pedanther

One of the reasons why, until this month, I hadn't been to town since 2019 was a lingering fear that if I went into the crowded city I would come back with something interesting and respiratory. In a typically human display of logical thinking, however, having made up my mind to go I didn't take any serious precautions against that outcome, and went cheerfully unmasked among crowds on trains and in buses and in rooms full of boardgamers and so on and so forth.

So it wasn't entirely a surprise when it became apparent, within a week of my return, that I had in fact acquired something interesting and respiratory.

It isn't covid, or at least I've got a negative result on all the covid tests I've been taking. I even tried a brace of those fancy new ones that also test for flu and RSV, and got negative results on those as well. So I'm not quite sure what it is, except that it's definitely annoying.

It started with a general feeling of being tired that had developed by Saturday morning into enough of a something that I cancelled my social plans for the afternoon and spent most of the afternoon asleep instead. The worst of it was over within a few days, leaving just the post-nasal drip and associated cough which do not appear to be in any hurry to go away.

I've been sticking at home to be on the safe side, and skipped board game club and other social occasions. (And a committee meeting, which felt particularly weird because I don't think I've missed a meeting of that committee in years and there's a part of me that worries about what they might get up to without my eye on them.)

One of the ways I passed the time during the week was re-reading Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic tetralogy, and then the sequel tetralogy, The Circle Opens. I started reading them years ago along with the Mark Reads online book club, but for some reason I don't now recall I stopped partway through. The decision to re-read them now and finish the series was partly a choice to read something fairly undemanding that I knew I'd enjoy, and partly a deliberate attempt to manipulate my reading statistics on StoryGraph: The all-time stats page includes a top ten list of the authors a user has read the most books by, which in my case starts with Terry Pratchett at #1 and continues down through several excellent SF writers, two creators of classic detective series, and the most prolific author of Doctor Who tie-in books, to finish – now – with Tamora Pierce at #10. The previous #10 was an author who I regrettably read voraciously during my undiscerning teen years but would now rather not give any hint of endorsement to, so I'm glad to have crowbarred him off the list.

Remarkably Bright Creatures fit the themed reading challenge for November ("a book about families") and the last book of The Circle Opens fit the challenge for December ("Finish a book or series that has been lingering for a long time" – and also the alternate option, "a book about someone who is gifted"), so I've completed that set of challenges ahead of schedule. On the other hand, I'm straggling with the random book challenges: I haven't finished the October book yet (This Is Improbable is one of those books that was designed to be dipped into on odd occasions, not read in long stretches) and I haven't settled on a November book. The November challenge is to pick a book at random from the books with your favourite StoryGraph 'mood' ("adventurous", in my case); I failed to get on with my first pick, as previously detailed, and my next few attempts to re-roll the choice landed on books I wasn't in a suitable frame of mind for. Part of the trouble, I think, is that if a book with my favourite mood has been sitting on the to-read shelf for years there's probably some reason I'm not keen to read it. I'm currently having a shot at a Sabatini novel I picked up in a second-hand shop once, and being reminded that although Sabatini inspired several classic adventure movies I've never entirely got on with his books at first hand.

. With the WA elections coming up, the ABC has published a summary of the 19 parties running and their major policies. May be useful for telling apart the minor parties who didn't just name themselves after their main policy.


. The brass band has started up again for 2021. We're in a position where we have some rebuilding to do before we're at the level we were around this time last year, not just because of the long pandemic hiatus but also because the new year is the time when people go away to university or leave town for new jobs elsewhere, and this year we've lost our conductor, a couple of key players, and two of the mainstays of the band committee. We have a new conductor and new committee members, but there's going to be a while before we have an idea of the effect on the band's collective personality and goals.


. The Rep Club has also started up again for the year. We have a season of one-act plays going up next month, and then will be the big push toward this year's musical. We're having another run at Hello Dolly!, which we were going to do last year before the pandemic hit. Some of the people who were cast last year have left town or had to withdraw for other reasons, but fortunately most of the losses were down in the supporting cast where the gaps are easier to fill in.


. The roleplaying campaign is progressing. We're beginning to accumulate some of those "your players did what?" anecdotes that every good campaign produces. Our adventuring party has done enough adventuring to pass probation and get officially accredited, which raises the question: What are we going to call ourselves? I've been leaning toward something about dire wolves, on the "if I had a nickel for every time we've been attacked by dire wolves" principle, but only if we can make it clear that "dire" isn't a judgement on our adventuring abilities. When I mentioned this to the rest of the group, somebody suggested that we could call ourselves The DW, and claim it stood for whatever seemed most appropriate depending on who was asking. "When you're in trouble, you call DW," said two players in unison.


. I recently had a go at reading The Barrakee Mystery, an Australian murder mystery novel from 1929 that turned into the first of a series running to 29 novels over three and a half decades. The protagonist of the series, though he's more of a supporting character in the first novel, is Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, known as "Bony", a detective with mixed ancestry from an Aboriginal mother and an unknown European father. As such, it's worth noting that the series spans several eventful decades in the history of race relations in Australia. I'd read some of the novels from near the end of the series before, but the beginning is a very different experience. It hadn't occurred to me to wonder why a white author in the 1920s would put a half-Aboriginal detective in his novel, but of course race relations play a big role in the plot and Bony isn't the only half-Aboriginal character in the novel. It's an uncomfortable read at times: Bony and the narrator both have pointed things to say about white Australia's treatment of Aboriginal people, but the novel also seems to take it as given that someone with mixed white and Aboriginal heritage will be dragged down by their inferior blood. (It's the Aboriginal blood that's being posited as inferior, to be clear.) It certainly takes it as given that most of the white characters will be prejudiced against Aboriginal people to a greater or lesser extent, and that this isn't expected to affect how likeable the audience finds them.

I sometimes think about what a modern TV adaptation of the Bony novels might be like. It would probably have to be pretty thoroughly reimagined; even the most recent of the novels is over fifty years old, and The Barrakee Mystery is coming up on its centenary, and the national conversation on race has changed a lot in that time. But sometimes I feel like we kind of owe it to Bony, for the fact that there have already been two TV series inspired by the novels and both of them starred white men. (The 1970s series made at least a token effort to audition Aboriginal actors before casting a white man and investing heavily in brown makeup; the 1990s series just straight-up made the protagonist a handsome white twentysomething, played by one of the several bankable handsome white twentysomethings that were on TV all the time in those days. And those days were the days when Ernie Dingo was also a bankable twentysomething, so it's not like they didn't have options.)

So, how about that coronavirus, huh?

This weekend was going to be a very busy one for the band, with a performance at the monthly markets this morning and the rest of the weekend devoted to a series of workshops with a visiting conductor to get us into shape for the Nationals next month. Then the Nationals got cancelled because coronavirus, and then the markets got cancelled because coronavirus. So it's been a much more relaxed weekend than I was anticipating.

Swancon has also been cancelled because coronavirus. This has brought me to a realisation: for years, I've spent every Easter weekend at either Swancon or the Nationals, and now they're both off the table. Unless I come up with a plan quickly, I may be obliged to (dramatic musical sting) spend Easter with my family.

In more cheerful coronavirus cancellation related news, Broadway's Laura Benanti has created a Twitter thread for students whose school musicals have been cancelled to post bits of their performances. The performances themselves are great, and many of the stories are charming, and the thread itself is generating a few interesting moments of its own (like somebody posting a video of their school production of Matilda and getting an encouraging comment from someone who's played Matilda professionally). (via rthstewart)