Livre d&#39;Or

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I have seen pretty good evidence that a bad actor has all the logins and password details from LiveJournal, including old, deactivated passwords and including accounts that have been deleted.

Change your LJ password now.

If you use that password anywhere else, change it there too. A really nasty blackmail spammer has it, and I find it credible that This isn't a series of lucky guess. This is inside information, either from someone at LJ sniffing passwords when you login or some serious breach of security from outside.

I probably should in fact delete my LJ. I am happier since I stopped posting here just over a year ago, and the number of friends I have left who post regularly here and not to DW or other blogs is so small I probably might as well just add the RSS to a feed reader. I think it's down to

owlfish,

woodpijn and

atreic. I do care about you three and I don't want to miss your locked posts, so eh, maybe I should stick around.

But anyway, it seemed worthwhile to post a warning.

As most of you know, about a month ago LJ suddenly changed its terms of service, in a really nasty way, with no warning and forcing people to accept the new terms in order to interact with the site at all. I confess I was not too bothered at first.

So having started out thinking, well, it's annoying but nothing much will change, I might as well carry on cross posting, the reality has been that there's basically nothing keeping me on LJ any more. I just unticked the box, and I've only now got round to making a post about it. I think I will not delete my old LJ because it's convenient to have an account for reading the last smattering of posts, and because I don't think my old stuff is particularly contributing to whatever evil Putin's government may be up to.

For people who want to stay (exclusively) on LJ, I certainly don't think badly of you. After all I very nearly stayed myself, and I know there are many reasons to continue with problematic sites. If you would like to follow my Dreamwidth, there is a feed at

liv_dw, or you're entirely welcome to put that RSS into your feed reader of choice. You have to click through to comment; I won't see comments on the feed itself. You don't have to log in to comment, but please do write your name or handle, because I've had problems with an annoying anon guy so I want to know you're not him. I also very rarely lock posts, so you're not missing much.

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I took a couple of days off so I could have a four-day weekend, and didn't commit myself to excessively many social things, so I was able to spend lots of time gaming.

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Recently acquired:

Can neuroscience change our minds? by Hilary and Steven Rose. Steven Rose was a big influence on getting me into bioscience, so I'm excited to learn that he's written a new book about debunking neurobollocks, a subject close to my heart. And that he's written it in collaboration with his wife, a sociologist of science.
Three non-fiction books to give as belated bar mitzvah presents: I went with A history of God by Karen Armstrong, 1491 by Charles Mann, and The undercover economist by Tim Harford in the end. I reckon that gives a reasonable spread of perspectives, periods and cultures to get a curious teenager started.
A whole bunch of mostly novels for a not-very-sekrit plot.

Recently read:

This is a letter to my son by KJ Kabza, as recommended, and edited by rushthatspeaks. It's a near-future story about a trans girl, which has minimal overt transphobia but quite a lot of cis people being clueless, and also it's about parent death among other themes.
Why Lemonade is for Black women by Dominique Matti, via sonia. Very powerful essay about intersectionality between gender and race. I've not actually seen Lemonade yet, because everything I've read about it suggests it's a large, complex work of art which I need to set aside time to concentrate on, I can't just listen to the songs in the background. And I'm a bit intimidated by the medium of a "visual album".

Currently reading: A Journey to the end of the Millennium by AB Yehoshua. Not much progress.

Up next: I am thinking to pick up How to be both by Ali Smith, which has been on my to-read pile for a while. We'll see.

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So this weekend I went to two synagogue services (in two different cities) and one church service, and I had a quiet going out for lunch and talking date with

cjwatson and a bouncy metal gig date with Ghoti. And went to the cinema to see Beauty and the Beast and just about managed to squeeze in a little bit of time talking to

jack. Um, it is hypothetically possible that I may have over-scheduled myself a bit.

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So my two former bar mitzvah students want to carry on with Hebrew now they've both completed their ceremonies. They've said they'd like to do a bit more conversational modern Hebrew as well as just practising prayerbook reading. Does anyone have any recommendations for textbooks?

The boys are 13 and 15, both reasonably academically able and reasonably committed. They can read fairly fluently, but have very little vocab or grammar at the moment. They're also extremely busy and probably won't have huge amounts of time for practice in between their fortnightly lessons. My options at the moment are:
The textbook recommended by the GCSE exam board. I'd generally like the boys to be thinking about GCSE sort of level, not that they hugely have to pass exams but as a streching, but attainable, target. The problem is that the book looks incredibly dated and dull and I don't feel inspired to teach from it!

Or Routledge Introductory Course in Modern Hebrew. I think this is basically aimed at beginners, but beginners who are university students or otherwise quite advanced in general language skills. It's really quite heavy on grammar, and might be overkill for a couple of years of informal lessons for teenagers.

I can't find anything I like better than these two options. I don't want a course that is primarily audio for self-learning, because I'm going to be there teaching and keeping up reading fluency is a big priority. And I don't want just a vocab list or beginners' dictionary. The younger boy suggested using a tourist phrasebook, which might work but ideally I'd like something more like a textbook and less like lists of phrases to rote learn.

Secondly, I still have not succeeded in giving the younger lad his bar mitzvah present, because everything I could think of is out of print and not for sale for reasonable money. I would like to give him a good work of popular non-fiction, something enjoyable to read but also informative. He's quite interested in politics and world affairs, which is a subject I know little about. And he's pretty bright but not especially precocious, I think he'd get more out of something accessible or even aimed at teenagers, than something hardcore academic.

I'm thinking something about the level of Jared Diamond's Guns, germs and steel, except not that because I'm now aware that Diamond not only plays fast and loose with scholarly accuracy, he conducted some rather unethical ethnographic research and published identifying stories about his subjects without their permission. And I have in mind that there used to be a journalist who did short programmes on Radio 4 about US politics and culture, and that he died a few years ago (?) and that prior to that he had written a book of anecdotes that this young man might enjoy, but that's not enough information to shake his name out of Google, does anyone have any clue whom I'm talking about?

So. Anyone who's taught conversational Hebrew, any recs? And in a less specialist query, what's the most interesting popular non-fiction book you've read lately?

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I think of myself very much as someone who does interfaith, but I haven't really had any opportunities for it for ages. And then two came along at once:

So basically I'm full of enthusiasm and really energized by getting a chance to do interfaith again. And I've been babbling at my partners about stuff that they're not very familiar with, so hopefully this post is a bit more coherent.

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Recently acquired: A second hand book stall appeared right in between my flat and work, and it ambushed me and somehow I ended up with Downbelow Station by CJ Cherryh and Tales of Nevèrÿon Samuel R Delany.

Recently read: In honour of International Women's Day:
The reality of women by Karen Pollock. The article addresses, in order to refute, the idea that trans women aren't real women, lesbians aren't real women, etc. Very erudite piece, and I've always wanted to quote impeccable feminist foremother de Beauvoir's On ne naît pas femme : on le devient at people who somehow think it's "feminist" to make a distinction between women-born-women (ie cis women) and trans women.

Even more internationally speaking, here's Sumita Mukherjee on the rhetorical use of *That* Indian Suffragettes photo.

In reference to the Nation of Internet,

siderea makes a very interesting case that moderation is a feminist issue.

Currently reading: A journey to the end of the Millennium by AB Yehoshua. I kind of wish I'd finished it before IWD because it's really quite phallocentric in addition to being written by a male author.

Up next: Not sure. Recommend me something by an author known to be female? Any length, and I'll try to suggest a similar work in return. (International Nonbinary Day is July 17^th and International Men's Day is November 19^th so if I remember I shall try the same again for those genders on their respective days.)

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Reasons for watching it: As soon as I started seeing this talked about on the internet, I knew I had to see it. What a brilliant idea to make a film about the African-American women involved in the technical aspects of the US developing manned space flight!

Circumstances of watching it: I wasn't at all sure I was going to find time to go to the cinema while this was on, and indeed the first date I set aside to see it turned out to be before it was showing locally. And then

ghoti suggested taking Judith, who is really into space exploration and all things astronomy. I had thought the film would probably be too talky and generally not interesting to a child, but lots of Ghoti's friends said similar aged children had enjoyed it. And she also managed to squeeze some time when we could go to a matinée together the last weekend it was in cinemas, yay.

Verdict: Hidden figures tells a great story really well.

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Five years ago, I married

jack. At the time I'd never had a relationship lasting as much as five years, and now we are nine. Back in 2010, I spent a lot of time considering whether getting married to

jack was really the right decision, but looking back I couldn't be more pleased with how it has turned out.

Also, a friend recently asked me for advice about marriage, from my perspective as a happily married person. I don't think I'm at all qualified to comment, because really five years together seems like a really short time. It's about 10% of the marriage I'm hoping for, and probably the easiest tenth, too. But anyway, it's a fun topic so I shall put some scattered thoughts here.

So in the end, the advice that I gave to my friend was that a good marriage is partly a matter of luck, and partly a matter of picking the right person. But it's only partly luck; the people actually involved in the marriage have some control over whether the relationship is happy or not. I don't necessarily count time-limited relationships as failures, but if what a person wants is a forever relationship, then it's important to think about what may help towards that. And I don't know if I will get that myself, but the first five years have been really good and I'm looking forward to lots and lots more.

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Recently read: A couple of cute things:
Ghetto Swirl by Terry Blas. A lovely comic about a nerdy, Mexican, gay, Mormon and some street kids.

In which a New Type of Dragon is revealed by

hatam_soferet

Currently reading: A journey to the end of the millennium by AB Yehoshua. Still a bit slow, still a bit sexist, but compelling in spite of that.

Up next: I am not sure, I have a lot of things vaguely on my to-read pile, but it'll probably take me a while to finish the Yehoshua.

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I've had a good month for seeing friends I don't spend time with often enough. I managed long phone chats with

hatam_soferet and

lethargic_man, and

jack and I managed to get most of a weekend with

doseybat and her mother and

pplfichi, and the wonderful

angelofthenorth came to stay with me for a few days.

I feel really really blessed by having such wonderful friends, especially when they reach out to me when I'm doing badly at keeping in touch. And several other people have got in touch too and I really do want to get back to them to make plans. And I'm not doing at all well at posting or commenting here (though I'm still reading, definitely, I haven't missed a day.)

Anyway, the only way to restart the habit of posting here is to just go ahead and do so. Have a meme which

ghoti sensibly imported from FB: suggest a category and I'll tell you my top five things in that category. Feel free to propagate it if you think it would be a fun thing to do in your own journal.

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Reasons for watching it: Kinky Boots is just the sort of film I like, with a drag queen helping to save a struggling family business in a narrow-minded small town.

Circumstances of watching it:

jack was able to come and stay with me for a few days, which meant that for once we had time to settled down with a DVD in the evening.

Verdict: Kinky Boots has a lot of heart but didn't quite work for me.

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Recently acquired: Psychohistorical crisis by Donald Kingsbury, a present from

rysmiel which appears to be Asimov fanfic, I'm quite looking forward to it.

Recently read: Dipping my toe into Yuletide stuff, thanks to people who wrote things and mentioned them where I would notice.

I have a couple of kinky erotic pieces to recommend:
Promotion by

silveradept. This is something I wouldn't have expected to work, namely fic about the game of chess. The author warns for dubious consent and violent death, but it's not very realistic, it's about sentient chess pieces. I personally found the erotic elements really vivid and definitely hot, and the disturbing elements quite glossed over.

Lovely in her fall by

edonohana /

rachelmanija. This is fanfic of the setting of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel books, but it's only about the setting and not the plot; there are no spoilers and you don't need to know the originals. The setting being pseudo-Mediaeval France, with a fantasy religion based around paid sex work, with different Houses offering different styles. The published books are about a divinely-inspired masochist so are very focused on S&M, whereas

edonohana has chosen to write about all the other kinks that are not to do with pain. The piece is a very nice example of characterization via a series of sex scenes, and I think sheds some light on how the sexual / religious institutions portrayed in Kushiel might actually work; Carey's world-building can be somewhat thin. As well as paid-for, kinky sex, this story includes references to death, but that doesn't happen on stage.

Currently reading: In theory, A journey to the end of the millennium by AB Yehoshua, but I'm still not really making headway with that.

Up next:

doseybat's mother recommended me My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante; I generally trust the Batmother's recs, and she said that the books were really engaging even if not amazingly well written, plus I like books about deep friendships.

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I sent the following email to Jeremy Corbyn, asking him to give his MPs a free vote on Article 50. I used email rather than a written letter because Corbyn's office make it clear that they do not accept letters (or phonecalls) from people who are not part of Corbyn's constituency.

Meanwhile my Dad is doing a really sterling letter-writing campaign about the horror show that is the Home Office mining NHS patient records in order to identify people they want to deport. (Never illegals, no human being is illegal.)

My gratitude goes out to everybody who's doing any kind of activism against all the scary political trends going on right now. I'm not contributing much myself, cos I'm mostly vacillating between terror and fatalistic despair. I'm hoping that getting started on doing something, however nominal, will help me to break out of that.

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Recently read: Katy by Jacqueline Wilson. (c)Jacqueline Wilson 2015, Pub Puffin Books 2016, ISBN 978-0-141-35398-2.

This book. This booooooook!

ghoti found it and gave it to me for chanukah, and it is the most wonderful thing. I love Jacqueline Wilson, and I love Coolidge's What Katy Did in spite of it being problematic in that uniquely 19^th century way. And it's a book about a protagonist who suffers a spinal cord injury which is not awful.

So yes, Katy is awesome, and if you don't absolutely hate the whole YA genre you should definitely read it.

Currently reading: Theoretically A journey to the end of the millennium by AB Yehoshua, but I'm stalled on it to the extent that I read a whole other book in the middle, so we'll see. I know lots of people read several books at once but it's fairly unusual for me.

Up next: Not sure, I've been given a lot of awesome presents recently and haven't got round to reading them all. I've seen a few very enticing reviews of An interior life by Katherine Blake, which

rysmiel gave me a while back and it's not got to the top of my reading pile.

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Thank you all so much for all the supportive comments on my post with squee about the awesome bar mitzvah. I feel really loved!

In another instance of my students being brilliant, I ran a session recently to introduce the first year medics to the concept of public health. We ended with an exercise which I found rather fun, so I thought I'd offer it to you to play:

A philanthropist is offering a grant of £250,000 to someone who can propose a way to improve the situation in a deprived housing estate. Population ~10K, annual healthcare spend roughly £100 million. The philanthropist wants to see improvements on a 30 year timescale, and wants the actual inhabitants to be involved in the project in a community building sort of way. What would you do?

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Soon after I came to Stoke, there was a boy of 8 or 9 who got really really enthusiastic about Judaism. He dragged his not terribly religious father to shul regularly, and wanted to join his friend, two years older, for Hebrew lessons. So I taught the two of them together, and the older of the two celebrated his bar mitzvah in due course. They've always had a really great friendship and partnership, in spite of what might have been an awkward age gap, and I was really pleased that the bar mitzvah boy was entirely keen to carry on with Hebrew lessons once he'd finished the bar mitzvah.

Younger lad wanted to have a bar mitzvah in his turn. And there were lots of reasons why this might not have worked out but he was so keen, and had really obviously thought through all the ramifications, so we agreed that we should start preparing a Torah portion. So for about a year we've being alternating one-on-one bar mitzvah tuition with joint lessons for the two lads, focusing more on general language skills.

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Apart from Arrival, I managed to find a bit more time over Christmas than usual to watch shows.

Also, Ghoti suggested that if she'd dragged me into watching Christmas movies, she should reciprocate by watching a chanukah movie with me. Which is a really sweet thought, but I'm not sure if there's such a thing as a chanukah movie! Does anyone have any suggestions? I mean, that whole New York Jewish custom of eating Chinese food and watching a movie on Christmas Day, is there any particular film that's traditional? Or failing that, perhaps a Jewish themed film (I thought of Yentl or maybe the film of Potok's The Chosen, which I haven't seen), or one that's about identity and resistance to assimilation and rebelling against an oppressive régime. Preferably not Holocaust-related, that really doesn't seem a suitable topic for a date movie. It did occur to me that Rogue One could be considered a pretty suitable thing to watch during chanukah, since it's about a miraculous victory for a no-hope strike against an oppressive empire...

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Recently read: I'm really impressed at people who were getting Yuletide recs out within a few days of the event!

Currently reading: A journey to the end of the Millennium, by AB Yehoshua. I'm enjoying this, but with some caveats. It's subtitled A novel of the Middle Ages, but in many ways it's quite aggressively modern, and I think that is probably deliberate, but it's not the immersion in a different culture that I look for in historical novels.

I really like that it breaks the Eurocentric perspective of much of modern writing about the Middle Ages, it treats white Christians as this peculiar tribe eking out an existence in the barbarian lands of northern Europe, with the Jewish and Muslim viewpoint characters as the sophisticated travellers visiting these primitive lands and trying to avoid rousing the superstitious natives to violence. And within that, the plot about an African Jew who's completely bemused by this bizarre new German concept that marriage is supposed to be between one man and one woman. But the sexism and racism are twentieth century sexism and racism, projected back onto Ye Olden Dayes. The major female characters are nameless, just "The First Wife" and "The Second Wife," and the novel opens with a long and mostly pointless scene about the protag psyching himself up to satisfy both his wives in a single night. That's not, gender roles were different in the 10^th century, that's exactly reproducing all the other litfic ever about middle-aged men angsting / fantasizing about their virility. Likewise the only Black character (though most of the main characters are not exactly white) is "the black slave" and seems to be very stereotyped, and again, it's modern racially essentialist stereotypes, nothing that feels authentically period.

I'm finding de Lange's translation a bit awkward. In some ways it's quite successful at conveying the feel of reading Hebrew, full of allusions to the scriptural language which is at the root of modern Ivrit, and it's poetic as I imagine Yehoshua's writing must be. But it's also quite intrusive, I don't want to be constantly feeling that I'm reading a translation. Never clunky, it's not over-literal to the point of being completely unidiomatic, but it's just distancing.

Up next: Surely Katy by Jacqueline Wilson, because I have been unknowingly waiting for this book for most of 30 years.

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So something is sending vast quantities of spam from my email address. Does anyone have any advice?

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So this year chanukah started on Christmas Eve.

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Recently acquired: I did very well for books as presents for chanukah and Christmas and my birthday.

cjwatson gave me Meetings with remarkable manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel, because apparently my boyfriend pays attention to what sorts of things make me happy.
rmc28 gave me Rachel Manija Brown's (rachelmanija) memoir All the fishes come home to roost, plus Island below the star by James Rumford, a really gorgeous children's book about the discovery of Hawaii (since we've both been excited about Moana lately).
ghoti gave me Katy by Jacqueline Wilson, which is contemporary AU fixit fic for What Katy Did. I am unbelievably excited that this book exists!
ghoti also managed to find me Happy Hanukkah, Curious George by Emily Flaschner Meyer. Judith did an excellent job of reading the verses aloud to me on the first night of the festival – turns out that The Man with the Yellow Hat is Jewish.
I usually end up defaulting to books as Christmas presents, but this time I tried to be a bit more creative. I did get The Usborne Creative Writing Book by Louie Stowell for Judith, because I was impressed at how broad a scope it has, it's not just about how to write novel-like fiction stories, but includes journalism and blogging and script writing and is generally up to the high standard I remember from Usborne books when I was a kid.
I bought SPQR by Mary Beard for fivemack, but fortunately-unfortunately he's already read it, so I may have purloined the copy for myself.
I also bought a copy of one of my favourite books for rushthatspeaks, for ghoti's bookswap (which she fixed to be a straight exchange instead of a pyramid scheme.) Exactly which one I picked remains a secret until it arrives :-)

Recently read: The invisible library by Genevieve Cogman. (c) Genevieve Cogman 2015, Pub Tor 2015, ISBN 978-1-4472-5623-6. It's a fun and satisfying urban fantasy.

Currently reading: A journey to the end of the Millennium by AB Yehoshua. Found this in Camden market and couldn't quite resist it. It's written in 1999 and set in 999, which is perhaps a bit obvious, but I am enjoying Yehoshua's choice of a viewpoint character who is an African, polygamous Jewish merchant travelling to the backwaters of Northern Europe.

Up next: I am desperate to read Katy and I might well start it before I finish the Yehoshua, which is lush and poetic and slow.

(Have plenty to post about, since I've been almost non-stop busy since about 23^rd December, plus I want to look back on 2016 and forward to the new year, but let's start up posting again with a Reading Wednesday.)

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Reason for watching it: I was completely fascinated by the idea of a film of the marvellous Ted Chiang short Story of your life. I started out thinking the film probably wouldn't do it justice but wanted to see it anyway. And then lots of people started posting really positive reviews of it, which made me even more excited to see it. Not to mention lots of articles about constructing the alien language made it seem even more intriguing.

Circumstances of watching it:

jack and I managed to catch about the last showing before everything is taken over by the new Star Wars. We had an early dinner in the somewhat fancy Chinese place, Orchid, mainly because it's close to the cinema. Things I like about Orchid: the ambience, which is very calm and feels much more relaxingly atmospheric than many anglo-Chinese restaurants. The way they have fancy teas as well as fancy wines (for about the same sort of price range.) The amazing grilled aubergines which are like a kind of vegetarian steak. Things I am not so keen on: they have a bad habit of putting shellfish in the dishes labelled vegetarian, and there's little choice of actually veggie food. And they're a bit overpriced, we ended up spending about £30 a head, which isn't ridiculous but there are quite a few places locally when you can get a good meal for quite a bit less than that.

Then we saw our film at the Vue in the Grafton Centre. I'm not a huge fan of this new system where they're trying to encourage people to shell out for cinema tickets by providing fancy reclining seats for everybody, since my legs are too short to sit comfortably in a huge chair, I felt as if I were stuck in a kind of padded bucket. Anyway, I'm really glad I got to see the film as part of a proper date with

jack, we so rarely get to have an evening out together like that.

Verdict: Arrival is really lovely thinky SF with brilliant aliens.

So yes, I really enjoyed that film, it was very much what I was hoping for and I'm really glad I got to see it.

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