#noah charney

[shamebats]

Tragically accurate I'm afraid

[stromuprisahat]

What if...

Grisha tradition of burning their dead stems from otkazat'sya belief in vampires?

Excerpt uses "vampire" and "werewolf" interchangeably.

All the villagers gather with hawthorn stakes (for he only fears a hawthorn stake – a saying goes ‘let him find hawthorn and madder on his way’, because hawthorn grows above madder), and then they open the coffin. If they find a man who did not decompose, they run the stakes through him, throw the remains into a fire and let it burn. They say that sometimes they’ll find a werewolf who grew fat, bloated and rubicund with human blood (a saying goes ‘red as a vampire’). A werewolf might visit his wife, especially if she is pretty and young, to sleep with her and they also say that a child conceived with a werewolf would be born without bones. In times of hunger, a werewolf is often seen around mills, wheat and corn reserves.

The Slavic Myths- Vampires (Noah Charney, Svetlana Slapšak) quoting Vuk Karadžić, Srpski rječnik

What if thanks to their connection to the Making, it takes longer for the decomposition to settle, so Grisha burn their dead to prevent desecration and suspicion of vampirism? Especially since that might implicate the deceased's family.

Peter’s death in 1725 was followed by the sudden deaths of nine other people over the course of eight days – each of whom had appeared ill for less than a single day. Several of the victims claimed before dying that Peter had appeared in their rooms and choked them. His wife, too, claimed that he had visited her after his death and requested his shoes. She moved to another village to escape him, but Peter’s son then claimed that he had returned to his house and demanded food. The son had refused, and soon afterwards he became Peter’s next victim.

The Slavic Myths- Vampires (Noah Charney, Svetlana Slapšak)

Again- this aspect of the myth is shared with Slavic "werewolf"

‘But what happened to the village? Where is the rest of your family?’ She looked like she was crying but shed no tears. ‘It is horrible,’ she began. ‘And it is Father’s fault.’ ‘You mean that Gorča lives?’ ‘Oh, no,’ she continued. ‘He is well and truly buried. A stake driven through his heart. But he drained the blood of Đorđe’s son, as you will recall.’ ‘Yes, I’m so sorry. We buried him the day I left.’ ‘Indeed. So you can imagine our surprise when he came back the next night, crying at the window, calling to his mother, saying he was cold and wanted to come in. This was before Đorđe returned from the forest, where he had chased our father. You cannot blame the child’s mother. She may have seen him buried with her own eyes, but it was only hours earlier. We all thought that he had been deemed dead prematurely and, most horribly, buried alive. But he had managed to burst out of his coffin and clear the earth above him. So, of course, she invited him in. No sooner did he cross the threshold than he attacked her and drained her blood. Petar managed to scare him off and he fled to the woods, running on all fours. His mother was buried soon afterwards. For a while.’

The Slavic Myths-At Stake (Noah Charney, Svetlana Slapšak)

Better to burn the corpse immediately, than risk both the trauma of watching one's beloved's remains dragged out of their grave AND face the angry mob, who believes they're banishing future threat.

[iklees]

The Art Thief / Noah Charney

Uit een kerk in Rome wordt een Annunziata van Caravaggio gestolen en uit het depot van de Malevich Society in Parijs, één van diens 'wit op wit' schilderijen. In Londen koopt de National Gallery of Modern Art op een veiling bij Christie's een Malevich, die kort daarna ook wordt gestolen, net als een ander — onbekend — schilderij dat op diezelfde veiling is gekocht door een particulier. Gespecialiseerde rechercheurs van resp. de Sureté en Scotland Yard doen, los van elkaar onderzoek, en hebben niet door hoe alles met elkaar samenhangt.

Een irritant boek. De plot is ingenieus, maar het is verschrikkelijk slecht geschreven. Zinnen zoals "[She] sat on the edge of her desk, arms crossed, looking unamused and wearing a black suit." De personages zijn plat, op het karikaturale af.

"What we need," said Bizot, "is a Bible … uh … what's it called when everything's linked up, you know, so you can look up one word and find all the examples … " "A dictionary?" Lesgourges looked confused. "No, not a dictionary. You know, where it lists … " "A thesaurus?" "No! Have you ever heard of a Bible thesaurus? What's the … we need a dictionary to look up the word for dictionary … ah! That's it, a concordance." "Oh, right." On the table next to the computer sat a framed black-and-white photograph of Lesgourges, with a full head of hair, his arms slung around a young woman. The photo frame was dustless. Lesgourges manipulated the keyboard with one hyperextended finger at a time. "Now what do we do?" asked Bizot. "We can just type in a passage name and number, and it will find it for us?" "We'll never need to open a book again. What shall I enter?" "Delacloche suggested that CH could be the abbreviation for the book of Chronicles. But 347 sounds like too many numbers for a chapter or verse. We should try all the combinations, and see if any of the passages make sense. Try," Bizot considered, "Chronicles, chapter 3, verse 4." Lesgourges typed, and the screen stirred to action.

En die erudiete Franse kunstkenners proberen dan eerst 3:4, 3:7 en zelfs 4:7, terwijl iedereen met een beetje bijbelkennis weet dat 3:47 of 34:7 de meeste logische opties zijn… Waar ze hoe dan ook géén concordantie voor nodig hebben.

[kammartinez]

Caucasian Wingnut, Brooklyn Botanic Garden II 2011 (Mitch Epstein / Sikkema Jenkins & Co.) (Mitch Epstein / Sikkema Jenkins & Co.)

Silent observers of our lives, trees are on most peoples’ radar only at moments of transition or death: We mark springtime’s budding and autumn’s flamboyance; note somberly the tree felled by a storm or by the tiny, ravenous ash borer. Although emblematic of nature, they nonetheless are seen with the goggles of our human-centered vision, and thus barely seen at all.

With a rush of popular fiction and nonfiction on the sociality of trees, we are starting to recognize the extent of what we’re missing. Whether the simplest details—the plain fact of their presence more below ground than above it—or the awareness of their constant inter-arboreal communications, trees have officially entered our contemporary awareness as more than just a background to our human dramas.

Trees and tree colonies—including an 80,000-year-old grove of aspens in Utah—are among the oldest living things on Earth. There is wisdom in longevity, if only we knew how to listen to it. What, for example, would tortoises and bowhead whales have to say about what they’ve seen over a century? The typical way of “reading” trees for their knowledge used to be to fell them: In the rings bared at the gash, the years of drought, the years of sickness, the years of plenty are plainly visible.

Two new books, by Noah Charney and Tristan Gooley, take a less destructive approach and present us with trees on their own terms, before turning to what they have to say about the state of nature today and our place in it. Neither author is making the single claim that your life, your brain, and your mood will improve if only you immerse yourself in the natural world, as is so often touted. Although surely concerned about climate change, they also avoid presenting their books as primers in how to treat the Earth better. Instead, they advocate for something more radical: the simple expansiveness of becoming a “citizen of nature,” literate in a world to which we have all but closed our minds.

Both authors are keen seers—sometimes seeing the same signs—but their desires differ: to know the past or to find yourself in the present. In Charney’s These Trees Tell a Story, he takes the reader with him to 10 wild landscapes, treating each as a constellation of clues that give us a lens into the site’s history. Gooley’s How to Read a Tree also ambles in the woods, deconstructing the meaning of the size, shape, location, and shadow of each tree for the sake, merely, of knowing trees.

Charney, an assistant professor of conservation biology at the University of Maine, presents his book as a kind of multi-modal jigsaw puzzle, where each piece is capable of telling a small story on its own, and a larger story when combined with the pieces around it. Retracing field trips to sites across New England that he took with the students in his “Field Naturalist” course, each chapter of These Trees Tell a Story opens with photos of these varied puzzle pieces: an insect-damaged leaf, a fallen log, an animal footprint, a cut stem. Each, read closely, is a clue to the history of the place up to the moment before Charney and his students arrived at it.

He’s an amiable host, and soon the reader realizes we’re following the stream of consciousness of an ecologist driven by extraordinary zeal. Charney is the kind of fellow who shimmies into the foot-wide opening of an old beaver lodge to sit inside its muck-and-stick sanctum; who lived one summer in college in a wigwam in the woods, navigating to it at night by its smell. His stroller-age children are brought along and implicated in many of his explorations (and used in photographs for scale).

Charney sees the details of a landscape less for their aesthetic qualities than for their contributions to the record of a place. He connects the seemingly unrelated, showing how salamanders in the Northern Hemisphere can trace their existence to a fluke of plate tectonics; how a meandering river has created a staircase along an embankment; and the effect of deer on mice, who in turn affect the spongy moth and oak trees, which in turn affect the deer. The cumulative effect of his book on the reader is the realization that, as much as we talk about “managing” nature, nature has been managing itself for eons just fine without us. The constituents of what we might see as a simple plot of land (including the slopes and the sphagnum) have a history and complicated existence that is completely independent of us.                                           

How to Read a Tree, by contrast (and befitting its title), looks at the trees, not the forest—and looks assiduously at each part of those trees: bark, trunk, roots, and so on. The U.K.-based Gooley is renowned for his skill in practical geography, or “natural navigation,” which is on display in each of his several books about reading nature’s signs.

Out tumble reams of appealing facts that make one itch to get outside and right up close to the rough surfaces and shady cover. Are, indeed, most of the knobby eyes on a tree facing southward? Are the thickest roots typically on the windward sides? And how could I confirm his claim, borrowed from Leonardo da Vinci’s musings, that the thickness of all of a tree’s lowest branches and twigs combined equals the thickness of its trunk?

Although clearly besotted, Gooley is no romantic, reminding us repeatedly to think of the successful tree’s selfish genes, which prompt them to elbow out smaller trees reaching for the light—or even poison their neighbors. But the bevy of detail he presents does prompt “a quiet joy rising in your sap”: the satisfaction of simply seeing something in plain sight that was previously overlooked. Charney’s book inclines one more toward the pleasure of realizing the depth of the story that is being told by the environment, without taking us into account at all. As Richard Powers wrote in The Overstory, “This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.” Charney would agree, I think—although he might also point out the ways humans have left our mark on the landscape. As much wilderness as it may appear still surrounds us, it all bears scars of the “disturbance,” to use the authors’ term, of our presence: including the logging, the land denuded, the species extinguished, the invasive species released. Quietly optimistic, Charney takes the long view, pronouncing the idea of perfectly stable, balanced nature as a mirage. Nature is dynamic, self-disturbing. Seeing the effects of our contribution, though, might allow us to fit ourselves back into nature.

As strong as the authorial voices in these books are, after reading them, one senses the human voice fading and the voice of the trees rising. In ethology, the science of studying animal behavior that I practice, one gradually learns to strip away the human descriptions that we instinctively place on our subjects, and to stop talking of their lives in terms of our own. The idea is not that nonhuman animals are entirely unlike us, but that the glancing attention we usually give to them disables our ability to see who they really are. We walk into nature, similarly, sure that we understand the categories of objects found there, our gaze dismissive as we plod along the path. What if, Charney and Gooley hint, we instead go off the trail, linger, and listen?

It feels ironic perhaps that we gain these insights about trees via the words printed on the dried, pressed, macerated pulp of trees. Nonetheless, we would be lucky to be lost in a forest with either of these writers. Not just to find our way out—something they could surely help with—but to find our way in: to see what the trees are telling us about the Earth we all find ourselves a part of.

[kamreadsandrecs]

Caucasian Wingnut, Brooklyn Botanic Garden II 2011 (Mitch Epstein / Sikkema Jenkins & Co.) (Mitch Epstein / Sikkema Jenkins & Co.)

Silent observers of our lives, trees are on most peoples’ radar only at moments of transition or death: We mark springtime’s budding and autumn’s flamboyance; note somberly the tree felled by a storm or by the tiny, ravenous ash borer. Although emblematic of nature, they nonetheless are seen with the goggles of our human-centered vision, and thus barely seen at all.

With a rush of popular fiction and nonfiction on the sociality of trees, we are starting to recognize the extent of what we’re missing. Whether the simplest details—the plain fact of their presence more below ground than above it—or the awareness of their constant inter-arboreal communications, trees have officially entered our contemporary awareness as more than just a background to our human dramas.

Trees and tree colonies—including an 80,000-year-old grove of aspens in Utah—are among the oldest living things on Earth. There is wisdom in longevity, if only we knew how to listen to it. What, for example, would tortoises and bowhead whales have to say about what they’ve seen over a century? The typical way of “reading” trees for their knowledge used to be to fell them: In the rings bared at the gash, the years of drought, the years of sickness, the years of plenty are plainly visible.

Two new books, by Noah Charney and Tristan Gooley, take a less destructive approach and present us with trees on their own terms, before turning to what they have to say about the state of nature today and our place in it. Neither author is making the single claim that your life, your brain, and your mood will improve if only you immerse yourself in the natural world, as is so often touted. Although surely concerned about climate change, they also avoid presenting their books as primers in how to treat the Earth better. Instead, they advocate for something more radical: the simple expansiveness of becoming a “citizen of nature,” literate in a world to which we have all but closed our minds.

Both authors are keen seers—sometimes seeing the same signs—but their desires differ: to know the past or to find yourself in the present. In Charney’s These Trees Tell a Story, he takes the reader with him to 10 wild landscapes, treating each as a constellation of clues that give us a lens into the site’s history. Gooley’s How to Read a Tree also ambles in the woods, deconstructing the meaning of the size, shape, location, and shadow of each tree for the sake, merely, of knowing trees.

Charney, an assistant professor of conservation biology at the University of Maine, presents his book as a kind of multi-modal jigsaw puzzle, where each piece is capable of telling a small story on its own, and a larger story when combined with the pieces around it. Retracing field trips to sites across New England that he took with the students in his “Field Naturalist” course, each chapter of These Trees Tell a Story opens with photos of these varied puzzle pieces: an insect-damaged leaf, a fallen log, an animal footprint, a cut stem. Each, read closely, is a clue to the history of the place up to the moment before Charney and his students arrived at it.

He’s an amiable host, and soon the reader realizes we’re following the stream of consciousness of an ecologist driven by extraordinary zeal. Charney is the kind of fellow who shimmies into the foot-wide opening of an old beaver lodge to sit inside its muck-and-stick sanctum; who lived one summer in college in a wigwam in the woods, navigating to it at night by its smell. His stroller-age children are brought along and implicated in many of his explorations (and used in photographs for scale).

Charney sees the details of a landscape less for their aesthetic qualities than for their contributions to the record of a place. He connects the seemingly unrelated, showing how salamanders in the Northern Hemisphere can trace their existence to a fluke of plate tectonics; how a meandering river has created a staircase along an embankment; and the effect of deer on mice, who in turn affect the spongy moth and oak trees, which in turn affect the deer. The cumulative effect of his book on the reader is the realization that, as much as we talk about “managing” nature, nature has been managing itself for eons just fine without us. The constituents of what we might see as a simple plot of land (including the slopes and the sphagnum) have a history and complicated existence that is completely independent of us.                                           

How to Read a Tree, by contrast (and befitting its title), looks at the trees, not the forest—and looks assiduously at each part of those trees: bark, trunk, roots, and so on. The U.K.-based Gooley is renowned for his skill in practical geography, or “natural navigation,” which is on display in each of his several books about reading nature’s signs.

Out tumble reams of appealing facts that make one itch to get outside and right up close to the rough surfaces and shady cover. Are, indeed, most of the knobby eyes on a tree facing southward? Are the thickest roots typically on the windward sides? And how could I confirm his claim, borrowed from Leonardo da Vinci’s musings, that the thickness of all of a tree’s lowest branches and twigs combined equals the thickness of its trunk?

Although clearly besotted, Gooley is no romantic, reminding us repeatedly to think of the successful tree’s selfish genes, which prompt them to elbow out smaller trees reaching for the light—or even poison their neighbors. But the bevy of detail he presents does prompt “a quiet joy rising in your sap”: the satisfaction of simply seeing something in plain sight that was previously overlooked. Charney’s book inclines one more toward the pleasure of realizing the depth of the story that is being told by the environment, without taking us into account at all. As Richard Powers wrote in The Overstory, “This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.” Charney would agree, I think—although he might also point out the ways humans have left our mark on the landscape. As much wilderness as it may appear still surrounds us, it all bears scars of the “disturbance,” to use the authors’ term, of our presence: including the logging, the land denuded, the species extinguished, the invasive species released. Quietly optimistic, Charney takes the long view, pronouncing the idea of perfectly stable, balanced nature as a mirage. Nature is dynamic, self-disturbing. Seeing the effects of our contribution, though, might allow us to fit ourselves back into nature.

As strong as the authorial voices in these books are, after reading them, one senses the human voice fading and the voice of the trees rising. In ethology, the science of studying animal behavior that I practice, one gradually learns to strip away the human descriptions that we instinctively place on our subjects, and to stop talking of their lives in terms of our own. The idea is not that nonhuman animals are entirely unlike us, but that the glancing attention we usually give to them disables our ability to see who they really are. We walk into nature, similarly, sure that we understand the categories of objects found there, our gaze dismissive as we plod along the path. What if, Charney and Gooley hint, we instead go off the trail, linger, and listen?

It feels ironic perhaps that we gain these insights about trees via the words printed on the dried, pressed, macerated pulp of trees. Nonetheless, we would be lucky to be lost in a forest with either of these writers. Not just to find our way out—something they could surely help with—but to find our way in: to see what the trees are telling us about the Earth we all find ourselves a part of.

[whencyclopedia]

From the artwork to its theft and role in popular culture, the critically-acclaimed book The Thefts of the Mona Lisa provides the complete story of this work of art, as written by a bestselling, Pulitzer finalist author Noah Charney. Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait, called the Mona Lisa, is without doubt the world’s most famous painting. It achieved its fame not only because it is a remarkable example of Renaissance portraiture, created by an acclaimed artistic and scientific genius, but because of its criminal history. The Mona Lisa (also called La Gioconda or La Joconde) was stolen on 21 August 1911 by an Italian, Vincenzo Peruggia. Peruggia was under the mistaken impression that the Mona Lisa had been stolen from Italy during the Napoleonic era, and he wished to take back for Italy one of his country’s greatest treasures. His successful theft of the painting from the Louvre, the farcical manhunt that followed, and Peruggia’s subsequent trial in Florence were highly publicized, sparking the attention of the international media, and catapulting an already admired painting into stratospheric heights of fame. This book reveals the art and criminal history of the Mona Lisa. Charney examines the criminal biography of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, with a focus on separating fact from fiction in the story of what is not only the most famous art heist in history, but which is the single most famous theft of all time. In the process he delves into Leonardo’s creation of the Mona Lisa, discusses why it is so famous, and investigates two other events in its history of theft and renown. First, it examines the so-called “affaire des statuettes,” in which Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire were arrested under suspicion of involvement in the theft of the Mona Lisa. Second, there has long been a question as to whether the Nazis stole the Mona Lisa during the Second World War LEARN MORE --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIn9aY3GUh0

[jezzzebel]

dude if you havent you should read The Slavic Myths by Noah Charney and Svetlana Slapšak, its a really really good combination of folk stories and then analysis and background information about them. its really deeply researched and interesting, can verify as a slav myself. also doesnt completely ignore the existence of southern slavs, which is really refreshing to see. you should rlly check it out if youre interested in learning about slavic folklore and history and connecting with ur roots ect

Hi there fella! First things first, i love your username lol /g

I don't think i have ever read that book! Svetlana Slapšak is a very familiar name to me... I remember hearing of her but IDK where.

Thank you so much for the recommendation! You intrigued me so much haha now i am definitely gonna read it!! :D the south slav erasure is something i really hate so i am happy to see a book that actually acknowledges us!!

Is it available on pdf??

[wintersongstress]

get to know me

tagged by my beloved, talented, beautiful, and heartwarming friend @rivetingrosie4 thank you dear 💕🫂🌹

favorite color: purple. a dark, moody, gothic romantic eggplant shade.

last song: Teqkilla by M.I.A.

currently reading: Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art by Noah Charney. Learning about a lot of cool female artists I hadn't known of before. Art history is my true love, I think.

currently watching: Overboard (1987).

currently craving: coconut ice cream

coffee or tea: tea. I drink black tea and add almond milk creamer to it everyday and that does it for me 😋

booping (no pressure) : @uhlunaro // @vault21 // @sternbagel // @a-shakespearean-in-paris // @hollytanaka // @weltraum-vaquero

[bermudianabroad]

2023 Reading Roundup

Everything what I read in 2023

I read a whole bunch.

Heartily Recommend Visceral Bleh Reread *Audiobook*

Fiction

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (where is the fucking humidity in your swamp, Delia??)

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

Lot by Bryan Washington

Mr. Loverman by Bernadine Evaristo

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas

Trust by Hernan Diaz

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

The Unquiet Dead by Ausma Zehanat Khan

It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantell (but everyone is called Thomas)

Verity by Colleen Hoover (awful but wacky and hilariously awful)

Katalin Street by Magda Szabo

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Animorphs #24 The Suspicion by KA Applegate (a trip)

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

The Island of Forgetting by Jasmine Sealy

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

The Trio by Johanna Hedman

At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid

The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera

Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge

Silence by Shusaku Endo

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

Babel by RF Kuang (was so disappointed by this one)

The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld

Island by Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen

The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles by Giorgio Bassani

Must I Go by Yiyun Li

The 1,000 Year Old Boy by Ross Welford

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker Chan

Ariadne by Jennifer Saint

The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel

Memphis by Tara M Stringfellow

The Whirlpool by Jane Urquhart

Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert

A Country of Eternal Light by Paul Dalgarno

Yellowface by RF Kuang

The Country of Others by Leïla Slimani

The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

Game Misconduct by Ari Baran

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Uprooted by Naomi Novik (sorry Naomi :/ )

The Foot of the Cherry Tree by Ali Parker

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Matrix by Lauren Groff

The Twilight World by Werner Herzog

Wild by Kristen Hannah

*The Fraud by Zadie Smith*

The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham (weirdly, one of the best depictions of a marriage I’ve read)

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Against the Loveless World by Susan Abdulhawa

North Woods by Daniel Mason

Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather

The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

Animorphs: The Hork-Bajir Chronicles by KA Applegate

Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri

Animorphs #13 The Change by KA Applegate

Animorphs #14 The Unknown by KA Applegate

Animorphs #20 The Discovery by KA Applegate (snuck in two more under the wire… #20 is when shit REALLY kicks off. From there it gets darker and darker).

Poetry

Black Cat Bone by John Burnside

Women of the Harlen Renaissance (Anthology) by Various

The Analog Sea Review no. 4 by Various

The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy

Non-Fiction

Besieged: Life Under Fire on a Sarajevo Street by Barbara Demick

Atlas of Abandoned Places by Oliver Smith

Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

Wanderers: A History of Women Walking by Kerri Andrews

City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London by Vic Gatrell

The Lazarus Heist: From Hollywood to High Finance by Geoff White (fully available as a podcast)

The Entangling Net: Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Women Tell Their Stories by Leslie Leyland Fields (very niche but fascinating. Transcribed interviews)

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi

Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir by Lamya H.

Freedom by Margaret Atwood (just excerpts from novels repackaged)

*Born a Crime by Trevor Noah* (Noah’s narration is superb)

The Slavic Myths by Noah Charney and Svetlana Slapšak (was expecting stories, but it was mostly academic essays)

Manga, Comics, Graphic Novels

Safe Area Goražde by Joe Sacco

The Way of the House-Husband, vol. 1 by Kousuke Oono

SAGA vol. 1-6 by Fiona Staples and Brian K Vaughan

Top of the Top:

Born a Crime was probably my favourite non ficition, and most of that probably is due to Trevor Noah's narration skills. It was very entertaining and heartfelt.

Less uplifting but just as gripping in a different way was Empire of Pain. Excellent book that went deep into the why and what and hows of Purdue Pharma. Anger inducing.

Lazarus Heist is great and available as a podcast. The book is more or less the podcast word for word.

Fictionwise: I read Trust at the start of the year and it was a bit soon to declare as favourite of the year, but it's stil made the final cut. Just very imaginative and intriguing. Just my kind of MetaFiction. Clever without being cleverclever.

Demon Copperhead I read right off the back of Empire of Pain so maybe that coloured my experience. I've not read any Dickens so loads of references no doubt flew past me, but the language was acrobatic and zingy. I loved it.

Wrapped up the year on a high with North Woods. That was so unexpected and entertaining. Again with the playful language, memorable characters and a unique approach to tying all the various stories together. One that sticks in the mind and makes the writer in me wonder how I can replicate his style (with my own personal twist of course.)

[yesterdaysanswers]

Thanks for tagging me @umi-no-ko 🥰

Get to know me better

Favourite colour: blue/turquoise

Currently reading: The Museum of Lost Art by Noah Charney

Last song: I listened to Battisti's Anima latina while falling asleep last night, but I have no idea when I actually fell asleep

Last movie: Benecio Del Toro's Pinocchio

Sweet/Savory/Spicy: sweet and savory, I don't care for too much heat

Currently working on: nothing specific other than learning Italian and trying to read more in Italian.

I tag @eddie-rifff and @sarvyle if you want to!

[copperbadge]

It's wild to me how many people in the notes are saying they thought or hoped the theft would involve repatriation.

I'm not saying that to scold, it's a logical extension of the awareness that so much of what's in the British Museum is looted, but as someone who has spent some time researching and studying art theft, the thought never crossed my mind. The vast majority of art theft (particularly from museums) is linked, initially or eventually, to organized crime. I'll talk a little about it below, but for reference much of my knowledge of this comes from Noah Charney, who has written essays and books as well as lecturing extensively on the topic.

There have been rumors for a while that there are a number of wealthy people in China who have commissioned thefts of Chinese antiquities from Western collections in order to bring looted artefacts home. I've got no value judgement to make on that, it's a complicated issue, and in any case I'm not sure if it's true or weird anti-Chinese propaganda, but if true it's very uncommon. The theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911 was because Vincenzo Peruggia wanted to "repatriate" it to Italy (it actually was given to Francis I by Leonardo da Vinci when he moved to France). There are a few other examples of politically-motivated thefts, but not generally repatriation-related, and mostly by people who are mentally unwell.

Most art theft is either the result of someone thinking they can cash in on a visible security gap, or is stolen because it can be used in criminal enterprises. Often the former becomes the latter when the thief realizes they can't sell a hot painting. Most often, they stand in for a cash deposit on a high-level drug deal. Sometimes, the paintings are stolen and deliberately safeguarded as a bargaining chip against future arrests. Or, more often, they're stolen because they can be ransomed back or returned-for-reward for more money than they'd get selling the hot painting to a private collector. Dicey business but the people who do this are generally career criminals accustomed to the risk.

It's really fun and makes for an interesting fictional narrative to imagine a curator slowly stealing an entire museum's artefact collection to repatriate it, but the reality is that if you read about an art theft, that's almost certainly not what's happening. I generally recommend against giving anyone robbing a museum the benefit of the doubt. For one thing, you can't legally repatriate stolen goods, so who exactly are they giving the objects "back" to? And for another, there are a lot of museum staff who are genuinely passionate about ensuring the integrity of their collection, about fighting with boards and governing bodies to get the objects back where they should be, and doing it in a legal way, while this dickhead appears to have just wanted pizza money or something.

Art thieves in fiction can be suave, sexy, noble, or romantic; art thieves in reality are usually traffickers and drug dealers who would throw a priceless artefact into the ocean to destroy the evidence if they thought the cops were coming.

Mind you, if this guy's goal was to sneakily devastate the security reputation of the British Museum and make it difficult to hold onto all the loot, then I guess he got the job done.

Meant to link this sooner but life briefly got away from me -- tl;dr it was discovered last month that over 1500 ancient artefacts were stolen from the British Museum by a senior museum curator. Who has been selling them on eBay for years. (Allegedly. And possibly the museum knew about it much earlier and covered it up, given he was dismissed earlier this year; the theft was actually uncovered by someone who linked the curator's twitter and ebay accounts.)

Lots of talk these past two weeks about how this does not give the museum much of a leg to stand on the next time it tries to assert it's a better caretaker of Greek antiquities than, well, Greece. The marbles being returned in our lifetime is a stronger possibility than ever.

Been a bad year for the museum, aside from the blessing of my presence there in April...

[shamebats]

'The Vampyre' lived on, turned into a hit stage play and innumerable spinoffs and alternative versions, but always largely maintaining the idea of the vampire as aristocrat. In short, the popular literary form of the vampire has always been based on Lord Byron himself, a serial 'devourer' of women. The sexual aspect of vampires as incubi – men who come to your bedside in the night and suck on you, ingesting your bodily fluid – seemed to hold great appeal for Victorian readers.

Some say it was the first trend in literature that was truly for the girls & the gays

[stromuprisahat]

When you start reading a book on Slavic myths, written by Slavic-looking names, who live in another Slavic country, but you find famous names in your language written wrong...

[teachanarchy]

This person isn't actually screaming - Noah Charney

[me-encontre-no-museu]

O Ladrão de Arte - Noah Charney

Noah Charney é formado em história e mestre em História da Arte e tem uma longa obra literária sobre crimes de arte. Até o momento, O Ladrão de Arte, publicado no Brasil pela Editora Intrínseca, é seu único romance.

Como uma adoradora de romances de mistério (passei minha adolescência percorrendo a obra da Agatha Christie, livro a livro) fui logo atraída para O Ladrão de Arte. O livro atravessa museus, coleções particulares, casas de leilão e falsificações. Todos temas que Charney aborda em sua obra de não ficção.

O ponto de partida do livro de uma pintura em uma Igreja em Roma. Em seguida, somos transportados a Paris, onde uma pintura desaparece em uma sociedade voltada a preservação da obra de um pintor russo. Essa obra acaba numa casa de leilões e de lá para uma galeria de arte moderna em Londres, de onde é roubada. De novo.

Mesmo andando com dificuldade para ler e demorando muito mais tempo do que costumava para ler um livro do mesmo tamanho, nesse caso minha leitura fluiu fácil. Apesar disso, senti que em alguns momentos havia muitos personagens e que era difícil se relacionar com eles. Acho que houve do autor uma tentativa de apresentar personagens "imperfeitos", em muitos pontos até chatos e até uma ênfase na aparência estética desses personagens. Não sei se o autor pretendia contrapor a beleza ou a ausência dela nos personagens a uma beleza que ficaria restrita às obras de arte.

Meus personagens favoritos foram, sem dúvida, os dois Jeans: o inspetor francês e seu fiel amigo. Senti que deram ao livro um tanto de leveza. Além do mais, não consigo não gostar de alguém que valorize tanto comida quando eles dois.

Senti uma certa confusão com alguns pontos conforme se aproximava o final e acho que isso pode ter sido consequência da já comentada quantidade de personagens ou de uma tentativa muito grande do autor de apresentar uma solução inesperada. As três histórias se cruzam ao longo do livro e era óbvio que a solução do mistério seria conjunta também.

Nenhum dos investigadores é um Poirot ou uma Miss Marple, inclusive referenciada no livro, mas considero de que dentro do que o autor apresenta, o desfecho é satisfatório.

CHARNEY, Noah. O Ladrão de Arte. Rio de Janeiro: Intrínseca, 2008. 320 p.

[whencyclopedia]

The Slavic Myths

The Slavic Myths, by the historian Noah Charney and the anthropologist and historian Svetlana Slapšak, is a wonderfully written and beautifully illustrated book delving into various Slavic myths, gods, and supernatural figures as well as the histories behind them. The Slavic Myths contains eight chapters and The Slav Epic, a cycle of 20 canvases by the Czech artist Alphonse Mucha depicting Czech and Slavic mythologies. Each chapter includes a new retelling of a myth, reimagined by the two authors, followed by a section on the history of the myth and numerous important features within it. This is not a compilation of everything we know about Slavic mythology. Instead, the seven hand-picked stories accompanied by accessible academic analysis allow readers, whether they are well-versed in Slavic myth or brand new to the corpus of tales, to enjoy the stories and, if they wish, develop their understanding of the myths and history further. Readers of The Slavic Myths can read the book from cover to cover, or they can jump in and just read a chapter at a time; similarly, they can stick to the compelling reimaginings of the chosen myth or dive into the historical analysis of each section. Either way, with the book being a combination of retelling and non-fiction, it can be enjoyed by all.

Continue reading...