Joan's Journal

After reading the introduction to Scott's The Talisman, I was kind of like ... Whoa Richard the Lionheart was somewhat horrible? I only knew about him previously from like. Robin Hood. And Ivanhoe, which is almost the same thing. (In retrospect it's not surprising that these sources were not very reliable.)

Now that I've read a bunch of articles on Wikipedia I know that historians debate, but he is widely considered arguably a bad king and not great guy, although definitely a very good warrior and general. And he did punish anti-semitic rioters one time. But other than that, there's little to be said for him except that his brother John was worse.

Scott was a fan, but his introduction doesn't really have any more to say in his favor, just basically: He was brave! and He was super into the Crusade! The latter may argue for his emotions and conviction of purpose, but I can't count it as a positive overall.

All that said, clearly people are not reading The Talisman, or there would be way more Richard I/Saladin on AO3.

Well, guys, last fall when I was having a nervous breakdown my doctor was having some trouble finding a good medication to prescribe to help me sleep, and she landed on mirtazapine, which is actually an antidepressant, but has a strong history of off-label use as a sleep aid.

You can take half a pill or a quarter of a pill, something like that, at bedtime, my doctor said, and hopefully this will help you sleep. And this medication has a weird curve where it acts differently at high doses and if you want you can take a full tablet in the morning as a mood lifter. (This is all paraphrased.)

I tried a half-tablet of mirtazapine for insomnia last fall at one point, and found it made it very hard to wake up the next day. I quickly switched to quarter tablets and even eighth tablets, on a tip from the pharmacist ("Many people find an eighth works even better than a quarter"). I never took this every night, and gradually got out of the habit because I have mostly not been having much insomnia and my greater concern is how hard it is to wake up in the morning.

So until yesterday I actually never had taken a whole tablet, but I started thinking maybe I should try it recently. I have been feeling some of that weird ADHD-understimulation where it's like your brain itches, but all the things I tried to read or look at or draw didn't help and it still felt kind of... boring. I don't really like the term 'boredom' in this explanation for that reason, but all the information I can find about ADHD understimulation emphasizes it and most of it is about taking things you like to do along when you have to sit through boring lectures etc which is not what's going on for me at all (and which I have already been doing my whole life). Reading is my silver-bullet distraction that always works. Maybe the problem is that understimulation isn't really what's going on.

But anyway! Yesterday I decided to give it a try. So I took one tablet with my meds after breakfast and then I just. Got very sleepy inside like half an hour and slept for... five hours, and then woke up from hunger and only managed to stay up long enough to eat a banana and two pieces of toast before falling back asleep for another five hours. I ate the dinner Wax made and managed to sit there half awake for a couple of hours before going to bed and sleeping another twelve hours.

It's like the day is just gone!

I accidentally deleted the last William Morris book in my to-reread list from my phone and never got around to sending it back.

I started Walter Scott's The Talisman, because it's one of his few novels set in the middle ages, but there's some racism that's hard to swallow. There is a major Kurdish character, a knight under Saladin, who is... friends? With our Norman Scottish protagonist. The portrayal is not unsympathetic. I think Scott is doing his best to be even-handed, but like Catholicism, Islam just seems factually wrong and evil etc etc to him, and its adherents who are good guys are unfortunately misled. It's... hard to read. In retrospect, I'm surprised by how much he didn't dislike Judaism, in comparison.

Also started The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany. I read this as a teenager but remembered nothing. The narrative voice is quaint and charming. It's not really gripping me though.

No progress in Le Morte d'Arthur (Malory) or The Idylls of the King (Tennyson). The latter is more readable, comparatively, but I just don't really like reading verse. Also I did make some progress in The Faerie Queene (Spenser), and one verse narrative at a time is plenty.

Speaking of verse narratives, I still haven't made any more progress in the Wilson translation of Seneca's plays. (But the translations aren't in verse!) I might just have to skip Oedipus. I hate him for some reason.

I guess now I should actually reread all of Murderbot again, since I can't remember all the details and the show is starting to air. That should be comparatively quick though! I have the last Katherine Addison waiting and haven't gotten around to picking it up.

With all these things that I'm feeling decidedly unenthused about, I instead read the whole part of Jordanes' ancient history of the Goths that deals with wars with Asian invaders and then the entirety of Hervor's/Heidrek's saga, including the ancient poem called The Battle of the Goths and the Huns. (This is the only surviving medieval saga that deals with Gothic tribes in mainland Europe, and Jordanes' is the only other ancient source with relevance to Morris's The Roots of the Mountains.) I had made all the posts about that book which I had in mind when reading it, but yesterday I found a link on Tumblr to these two great essays about the context, history, and implications of the racism of Tolkien orcs/goblins by James Mendez Hodes (he doesn't mention Morris/ROTM or the specific borrowing from Jordanes alleged in Seaman's introduction to ROTM, but these links in the chain are immaterial to the argument): Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror. content warnings: racism, colonialism/imperialism, cultural conflation, sexism, sexual violence, anger & Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part II: They're Not Human. These essays totally opened my eyes to a missing link in my understanding of the background of the racist portrayal of the Dusky Men - one I wouldn't have missed if I'd reread Said's Orientalism, which I probably should've. The gender aspect of the ROTM Huns is riffing on the extreme cultural openness and intermarriage habits of the Mongols, whose invasions were much later - 13th century, long after the christianization and settlement of the germanic tribes and the fall of the Roman empire. (More on the Mongols' real culture and the stereotypes in western culture surrounding them in his posts!) So that gives me something else to research. Maybe I actually will eventually form a coherent theory of what is going on with all the gender roles in this book!