intertext

This week's bread: the Collister/Blake My Favourite Loaf, strong white/wholemeal/einkorn flour, turned out v nice.

Friday night supper: grocery delivery came so early that I had time to whip up dough, etc, for sardegnera (with Calabrian salami).

Saturday breakfast rolls: the ones loosely based on James Beard's mother's raisin bread, with Marriage's Light Spelt Flour. I think the current mace is a bit underpowered? I thought I had sprinkled on a fair amount but it didn't really come through.

Today's lunch: smoked haddock with butter beans - using Belazu Judion Butter Beans since actual dried butter beans are still being hard to come by - the haddock seemed a bit bland? - maybe I need to add further seasoning when mingling the poached fillets and the beans; served with slowcooked tenderstem broccoli (not bad considering it boiled dry a couple of times), and the whomping adult courgettes I was sent instead of baby ones (at least they weren't actual vegetable marrows) cut into batons and white-braised with sliced red bell pepper.

August is supposed to be this winding-down/wound-down month, right?

Well, for reasons which I concede are not particularly seasonal, the last week or so has been a bit of a flurry.

Getting next volume of The Ongoing Saga ready for publication in near future.

My tech person having issues with the website: it transpired that they had been upgrading some software which had had knock-on effects, but this involved a lot of three-way emailing about what was going on.

And I decided, for Reasons, to start putting together my talk for conference at end of September (rather than leave it until later I'd rather at least rough it out now and leave it to percolate) and this has so been the thing where the writing is the process and I am now actually feeling that I might have something a bit more original than I thought, and it has more of a shape to it. But the thing with this was that I kept having Ideas and going and adding bits and moving bits around, and realising I needed to go and Look Stuff Up, rather than just collate bits from my notes, so it was more of a vortex than I'd anticipated, and still ongoing.

Plus, the new physio exercises for hip/lower back and incorporating them into the routine, and, er, something or other was causing flareup of the Old Trouble, so there was working around that.

(Also, flurry of spam/phishing emails claiming to be 'support tickets' with deeply implausible references and origins.)

People on bluesky have been sending up the claim that GPT-5 boosts ChatGPT can provide PhD-level expertise.

After all, if you ask me for Mi Xpertise, you are likely to get 'it's complic8ed' and your ear bent with perhaps TMI on the subject, and what the areas of uncertainty are.

Do we not think that it would be more like having an overconfident mansplainer in one's pocket?

This led me to the teasing memory of a quotation, which I have tracked down and found has been researched in considerable depth here: Quote Origin: I Wish I Was As Sure of Any One Thing As He is of Everything.

It's fairly reliably attrib. to Lord Melbourne about the historian Thomas Macaulay (not, we fear, a member of the discipline given to declaring IAMC, sigh). Though it's been ascribed to various about various (funnily enough, all blokes) over the years.

Okay, I suppose that maybe the model is 'Disney princess' rather than any princess in history ever, but even then, don't they display a certain degree of agency?

This is A Thing where apparently women display princessiness by performatively giving up agency - sitting in restaurants with castdown eyes being ordered for, not speaking until spoken to - also certain forms of helplessness which suggest they actually need a team of Ladies of the Bedchamber fighting over whose hereditary right it is to put on their stockings and whose to lace their stays....

This boggles the mind of someone raised in an actual monarchy in which there were two princesses around who did not, actually, model docility - I don't think Princess Margaret conceding to the strictures of the day and Giving Up The Man She Loved because he was divorced really qualifies as she'd been going around with him, as far as I can recall WITHOUT A CHAPERONE for some time.

Historian is obliged to point out that for centuries princesses - apart from bearing necessary heirs - quite often had to undertake regnal tasks, either as consort or regent, or at least aid in the general work of Being Royal, even if they did not actually take the throne themselves. Note here conference paper I heard on the preference for female regents in medieval Europe when there was a minor heir.

If you're going to Be a Princess, perhaps do not take Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst as your model, though on another hand, why not? Girl-Bossing It to the Max!

but we commend Princess Sophia Duleep Singh to your attention.

Observe also the daughters of Queen Victoria: e.g. Princess Alice, who married Louis, the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, was known for her commitment to philanthropic work, interested in nursing, met and befriended Florence Nightingale, and also set up military hospitals; Princess Louise who attended the The National Art Training School and designed a full-size statue of her mother as well as a memorial sculpture for the Boer War. No meek sitting about for them.

(I will cop to have read Alot of historical novels in my misspent youth very much contradicting the notion that princessing was sitting still and being silent.)

What I read

Well, Presidential Agent kept me going for quite a while - boy, Upton Sinclair chucks a lot in - this one was particularly gripping.

I decided not to go straight on the next one - needing a break from the grim extension of Fascism over Europe - and therefore read Jessica Stanley, Consider Yourself Kissed (2025), which was a considerable disappointment. What I'd read about it led me to expect something fresher, more original, sparkier - I found this meh and towards the cosy women's fiction end. We note that back in the 60s/70s women were trapped like woodcock in springes by getting pregnant prematurely and thus stuck in unwelcome marriages or finding themselves tied down, and the gen X/millenial narrative is Biological Clock is Ticking On, so the trajectory is a bit different. The other thing I noted is that, as with All Fours, I feel Lessing's 'To Room 19' is somewhere in the DNA and it's a bit like the Omelas revisionism thing?

On the go

I've been wondering about Elizabeth Bear's The Folded Sky (White Space #3) (2025) and there was a very tasty deal on UK/European sites for the ebook - I found it a bit slow-starting but then we got the 'murder-mystery in enclosed setting' while a whole lot of other shit goes down.

Up next

New Literary Review.

Read a review of Andrea Long Chu, Authority: Essays on Being Right, which made these sound intriguing, and I read the preview sample on Kobo, and fell to the temptation of preordering. Should turn up this week.

Volume in which I have a chapter has arrived - I ought to at least riffle through the other contributions.