Saturday, December 31, 2022

Books read 2022

2022 wasn’t a particularly book-filled year for me. I read 35 books, which is fewer than in any year since 2017. That makes 237 books read since the start of 2018. But I’ll jump straight in with the mini-reviews.


Bridget Collins, The Betrayals

I certainly wasn’t expecting my first book of the year to be as good as this. Hermann-Hesse-inspired with touches of Gormenghast, and with a hissing and sizzling romantic tension throughout. Just incredibly good reading.


Private Eye Annual 2021


Good to see the Private Eye keeping up its satire efforts through the continuing pandemic.


Samuel Isaacson, The Altimer


A choose-your-own-adventure book - the first of those to have featured here in a while! Fun and well-constructed sci-fi narrative around a space mission gone wrong. Sometimes you get punished for apparently innocuous choices, such as opening a door cautiously rather than incautiously. And the chances of getting to the end without dying and having to restart are pretty much nil - but that does give it more replay value.


Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind


Much-recommended fantasy novel. Reads a bit like the story of someone trying to level up in all the D&D classes at once. Hardly mould-breaking, but definitely enjoyable. Extra note: either Kuang’s Poppy War (read last year) is derivative of this book, or both are derivative of something else, because the setup of the academy/university is very, very similar.


Stephen Booth, The Kill Call


Another murder mystery set in the Peak District, this time even closer to home for me. The characterization shines through in this book in a way it didn’t in Scared to Live, but the plot feels more disjointed, without much in the way of tension.


Albert C. Baugh & Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language (6th edition)


I don’t think there’s much excuse for anyone to be using this book to teach from in 2022. It has undergone expansions and changes over the years, but the result is incoherence and contradiction: for instance, there’s a nuanced debunking of outdated ideas about parataxis and hypotaxis on pp63-64, but the myth is then repeated on p238. It’s replete with long lists of borrowed words, and some weird sidebars (e.g. discussion of the early history of transformational grammar in the mid-20th century, in the chapter on American English). In view of the widespread availability of more up-to-date, pedagogically sounder alternatives, it should probably be used only for its historical interest.


Franco Moretti, The Way of the World


A book about the Bildungsroman, its core features, and the development of the genre. I read this as part of a project on reading the history of English as a Bildungsroman. It’s persuasive, but in that odd way that works of literary theory often are, with an accumulation of erudition and verbiage leading to a conclusion rather than anything that would normally qualify as argumentation.


The Dragon of Icespire Peak


This is by far the least interesting D&D adventure I’ve taken a look at. It seems like it’s just a collection of sidequests, with no real plot or coherence. The encounters look well-crafted, but that on its own isn’t enough to make me want to put characters through this. Perhaps it can be cannibalized for other adventures.


Jack Kerouac, On the Road


For the first two thirds of this book, I just despised the protagonists, Sal and Dean and all the rest. In the last third that was mingled with no small amount of pity. I think I was expecting something more life-affirming than pathetic, but it certainly has powerful moments. Perhaps it’d mean more if I’d been to any of the places in the book.


Erin Morgenstern, Starless Sea


This odd, dreamlike book is both derivative and very cosy/cutesy - circumventing both of these criticisms in a way by leaning into them. It’s fun and nicely written, but oddly paced. Enjoyable rather than life-changing.


The Dark Crystal Adventure Game


A beautifully designed and produced volume - it’s a shame that care didn’t extend to the proofreading, where there are lots of errors, some of which impede comprehension. I’d love to play a game of this some time, though I have concerns about the gameplay dynamics: getting less effective as you’re injured, while realistic, might hamper fun, and acquiring skills looks to be very expensive in terms of experience (“guess I’ll hang on to two sessions’ worth of experience in case I run into a random NPC”). There’s lots of thoughtful world-building.


Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet


I was expecting this to be good pop linguistics, and was also forewarned that it contains good linguistics in general. It’s both of those things: clearly and engagingly written, and the new proposals - e.g. emoji as analogous to gesture - are convincingly argued for. It’s also a trip down memory lane. My favourite chapter was the one taxonomizing different approaches to using the internet, in which I learned that I’m an Old Internet Person, having cut my teeth on Usenet, forums, MUDs and hand-coded HTML in the mid-nineties (though within this group I’m a comparative spring chicken). It’s fitting that this review will be posted on my blog, which has been in continuous operation since 2004.


Peter Hartmann, Zur Lage der Linguistik in der BRD


This little book is an overview of the state of linguistics in (West) Germany in the years leading up to 1972. Reading it exactly 50 years later is as interesting for what hasn’t changed as for what has; in particular, the fact that German linguistics is still structured around philologies, Lehrstühle, and other such silliness is really inexcusable given that people were rightly criticizing this setup fifty years ago. Hartmann’s prose isn’t exactly scintillating, and the book is most valuable for its little tables describing the situation at different universities.


Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You


Powerful novel about being an Asian American in the 1970s US. Tragic, pessimistic and compelling.


Giorgio Francesco Arcadia & Bianca Basciano, Chinese Linguistics: An Introduction


Reading this taught me a lot of stuff, including that I knew more about Chinese linguistics than I thought. It’d be fun to try to teach a course from it some time. On the minus side, the structure is sometimes a bit random and there are a lot of infelicities of English (“as e.g.” throughout).


Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun


After a fantasy novel, Ishiguro now turns his hand to cyberpunk/sci-fi. Though nothing about the plot is hugely original, this is a touching story about loneliness and grief.


Bertolt Brecht, Der kaukasische Kreidekreis


Not what I was expecting - an irreverent, fairytale-style story set in Georgia. Would like to see it on stage some time.


Ian Roberts & Anna Roussou, Syntactic change: a Minimalist approach to grammaticalization


Re-read, first time since 2009. Like many books known for one claim (“grammaticalization is upward reanalysis”), this book is a lot richer than one remembers. Lots of case studies, mostly from Indo-European (especially Germanic, Romance and Greek), but some from beyond. And interesting proposal at the end about the nature of functional categories.


Monsters of the Multiverse


It’s a D&D sourcebook. It has lots of revised classes in it, and a compendium of new and revised monsters. Fun.


Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: how the powerful took over identity politics (and everything else)


This book is a lot less cynical than the title suggests. Táíwò makes the case that identity politics has indeed been co-opted by a capitalist elite, but that this is more or less unsurprising, given that these elites tend to get their hands on everything in exactly this way. Thus elite involvement (while it should be resisted) isn’t a reason to discard the identity-politics enterprise out of hand. Instead, Táíwò suggests that we need to reject “deference epistemology” - a folksy version of standpoint epistemology that demands that we constantly defer to whoever in the room comes out poorest in the privilege calculus. As he points out, this approach neglects the far more important question of who is “in the room” in the first place, and why.


Tim Clare, Coward


I’m tempted to say that this book isn’t for the faint of heart, but actually that’s exactly who it’s for. Clare, normally a fantasy author, takes us through the research around anxiety and panic with a masterful hand. I was expecting a book by a fiction-writer on this topic to be more introspective and less… well-researched? But there’s no doubt he’s done his homework. As well as personally trying everything from CBT and SSRIs to transcranial stimulation and psychedelics, he’s spoken to a dozen leading researchers from around the world. The message I took away from it, with caution, was that many treatments appear to function only in a small subset of anxiety-sufferers - and that suggests (to me at least) that what we call anxiety is actually a myriad of disorders with different aetiologies but very similar symptoms, remaining to be better understood as time goes on.


Thomas Piketty, A brief history of inequality


As Piketty explains in the intro, this is his attempt to write a shorter, more readable book condensing the key ideas of his weightier tomes. It succeeds in that, and, just as when I read Capital, I’m impressed at Piketty’s combination of rich data and humanistic explanatory thinking. More than that, he actually offers concrete proposals for solutions to many problems - mostly amounting to “tax the rich more”, which I’m all in favour of. He does subscribe to a notion of historical progress along specific dimensions, but he doesn’t do so in the aggressively self-congratulatory Pinkerite way, and he’s at pains to point out where that progress has been rolled back in many cases since 1980.


Spelljammer: Adventures in Space


Another D&D sourcebook! This one includes a fantastic adventure, nice and epic and linear, that I will probably run for friends soon.


Carl Zuckmayer, Des Teufels General


Come for the Saxon genitive, stay for the 1946 exploration of loyalty, honour and morality under a fascist regime. This seems to be one of those plays that I can’t really imagine being any good when staged, but which makes for great reading. I also can’t imagine how incendiary this would have been when it came out.


Wu Cheng’en, Monkey King (Journey to the West), trans. Julia Lovell


Another of the four great Chinese novels. This one is just completely insane, and Lovell’s translation is fast-paced, quirky and inventive. My favourite bit is when two male characters get pregnant and need to resolve the situation.


Phil Sidebottom, Pecsætna: People of the Anglo-Saxon Peak District


I was expecting this to be less scholarly, but it’s a full academic treatment by an archaeologist who knows what he’s talking about. Lots of the book is unavoidably speculative, but there are some intriguing suggestions, such as the idea that the area was populated by Britons with a tiny elite of Germanic-speaking overlords, that it changed hands between Mercia, Northumbria and ultimately Wessex too, and that it was later settled by Hiberno-Norse speakers in small numbers. Unfortunately, with the textual record being what it is, we won’t likely be able to learn more that way. And I’m not sure why the author gives so much weight to the geological properties of the limestone White Peak area; why would this correlate with a political or ethnic unit?


Hilda Koopman, The syntax of verbs: from verb movement rules in the Kru languages to Universal Grammar


Written at the height of early Principles & Parameters, this is a cool study of Vata and Gbadi, two languages of West Africa, with interesting things to say about the theory of verb movement in particular - but also verb-second and more.


Manfred Braunger, Blutroter Bodensee: ein Fall für Kommissar Zoffinger


Another in the series of crime novels set in places I’m familiar with. This is not a very good book. Information is released to the reader piecemeal, chapter by chapter, and the consequences of that information are resolved within the same chapter, so there’s never much incentive to read on. And the book also trades on “ooh, Southern and Eastern Europeans are scary” in a way that I find pretty distasteful.


Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei


Some light bedtime reading.


Peter Auer & Karl Joos, Kleiner Seealemannischer Wortschatz gehoben auf Konstanzer Grund


A little dialect dictionary. (More precisely an “Idiotikon” - a list of words that are different in this dialect.”) Auer put this together based on Karl Joos’s PhD thesis from the 1920s, and it’s also got some cute illustrations. Not normally one to read cover to cover, but it’d be nice to blend in a little more with the locals…


Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: how they rise, why they succeed, how they fall


This is a cogent argument that Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Mobutu, Gaddafi, Pinochet, Putin and Trump (and others) constitute a natural class, a category of personalist strongman rulers whose hallmarks are ethnonationalism, corruption, violence, and the projection of an image of virility. While it’s convincing on that point, I’d have liked to see more on what can be done about them.


Greta Thunberg, No one is too small to make a difference


Thunberg is one of the most fascinating figures of our time - a kind of modern-day Martin Luther, except that rather than 95 theses she has only one: listen to the scientists and stop emissions. This tiny book contains eleven short speeches that make this point over and over again. It’s not encouraging and certainly not comfortable, but certainly necessary. You won’t learn much from it (the details of the science are not the focus), but if it spurs some people to get off their arses and do something, it’s served its purpose.


Elly van Gelderen, Third factors in language variation and change


Keep an eye out for my review of this one in English Language & Linguistics!


Private Eye Annual 2022


It comes round again. 2022 was not an easy year to satirize British politics - and this annual doesn’t even get as far as Liz Truss’s departure from office and the Queen’s death.


James Turner, Philology: the forgotten origins of the modern humanities


A wide-ranging and clearly written history of the humanities, minus its philosophical side. I found it odd that two thirds of the book is devoted to the nineteenth century - precisely the point at which individual disciplines were beginning to hive off from philology and go their own way. Relatedly (and perhaps even because of this) I wasn’t convinced that philology was as unified, and as distinct from philosophy, pre-1800 as Turner implies; it doesn’t do the development of thinking on language justice, at least. And I’m not convinced that the humanities are better off without their disciplinary boundaries, as Turner seems to suggest in the epilogue. But chapter 9 on linguistics, which focuses on Max Müller and William Dwight Whitney, is fun (though a bit partisan in favour of Whitney, in my view).

Friday, December 30, 2022

Review of 2022

The Blue Lagoon in Malta.

What did you do in 2022 that you'd never done before?

Published a textbook (Open Access, no less). Put two refugees from Ukraine up long-term in my flat. Had all four wisdom teeth out. Hosted ETG in Konstanz.


The cast of ETG 2022 (Hamlet) at the Unitheater in Konstanz.


Did you keep your New Years' resolutions?

I resolved to pay more attention to my health. On the one hand, I guess I did this, since I went and got things checked out at the doctor and the dentist more often. On the other hand, my lifestyle isn’t much healthier, if at all.


Have you any resolutions for next year?

No. (And why is there inversion with “have” here? Very archaic.)


Did anyone close to you give birth?

Not as far as I know.


Did anyone close to you die?

Also not as far as I know.


What countries did you visit?

The UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Malta, Vatican City, Liechtenstein, Austria, Andorra, Denmark.


What would you like to have in 2023 that you lacked in 2022?

More free time. And, since I’m on research leave from April, hopefully this one will actually come true.


What date(s) from 2022 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

No particularly memorable dates for me this year.


What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Me and Míša’s textbook coming out.


Me and Míša with copies of our textbook in Konstanz.


What was your biggest failure?

A resurgence of anxiety and panic in the second half of the year.


Did you suffer illness or injury?

See above. I also got Covid for the first time, at ICHL in Oxford, and took it with me to Edinburgh to infect my friends. (Sorry, friends.)


What was the best thing you bought?

Probably my tour of Gozo when I was in Malta - a hell of a place.


Exploring sea caves in a tiny boat. I was bricking it.


Whose behaviour merited celebration?

My lovely lodgers, Olha and Sasha. I wasn’t sure how it would go, inviting two strangers into my home. But they’ve been so nice to me, and so unassuming, that I think I’m happier now than when I was on my own.


Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

Relatedly: Russia, obviously. And also the Konstanz “JobCenter”.


Where did most of your money go?

Travel and various good causes.


What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Seeing Pure Reason Revolution and Gazpacho, two of my favourite bands from way back, touring together in Stuttgart.


Pure Reason Revolution playing in Bad Cannstatt, lit in purple and yellow.


What songs will always remind you of 2022?

Not sure I have any this year! 2022 wasn’t a year for new music.


Compared to this time last year, are you:

Happier or sadder? About the same.

Thinner or fatter? Fatter (?).

Richer or poorer? Richer.


What do you wish you'd done more of?

Repeated now three years in a row: “Real relaxation activities, i.e. hiking, cooking, washing things. I’m bad at relaxing.” Even when I have complete control of my own time and nowhere else to be.


What was the most embarrassing thing that happened to you in 2022?

Missing out on a cool workshop in Edinburgh due to anxiety.


Who did you meet for the first time?

Olha and Sasha. Some awesome linguists in the SILPAC group.


Did you fall in love in 2022?

No.


How many people did you kiss?

None.


How many one-night stands did you have?

None. (I’m asexual, in case you haven’t figured that out by now! And I’ll be deleting these three questions for future editions of this review.)


What was your favourite TV programme?

Didn’t watch much TV this year. The main thing I watched was Stranger Things series 4, which was meh overall. The Korean show Busted on Netflix was fun, but strained my suspension of disbelief to breaking point. But once again I did consume a lot of Roll Together’s D&D streams. Drowning in Blackwater was probably my favourite.


What was your favourite film of this year?

It wasn’t a great year for movies either. Tried to keep up with Marvel Cinematic Universe out of a misplaced sense of franchise loyalty, but they were mostly bad or unremarkable (even Thor: Love and Thunder, for which I had higher hopes); of those, I guess my favourite was the latest wacky Spiderman. The Gray Man on Netflix was similarly unremarkable, despite its star-studded cast. Enola Holmes was quite good, but Enola Holmes 2 was better, and probably takes the title of favourite film of the year.


What was the best book you read in 2022?

Fiction: The Betrayals by Bridget Collins.

Non-fiction: Three-way tie between Piketty, Brief History of Inequality; Táíwò, Elite Capture; and McCulloch, because Internet.


What was the best game you played in 2022?

Some big games played for the first time this year: Elden Ring, of course, and als Red Dead Redemption. Both were great fun, but my favourite has to be a replay: The Witcher 3. I also played the DLCs for the latter for the first time ever. Brilliant game! I also got back into Skyrim and also Dragon Age: Origins yet again, for the purposes of nailing down those last few achievements. Pentiment also gets an honourable mention for being a small, well-designed game right up my street.


What was your greatest musical discovery?

n/a.


How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2022?

Return of the hat.


Hat shadow selfie on the road near Oberdorf.


What kept you sane?

I think this is a presupposition failure.


What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I was 37. Didn’t do much on the day itself, but had a nice meal with Olha and Sasha, and a nice syntax social with linguist friends the day after. Appropriate for a prime-numbered birthday, I think.


How did you spend Christmas?

Quietly with my parents.


What would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Not being Dean of Studies for the Faculty of Humanities at Konstanz.


Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

No one.


What political issue stirred you the most?

The war in Ukraine, like most people, I imagine.


Who did you miss?

People who mostly aren’t on here. It feels wrong to list their names.


Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?

Only a few people I didn’t know existed this time last year.


Was 2022 a good year for you?

Yes, for the most part.


What was your favourite moment of the year?

There are lots of contenders. Hiking up to a lake in the Pyrenees with D, F & R.


Mountain lake in Andorra.


Watching the first half of Madame Butterfly while thunder and lightning crashed across the sky.


The set of Madame Butterfly at the Festspiele in Bregenz, at night.


Riding the Petit Train Jaune in France.


The Petit Train Jaune ascending into the Pyrenean highlands.


Exploring Gozo by jeep.


The capital of Gozo, from the castle above.


It was also great to get a D&D campaign going in person again after so long.


What is a valuable life lesson you learned in 2022?

Am I too old to be learning valuable life lessons? There doesn’t seem to be one from 2022, anyway.

Friday, November 18, 2022

Konstanz Working Cafés #8: Stadtkind

Today’s instalment deals with the sweet little Stadtkind. This is a café I’ve spent quite some time in over the years, so I feel bad about giving it the rating I do below – but in short it’s just not that well suited to working in, however nice it may be in other respects.

Advantages:

  • Nice location. It’s not as central as some of the other places on the list, but still easily reachable: 10 minutes on foot from the centre, maybe 15 minutes from the station, and it’s on the 9A bus route. It’s in a pleasant old building (see picture) opposite the Ellenrieder school, in a posh, leafy part of town.
Café Stadtkind front
  • Great, healthy, reasonably-priced food. This ratatouille with pasta in a jar at €6.90 was tasty. They also have homemade cakes and local ice cream for the sweet tooth.
Photo of ratatouille with pasta and bread, next to a coffee

Disadvantages:
  • No wifi. Le sigh. Mobile data is also ropey here.
  • Always full (or close to it). The place is popular and small, so you’d be a dick to sit there for hours while working on a laptop, even if you get a table.
  • Twee vibes. It’s cosy and all, but it feels like it’s run by your favourite garrulous, eco-friendly maternal aunt whose favourite pastimes are cross-stitching and flower-pressing. YMMV.
  • Coffee style is not my jam. At least, the most recent one I had was on the bitter side, and a bit groundsy. They do nice cappuccinos though, and always provide a tiny biscuit, which is a hallmark of class.
Price of a regular black coffee: €3.10.

Overall rating: ☕️☕️ (2/5), maybe even a bit less, for working purposes. For a chilled-out lunch with a friend it would score much higher, though.

Sunday, November 13, 2022

Konstanz Working Cafés #7: Seegold

This one is new to me! Thanks to HK for the tip. Café Seegold is a small-to-medium-sized place near the Swiss border. I’ve been here twice now, and will definitely be back!

Advantages:

  • Really good coffee: to my taste, at least. Below is a coffee here, complete with tiny biscuit.
Coffee with biscuit and spoon on wooden table
  • Really good food: here’s a picture of a Mediterranean-style platter you can get here. Caveats: they don’t have a broad savoury selection, and the kitchen is closed on Sundays.
Photo of platter with ham, olives, cheese, bread, and suchlike.
  • Quiet: there never seem to be many people here, which is ideal for working. (Though they also have a rack with toys and classic board games like Ticket to Ride, if that’s more your thing.)
  • Wifi: it exists and it mostly functions. ‘Nuff said.
  • Minimalist feel: while a lot of Konstanz cafés lean into the baroque and/or the twee, this place is clean, modern and sparsely decorated (see picture). It also has solid tables you can sit at for working. Haven’t spotted any power sockets yet, but maybe there are some somewhere.
Photo of bar at Seegold with a spartan feel; large house plant on the right.

Disadvantages:
  • Minimalist feel: not everyone loves this.
  • A bit out of the way: for me, at least, it’s not exactly on the beaten track. But it’s only about 15 minutes’ walk from the station and town centre. Top tip for the Swiss of Kreuzlingen, though!
  • Not open on Mondays.
Price of a regular black coffee: €2.80, which is fairly middle-of-the-road for Konstanz cafés.

Overall rating: ☕️☕️☕️☕️☕️ (5/5). Actually pretty much bang on a 4.5, but there are no half emojis.