Inside the circle of friends

What I read

Finished Victoria's Secret - still slightly meh about it - could possibly have engaged a bit with a longer history of 'Monarch has favourite/s who are not Quite Our Sort', even if historically the gender issues in play here were different??? Also had a bit of feeling that QV was not entirely NOT treating John Brown in the light of A Very Large Faithful Dog devoted to her to which she was also devoted and which she insisted on imposing upon people who hated dogs.... Thought it was good on her awful childhood, though.

Clare Pollard, The Modern Fairies (2024) - telling stories about women telling stories, i.e. the precieuses at the time of Louis XIV, the stories they were telling and their stories and how those reflected one another.

Susan Ertz, Woman Alive (1935), my attention having been drawn towards it by a mention of its having been republished. I have a copy of the first edition, Ertz being one of the early C20th middlebrow women novelists in whom I have had an interest going back decades, but not sure whether I ever actually read this. It is sf Of The Period, in which someone is cast forward into The Future by sciento-psychic means, this is his account. And okay, is not (unlike a cluster from around the same time) about the dystopic crushing iron heel of fascistic misogyny, is about the dysoptic outcome of a war in which germ warfare has killed all the women. Except one who has survived courtesy of mad scientist neighbour's experimental process.

Points for her being a young women of education, character, and something of a backstory conveying a certain cynicism, but she still concedes to the agenda of marrying and going forth and having babbyz, though I think everyone is a bit optimistic that she will pop out multiple daughters and even so, we do not think this will Save Humanity. (Also, no-one seems to suggest she should have Plurality of Mates, surely that would be advisable?) But then it just stops with our narrator pinging back to his present day.

Most recent Literary Review

Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), which I really enjoyed and am now looking out for more of hers - think I have copies of some somewhere?

Robert Barnard, Death of a Literary Widow (1979)- everybody in it is a bit of a caricature, not just the American academic.

Emily Tesh, The Incandescent (2025), because I have been hearing well of it. Pretty good, but is it just having Read A Lot that made one character look like a honking parade of red flags?

On the go

I think I am actually giving up on I Am A Woman, I don't think Being A Sad Lesbian is enough to provide a rounded character? Maybe it gets better?

Nibbling at various things. Realise that it is 2 weeks to next Pilgrimage discussion and I do not want to read Honeycomb too far in advance.

Up next

No idea.

Am still being harried by spam from those dodgy-sounding conferences of very little relevance to my actual interests, happening in v attractive places:

International Conference on Time Series and Forecasting (ITISE 2026) (wot is this even), Gran Canaria (Spain).

6th Current Issues in Business and Economic Studies (CIBES) Conference at the University of Valencia.

13th International Congress of Gynaecology and Obstetrics (okay, is brushing somewhere in the region of Stuff I Have Worked On?) in Kyoto.

But really, YOY?

A new twist on this has appeared via my shiny new academic email address: really weird journals giving themselves out as academic that sound totally synthetic -

Journal of High Speed Networks (not as far as I can see associated with even one of the less esteemed academic journal publishers):

a forum in which researchers from academia and industry can address a wide range of topics related to high performance networking and communication and report findings on concepts; state of the art, emerging standards and technologies; implementations; running experiments; applications; and industrial case studies. Coverage can range from design to practical experiences with operational high performance/speed networks including communication network architectures; evolutionary networking protocols, services, and architectures; and network security.

As, I suspect, is this one:

Invitation to Join Mesopotamian Journal of AI in Healthcare (MJAIH) Editorial Board. - there is in fact a website for the Mesopotamian Academic Press (I see they also publish Babylonian Journals of this and that.

Even without the complete mismatch to my actual realms of expertise here I am sceptical about this enterprise.