The seas will never run dry, my dear

[sovay]

It is astonishing to me how much energy I don't have these days. I had to visit a clinic for bloodwork yesterday and I was just useless for the rest of the day. I finished watching Turn: Washington's Spies (2014–17), which I have enjoyed and generally recommend even though the first season doesn't find its footing until the finale and the fourth season should really have been a fourth and fifth (it was surprisingly valuable for my formative experience of narrative TV to have been Babylon 5, is what I'm saying). I graduated from envying most of the cast their waistcoats to envying some people their actual coats. Quite unfairly, I then slept badly, had one of the worst nightmares I can remember in months, and woke with a jaw-wrenching headache. Today has mostly been work. Have some links.

1. I would love to see the rest of the series of orixás this combination of photography and drawing belongs to: Tauan Carmo and Tiago Sant'ana, "Oxum—A Rainha das águas doces."

2. I wouldn't mind knowing where this bog trail is located, either, but I love how the water lies over the boardwalk.

3. This is such a mythic poem with such matter-of-fact roots, which I enjoy: L. K., "Old Flame."

4. Because it is suddenly September and I have to make honeycakes soon, I feel everyone should appreciate this flowchart of the Jewish holidays. "Is there a horn?" "Tekiah!"

5. I love these photographs of ocean so much. They make me hungry. I went to the photographer's website and found the sailing expedition to Antarctica they came from. I would like that much of snow and sea and seals in my life. I would like to be able to travel again.

Comments

[brigdh]

Gorgeous photo of the bog trail! Do you know about the Corlea Trackway? It's a wooden road that was built through a bog in Iron Age Ireland, but which sank before the water after only a few years. There's a theory that the effort of construction was a deliberate sacrifice, since there's no reason to believe the builders weren't quite aware that anything built on a bog sinks quickly.

I really need to watch Turn. I read the book it was based on (which is entirely nonfiction, oddly enough), and I've got a project going about NYC during the American Revolution, and yet I still haven't gotten around to it!

[sovay]

Do you know about the Corlea Trackway? It's a wooden road that was built through a bog in Iron Age Ireland, but which sank before the water after only a few years.

I've read about it, but I'd never heard the theory of the construction itself as a sacrifice, and I love that concept.

I read the book it was based on (which is entirely nonfiction, oddly enough), and I've got a project going about NYC during the American Revolution, and yet I still haven't gotten around to it!

I really liked it! I will now proceed to provide a pile of caveats! The first season is narratively clunkier, morally more black-and-white, and rather more AMERICA!!! than I consider either necessary or ideal, but there are complicating elements present from the start and it comes into its own just in time for the season finale; the second and third seasons are almost exponentially better on all planes of characterization and emotional-historical complexity, eventually assuming the deep, hard edges of late eighteenth-century le Carré; the fourth season visibly suffers from having to pack the plot in with a crowbar before cancellation and therefore while it ends well, it ends fast, and although it contains some of my favorite character material all show, it also loses track of some things it really should have known better about. Assume a close AU relationship with history. Some of the characters are historical and portrayed faithfully; some characters are historical and imaginatively elaborated; some characters are pure inventions; some kind of shift between categories. Some of the most random plot coupons turn out to be historically attested, the dialogue was written by people making a visible effort to balance between period flavor and contemporary understanding, and although colonial America is not my field of specialty, I got the impression that a whole bunch of social mores just went by the wayside because otherwise the writers wouldn't have been able to tell the kinds of stories they wanted and I always have mixed feelings about that approach, even though from a purely storytelling perspective, it yields some barn-burners of character development. The show gets some of its best results, however, when people remember to think like their time, especially when it's jarring. The time-jumps are utterly unpredictable. Never mind the compression of the fourth season, we lose the entirety of 1779 behind the couch somewhere in season three and no one even seems to notice. The acting on all fronts is splendid and especially early on is the thing that carries the show. I actually started watching it for Burn Gorman, otherwise known as the disaster astronomer mentioned a couple weeks back; he got the most satisfying arc in the series for me and was a pleasure to watch no matter what he was doing in the meantime; but it's a solid ensemble show and everyone gets some chance to shine. I have not read the book and probably should, just so I know what everyone was really doing between 1776 and 1781.