What are you reading, watching and listening to? - All languages

[linguistcat]

I honestly hadn't heard of Robin Hobb ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Not that that says anything about how famous or not she is

[Raphael]

Neither had I.

[Salmoneus]

She's the world's greatest fantasy novelist!


I wouldn't say it's "remarkable" not to have read her. But I would say she's on The List of fantasy authors whose works it's hard to be a fantasy fan online and not be pushed toward. If someone wants to read the most-read, most-recommended modern-ish epic(-ish) fantasy authors, Robin Hobb is surely on their radar. She's presumably not the #1 on that list - I guess GRRM is, and then probably Pratchett, but I don't know who would be third if not Hobb.

The Wertzone list is a great resource the community should be thankful for, but he himself admits it's extremely patchy - it's based on random, out-of-date, out-of-context press statements and (in recent lists) the occasional helpful publisher giving him a number. Iirc, Hobb's sales figures in particular are noted as totally unreliable. I mean, she's certainly not a mega-bestseller like Martin, Pratchett, Jordan, etc, but she's much more read than those numbers suggest.

In fact looking at the page... for the most recent list, he updated her figure to 7.5m (just under sales of, for example, The Handmaid's Tale) and still noted that these were very old figures and probably very understated.

I tried looking up goodreads ratings numbers as a rough proxy for popularity, but these are dramatically skewed by recency: sure, more people read recent books, but that effect is drowned by the fact that more people bother rating recent books. Also, factors that I simply don't understand that are probably to do with the internetsavvyness and GR-y-ness of the fanbases. However, it's worth noting that Hobb's first book has more ratings than the first books by Abercrombie or Lynch, which are more recent and would generally, I think, still be considered giants of the genre. [Albeit they're all dwarfed by Rothfuss, or (surprisingly) Sarah Maas]

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Anyway: Assassin's Apprentice is likeable, but I think she becomes a much better writer over time. Although, admittedly, gradually a less accessible, mass-audience writer.

[zompist]

I finished Leave it to Psmith by PG Wodehouse, the best crime novel I've read in the English language.

Haven't read that in years, but it's my favorite Wodehouse novel. The Jeeves novels can be fun, but idiot protagonists are a little too British for me.

Is there some relation between Psmith stories and some of Stephen Fry's comedy sketches?

Surely, the fact that every British comic grew up reading Wodehouse.

You might be interested in Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller, which is both a comic novel and a spy novel. Laurie was Fry's longtime partner in sketch comedy.

[Vijay]

In general, you can be pretty sure that I haven't heard of any given famous person or thing.

Listening to (and watching a video of) a song in Shina called "Morek The Ne." Shina is mainly spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, but also in parts of Jammu and Kashmir on the other side of the border:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Omj-SrKa_ss

[alynnidalar]

Anyway: Assassin's Apprentice is likeable, but I think she becomes a much better writer over time. Although, admittedly, gradually a less accessible, mass-audience writer.

Ha, and here I was worrying I'd be pilloried if I confessed I didn't like the Farseer Trilogy all that much. It was good enough that I happily read all three books, but when I finished them I had very little desire to return to the world or writer. Perhaps I would like her later books more. (or perhaps not. She wouldn't be the first renowned author who just isn't my cup of tea, despite writing the sort of thing I otherwise enjoy...)

[Salmoneus]

Anyway: Assassin's Apprentice is likeable, but I think she becomes a much better writer over time. Although, admittedly, gradually a less accessible, mass-audience writer.

Ha, and here I was worrying I'd be pilloried if I confessed I didn't like the Farseer Trilogy all that much. It was good enough that I happily read all three books, but when I finished them I had very little desire to return to the world or writer. Perhaps I would like her later books more. (or perhaps not. She wouldn't be the first renowned author who just isn't my cup of tea, despite writing the sort of thing I otherwise enjoy...)

It may depend on why you didn't like them.

I think I'd distinguish three main reasons people have for not liking them: quality, style, and content.

In terms of quality, I think AA is slightly rough, particularly at the start, as she tries to work out a new style and voice (under her previous/alternative name, she wrote modern urban fantasies). I think the next two books are better, but the third suffers from a bad pacing issue in its second half. I think in terms of technical ability, both prose and structure, she becomes better and better from then on.

In terms of style, Hobb is... well, she's generally reflective, interested in characters and relationships, quite a lot of internal thought processes, quite a bit about social norms and duties - a bit Victorian, in that sense. She can write great action sequences, but she's mostly a slow-paced writer who only uses action as occasional punctuation. The really important bits are usually intensely emotively-charged but restrained conversations. Over time, she actually becomes more like this, rather than less - Farseer is probably as action-packed as it gets. She's also a very confrontational author: she's constantly undermining expectations and refusing to give her readers what they think they want, and even recontextualising what they think they knew. One of my favourite demonstrations of this is the difference between Farseer and The Tawny Man - in the latter trilogy, we return to a Fitz who is not just a couple of decades older than the protagonist of Farseer, but also older than the narrator of Farseer, and he's pretty scathing about the naivity of the earlier character - not just the naivity of his actions, which the original narrator points out, but the naivity of the worldview that the character shares with that narrator, and by extension the reader of the earlier trilogy. The early trilogy lures us into seeing through the eyes of a teenage boy and his twenty-something older wiser self, and then the second trilogy has a more paternal thirty-something version of the same guy (and HIS some-years-later, older wiser narrator in turn) pointing out how stupid we all were to accept what that foolish boy was thinking at face value...

And speaking of Fitz, the content: the two big objections to the content of Farseer are usually that a) we see everything through the eyes of Fitz, a teenage boy whom many people don't like; and b) lots of unhappiness occurs.

Regarding the second: this remains true in all her books. Farseer isn't the happiest, but it's certainly not the unhappiest either. Hobb has depression, and although she usually has happy endings, sort of, and moments of elation along the way, most of her books have a sort of background atmosphere of tragedy, and most of the protagonists are put through the wringer quite heavily.

Regarding the first, however: there are three Fitz trilogies, and although Fitz changes considerably over time, he's still always Fitz. And we always see everything in the world through his biased, depressive, paranoid, intense, and ignorant eyes.

Alongside those, however, there's a trilogy and tetralogy set in the same world without Fitz, and a trilogy set in a different world. I haven't read the latter, which is her least popular work. But both the trilogy (Liveships) and the tetralogy (Rain Wild Chronicles) abandon the single perspective, and are massively multiple-POV affairs. It means we don't get to know and love anyone as closely and strongly as we know and love Fitz... but for people who hate Fitz (and there are lots), that's a good thing. You're more likely to find a protagonist you like, and more likely to get to explicitly see different perspectives on things.


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I'll just give a quick stylistic summary, if anyone's interesting in trying any:

The Farseer Trilogy: closest to a conventional epic fantasy, with an angsty teenage boy as Our Hero (though he's actually mostly just around while other people do the heroism, and also he murders people for the government). Wolves and true love and the demands of duty, and training and growing up and viking raids. Essential for the two later Fitz trilogies. Warm, intense, painful.

The Liveship Traders: probably the most ambitious, in a way. It remainds me of some Victorian family saga - a dozen protagonists, across multiple locations, a family business in decline, clash between cultures, revolutionary sentiments, social change, and also sea monsters and a dragon and pirates and talking ships. It's kind of, I think, an exploration of the nature of womanhood, as most of the protagonists are women who try to explore different roles to deal with the dangerous world around them - so there's a dutiful wife, a matriarch, a tomboy, a spoiled prom queen type, a prostitute, an imperial concubine, a female dragon and so on, plus some of the men and boys around them. Including a fantastic villain (weirdly, her only great villain - villains are her achilles' heel...). A warning: while it's less angsty than Farseer, quite a few characters experience, are under threat of, or have in the past experienced rape, and indeed a lot of the thematic content is about cycles of abuse and different ways people try to heal from pain and abuse. It's mostly not graphic (indeed, it's mostly not even described directly) but it may be too hard-edged for some readers to be comfortable with. You don't have to have read Farseer first. Basically, if you haven't read Farseer, you miss out on hints about one character's backstory, you have even less understanding of their motivations than everyone else (but to be fair, it's intentionally never entirely clear anyway), and you don't understand one in-joke. Anyway, it's I think a better series than Farseer, but it is also colder and more distant - there are more characters, none of them 100% admirable, and it's third-person narration.

The Tawny Man: sequel to Farseer. The protagonist is older, wiser, and more traumatised than before. It's less about being a teenage boy, and more about being a father, or at least having fatherly feelings. It's better, but slower, than Farseer. You pretty much need to have read Farseer. You don't have to have read Liveships. It does help, both in giving a general context and in explaining who some tangentially-encountered character are and what they're doing. But it's not necessary - the essential backstory is provided explicitly by the characters, and if you don't recognise some minor characters, nor does the narrator, and don't worry, they really are minor.

The Rain Wild Chronicles: mostly starts from scratch. There's a more YA-ish slant, with a handful of teenage protagonists - but there's a group, and the lead protagonist is female, and nobody is a child assassin, so it feels quite different from Farseer. With themes of growing up and of (literal as well as metaphorical) exploration, it feels the freshest and most optimistic of the series, although there are certainly some tragedies along the way. The pacing's a bit weird because it was designed as two books, each of which has been broken in half in a rather ungainly way. You don't have to have read Farseer, or The Tawny Man (the latter helps very, very slightly). You don't HAVE to have read Liveships, but it is set in the aftermath of that series, in the same part of the world, so it helps. And then some characters from Liveships arrive in the second half of the series - you don't NEED to know who they are in advance because it is explained, but their appearance will mean more to you if you do. Personally, I think it's the weakest of the four series, but it does have its virtues. Also: probably the ONLY epic fantasy series I've read featuring a thrilling action scene in which one of the protagonists is in labour...

The Fitz and the Fool: sequel to Tawny Man. Fitz is older, more self-aware. Perhaps the most divisive of the series, not just for what happens in it, but also because her style is most unapologetic: very slow, intense, incredibly emotional, deliberate, closest of the series to being 'literary'. When it's good, it's fantastic. I really don't like the ending (not for the reasons other fans don't like it, but because I think it's too ideologically depressed). Fitz's battle against mental health problems is more explicit. An interesting element is that narration is now split between Fitz and a new character (about whom we can only pray we get more series in future...), so we finally get to see Fitz and his worldview from 'the outside', as it were. You need to have read both Farseer and Tawny Man. You don't NEED to have read Liveships or RWC, but characters from both appear in the final novel, and so it would probably really, really help if you have.



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...sorry. Hobb's one of my favourite writers.

[rotting bones]

I've only read The Farseer Trilogy, and that was a long time ago.

Fate Matrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzte-Fxz8I8 (AMV)
Chand Dekhte Giye Ami: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOjzdqTk7zw (Bengali)
Buddhu Bhutum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4q5pv1_cqw (Bengali. Used to hear this on the radio in primary school.)
Hell's Gate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyArAQvrKIM (AMV)
Katyusha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yl-DvkX0hY (Girls und Panzer)

I'm reading Zizek's Sex and the Failed Absolute. The basic idea is that the world essentially consists of para-mathematical abstractions, but the space of abstractions is prevented from achieving any kind of perfect unity by a "material" void. For example, it was thought in classical atomism that a void is required in order to give atoms a space to move and thereby align into novel configurations. Similarly, the space of para-mathematical abstractions is traversed by a "void" that makes contingent interconnections between ideas possible. This act of negating absolute necessity opens a (nevertheless limited) space for free thinking within an otherwise Platonic universe. This freedom is identified with Marxist "antagonism". The various classes see reality in different ways. It is possible for some of the views that are proposed to be objectively wrong, but that is usually the fault of particular theorists. In the final analysis, none of the basic, mutually contradictory approaches that are put forward are ultimately "right". There are all contingent, potentially correct ways of assembling the space of ideas.

Zizek prefers to approach politics through the topic of sexual tension. Immanuel Kant says that Reason as understood by (primarily Leibnizian) idealism runs into antinomies or relativisms in trying to provide a complete description of the world. The dynamic antinomies say that Reason is unable to decide whether or not there are exceptions to the order of the world. Namely, whether or not there are "spontaneous" exceptions to deterministic causality (Bohmian mechanics versus the Copenhagen interpretation), whether or not there is a necessary entity of some sort within the world or beyond it (theism versus atheism), etc. These dynamic antinomies are a negative point of contact with the noumenal Sublime, of whose positive content we can have no knowledge. How does that work? The Rational Being is confronted by neighbors with immensely greater worldly might than his own, money, health, wealth, and so on, or he feels on the point of being blown away by a natural disaster like a storm. But with the dynamic antinomies in mind, he feels the supernatural weight of moral principles that transcend the order of the natural world. Thus he is enabled to think of natural might as insignificant and sacrifices his material body to uphold the moral law. Zizek says that this is the fundamental gesture of the masculine subject. Kant says that we can never know with positive certainty whether we are following the moral law or being driven by pathological desires for worldly goods. Accordingly, a man is always trying to prove, even if minimally, that he is a man. In para-Freudian terms, a man acts as though the world is lawful (castration anxiety), but there is an exception to this rule whose existence is ambiguous (moral principles, women, the primordial father, Pan, Dionysus of The Bacchae, Casanova, Don Giovanni, Krishna of the eternal Raas Leela).

However, masculinity is not pure subjectivity, only a derivative of femininity. According to Kant, the mathematical antinomies say that Reason is constitutionally unable to ascertain the extent of the world. Namely, whether or not the world is infinite in extent (multiverse theories), whether or not the world is composed of elements of finite size (analytic philosophy calls the various possibilities junk, gunk and hunk: search plato.stanford.edu for these terms), etc. Zizek argues that the mathematical antinomies are an alternative negative point of contact with the transcendental Sublime. The Rational Being is confronted with a mass of immense size that, for one's tiny material body, appears impossible to shift. However, Reason presents the mind with the idea of an object exactly like the one present before the senses, except literally infinite in extent. Comparing the immovable object with actual infinity, the Rational Being sizes up sensuous reality, responds, "Is that all?" and sacrifices oneself rather than bending before natural might. Zizek says that this is the fundamental gesture of the feminine subject. A woman whose spirit hasn't been broken treats any sensuous antagonism as a dubious limitation. ("What, the world is on fire? Who gives a shit? I'll show the world what fire is!") She is always trying to overcome any boundaries that Master figures try to place on her in the form of social roles or biological natures. This coincides with the aims of feminism by supporting women in their quest to lose their traditional chains along with the benefits it may have compensated them with according to Chesterton. In para-Freudian terms, a woman acts as though nothing in the world measures up to its immanent infinity (non-all), while at the same time ambiguously admitting that nothing is free from subjection to the law (castration anxiety).

Because femininity understands the transcendence of nature in the terms supplied by the world, not as moral principles insisting from beyond, femininity is pure subjectivity that does not rely on the perception of external objects such as "principles". Because castration anxiety is experienced as ambient noise in femininity while it constitutes the foremost experience of masculinity, masculinity is a mere paper tiger that has been contingently cut out from the radicalism immanent in the feminine subject. Men are constitutionally terrified of being "unmanned" somehow. Eg. This is why some men are threatened by women who outperform us in our own field. Men are inherently cowards who put on an act of bravado to prove to others, especially to imaginary ideologies, sometimes pathetically conceived of as subjects, to women and a wide variety of Casanova figures, that we are not the cowards we undeniably are.

This fear of being unmanned is the basis for deriving "metaphysical" precedence in the Ljubljana school. In what sense is any of this metaphysical? In the sense of letting us trace the contours of the the transcendental Sublime by connecting the dots of what is presented to our consciousness as impossible. ("Being a man and going out in public wearing a bikini? Impossible!" as an intervention of principle versus women freely accepting that they look amazing in this getup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPE0n8mtD_Q) Kant himself argues that masculinity is Sublime in the sense articulated above regarding the dynamic antinomies, but he says femininity is merely beautiful (silly, pretty, unserious). The Ljubljana school merely disagrees by insisting that sexuality is itself Sublime. Also, there is no noumenal world. Kant produces his conclusions by analyzing the gap between the sensuous world and noumenal reality. The Ljubljana school says that there is a void immanent to the Platonic realm dividing it from within. This void is what functions as the "gap" in place of the boundary between phenomena and noumena. After all, we can know nothing positive about noumena anyway, and Kant's philosophy positively depends on us being ignorant of what they are. We lose nothing by doing away with them altogether. In fact, we end up with a more elegant and consistent "metaphysics".

Inspired by Hegel (somehow, I have never found these traces of subtlety that Zizek locates in Hegel), this void cutting across the Platonic realm is identified by the Ljubljana school as the absolute Real, the radical negativity that is subjectively apparent with metaphysical (Sublime) necessity in all objective processes. The further we move from the void towards positive entities by removing aspects of its negativity, the shakier, more virtual or "simulated" becomes the character of entities we end up with. This is because the negativity of pure difference or antagonism contingently specializes out of itself the positive entities between which it (radical negativity) constitutes the difference. In sexuality, the most dubious of these existential wagers is the brutish stupidity that is masculinity, with its ultra-fragile ego and unspecifiable "principles". ("I'm a man because I follow principles, but don't ask me what those could be. I said don't question my manliness!") From masculinity, we can move up the ladder of Sublimity towards more foundational entities. By adding one negation operator, we go from man to the "not man". The "not men" are women, the source which specialized a segment of itself into fragile masculinity. We can go another step by adding another negation operator, from "not men" to "not not men", the realm of difference preceding femininity. Unlike in classical logic, but like in many other logics such as intuitionistic logic, the two negations don't cancel out. The "not not men" are not merely "not men" either, but the "unmanned" beings that fragile masculinity is so terrified of ending up in the company of, loosely the LGBTQ+ community. It is difficult to distinguish which aspects of the community further negations correspond to.

This means that, at the furthest level we can distinguish, the radical negativity that adheres to all objective processes is immanent in sexuality in the form of the LGBTQ+ community. This absolute of pure difference specializes a segment of itself into the first positively identifiable but still radical subjectivity of women. Women still contain within themselves the purity of the original difference, and thus specializes a segment of itself into the unqualified stupidity of men, eternally worried about not being men and relying on nonexistent external "principles" to prove their manliness to a fundamentally indifferent world. It's here that we run into problems with queer theory. I would wager that Zizek thinks something above femininity can be a distinct gender, but it cannot be a distinct form of subjectivity characterized by a unique experience of the Sublime derived from failing to resist the power of nature. The LGBTQ+ status corresponds to an inability to commit to either the masculine or feminine form of sexual tension. I think Zizek fails to be fully himself here. He himself admits that the connection between society/biology and the experience of the Sublime is radically contingent, not "metaphysically" necessary in the traditional sense. Therefore, there is no reason to base commitment on totality. Even if only two forms of subjectivity are possible, it is entirely conceivable for a Rational Being to commit fully to some case-wise combination of the two. It is also conceivable that someone's biological sex is uncorrelated with their "transcendental" Sublime. This is more difficult because "transcendental" sexuality is also shaped by how someone is treated by society. Nevertheless, radical contingency means that none of these possibilities are ruled out in principle.

I have only read this far till now. Thoughts?

(Actually the derivation proceeds in two directions. The Real itself is virtual from the standpoint of phenomena. I have left out those complications to streamline the argument.)

Edit: "as though nothing in the world measures up to its immanent infinity" is closer to the original than "as though there is something in the world that transcends finitude".

[rotting bones]

zompist: Thanks, I'll add it to the pile.

[Vijay]

Watching a short documentary video called "Wilting Flowers, Fading Songs: DOCUMENTING a vanishing culture from the Western Himalayas" in which native speakers of Shina from Ladakh, known in Tibetan as "Brokpa," sing in their language and talk about their culture and traditional religion and how it's endangered:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdB-ZIbp64c

[Nortaneous]

Hvit Ulv - Belyj Volk

White Wolf But In Probably Fake Norse - White Wolf But In Russian

[Vijay]

This is a song in Burushaski, which is spoken in Kashmir (almost entirely in Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan but also by a few hundred people in Jammu and Kashmir). It's from seven years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-KyeNuFIjc

[Birdlang]

Since I make music I was listening to demos of Sound Canvas VA synth software. I use this software myself as well as others, but none of these are mine.
https://youtu.be/nc1qATZFUqM
https://youtu.be/HkDNV5v_6yY
https://youtu.be/b7eLG_qhuNY
https://youtu.be/3D1tle5_hTQ
https://youtu.be/WZyeO8Q8W3I
https://youtu.be/1iiIvKC3Ux8
https://youtu.be/54K29Bg9u_c
https://youtu.be/8D_ccyBJe-s
https://youtu.be/tl-pKmxUMxQ
https://youtu.be/ahddPyTVb40
https://youtu.be/Rv700QB0Be0
If you play 90’s video games or listen to 90’s or 2000’s Indonesian music (latter like me) you will recognize these sounds.

[Vijay]

Wakhi is a Pamiri language spoken in the Wakhan district in northern Afghanistan, in Gorno-Badakhshan in Tajikistan, in Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan, and in Xinjiang, China. This is a song in Wakhi with the lyrics (in Roman script) in the subtitles, apparently from Gilgit-Baltistan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaptNKw1azE

[Birdlang]

These songs. What language are they in?
https://youtu.be/yKIbofRhjzU
https://youtu.be/Iv5WfSWWuQo
https://youtu.be/eiJFCUJ81d4
https://youtu.be/r3LB4H_Tc0I
It’s not Tetun.
For context, these songs are from East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, and performed in a pop style with traditional sounding synths.

[Xwtek]

I heard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0SGm2dA2_g&t=154s

Warlpiri language is extraordinarily verbose and quickly spoken.

[akam chinjir]

That's awesome, Xwtek.

I wish it were easier to find substantial recordings of transcribed speech in arbitrary languages. (Or that I was better at finding them.)

[Vijay]

These songs. What language are they in?
https://youtu.be/yKIbofRhjzU
https://youtu.be/Iv5WfSWWuQo
https://youtu.be/eiJFCUJ81d4
https://youtu.be/r3LB4H_Tc0I
It’s not Tetun.
For context, these songs are from East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, and performed in a pop style with traditional sounding synths.

I'll venture a guess that the first one is in Uab Meto and the other three are in Helong.

Pothwari/Pahari-Pothwari/Potwari/Pothohari/Potohari is a language that's transitional between Hindko and Standard Punjabi and spoken in Azad Kashmir and northern Punjab. This particular song, "Nahin Aaya" by Raja Ajaz Parvez, was performed in northern Punjab, specifically Rawalpindi:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd_rPOt0aJU

[quinterbeck]

These songs. What language are they in?
https://youtu.be/yKIbofRhjzU

I listened to this song once, and now it's in my head and I'm constantly singing Oh he le le le le le le around the place, dammit

[Raphael]

Today I finished Matt Parker's Humble PI, a mostly delightful book about mathematical errors that had serious real-life consequences. (The parts that are not delightful are the ones about mathematical errors that actually killed people.) Interestingly, it's the first book in quite a while that I not only started but finished, too. Also interestingly, although I've just read it, I already find it a bit difficult to name specific anecdotes from it. I guess this might have to do with that whole "People remember things in context" thing that I've heard so much about.