning to teasingly complain to Hanff: this dog just upstaged her at her own party, so why does Arlene love him so much?

What I Plan to Read Next

My class on Inventing Languages has begun! And my assigned reading has exploded my unassigned reading list. Eagerly awaiting my interlibrary loans of J. R. R. Tolkien’s A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages and Richard W. Bailey’s Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated Execution of Edward H. Rulloff. (Rulloff was a linguist who supported his linguistics habit with crime.)

Some time ago I posted about my thrilling plans for my new DVD player, and then pretty much failed to post about anything that I’ve watched ever since, probably because so many of the things I’ve been watching are actually rewatches. Had a great time rewatching Chernobyl and the 2006 Jane Eyre miniseries, but don’t necessarily have a ton to say about them.

As per my plans in the linked entry, I did give Abbott Elementary a try, but after a few episodes it still hadn’t clicked for me and I decided life was too short of TV you aren’t loving. I also gave up on A Fine Romance after a few episodes, for the same reason. And I still haven’t rewatched Brideshead Revisited, even though I own the DVD set! But I did just rewatch it in 2020.

But I did rewatch the 2008 miniseries of Sense and Sensibility, one of the great miniseries of all time (their seaside cottage is so idyllic!), which I loved so much that it inspired me to look up other work by the same screenplay writer, Andrew Davies. (Davies is apparently very famous and

littlerhymes laughed at me for just now discovering him, but hey, better late than never.)

This at last led me to a series I haven’t seen before, the 1998 Vanity Fair, which is fantastic. Amazing portrayal of Becky Sharp - the show never forgets that Becky is in many ways in a very vulnerable position, but also never forgets that Becky is a wheeler and dealer, capable of using her wit, charm, and sex appeal to deal with any situation that arises. Also, sterling decision to shift the focus largely to Becky once her storyline diverges from Amelia’s post-Waterloo - Amelia’s mostly sitting around mourning her awful dead husband who doesn’t deserve it, while Becky never just sits around. Becky Sharp gets shit DONE.

I also came away from this adaptation with a possibly somewhat crack theory: Becky Sharp, a lesbian? This is based entirely on two facts. One, she clearly doesn’t give a toenail about any of the men in her life. Even for her husband Rawdon, the only one where you might argue she cares about him a little, she’s conspicuously unconcerned when he rides off to possible death at Waterloo. (Amelia meanwhile is prostrate over the departure of her horrible husband, who just the night before was trying to convince Becky to run away with him.)

Two, the usually entirely selfish Becky commits one unselfish act in the story, and it’s for Amelia. Near the end, she triumphantly routs Amelia’s pining suitor Major Dobbin, who suspects (correctly, based on 100% of Becky’s past behavior) that Becky will bleed both Amelia and Amelia’s brother Jos dry if allowed back into their hearts and home. He begs Amelia to drop Becky, and Amelia drops Dobbin instead.

Except for once in her life, Becky doesn’t milk the situation for every last drop of advantage. She tosses away her commanding position, and opts instead to ensure Amelia’s happiness. Stop pining for your awful husband, Becky tells Amelia, he’s not worth it. Here’s the note where he asked me to run away with him the very night before he died. Forget him and marry Dobbin, whom I can tell you love.

…Now admittedly enabling Amelia to marry a guy may not sound like compelling proof of lesbianism. But Amelia is one of the straightest characters ever written, so it’s not like Becky could keep her for herself if she wanted to. And this unwonted selflessness at very least shows that Becky, who is otherwise always looking out for number one, has enough of a soft spot for Amelia that she can be moved to look out for Amelia instead.

***

I had planned to get through all the adaptations in this one post, but I’ve decided that would make the post way too long. So I’ll have a separate post about Austen adaptations, and will instead wrap up with the comment that I’m planning to watch a few more Andrew Davies adaptations.

I’m looking at adaptations of books I’ve already read, so currently the contenders are the 1994 Middlemarch, 2016 War and Peace, and 2018 Les Miserables. Any recommendations between those three?

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

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March of the Penguins

Book Review: Where Angels Fear to Tread

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84 Charing Cross Road

Book Review: The Undead Fox of Deadwood Forest

Book Review: Esperanto and Its Rivals

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Greyfriars Bobby

Picture Book Monday: Picture Books in Spanish

Book Review: Commodore Hornblower

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Documentaries Part II

Book Review: In the Land of Invented Languages

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August Writing and September Plans

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