Matthew Lloyd > Recent Status Updates

Apparently this was the third time that I've read "A Momentary Taste of Being" - perhaps explaining the little I did remember, that it was three years ago, not eleven, that I last read it. But for the longest Tiptree story in this collection - by two hours! - it drags. The ending is not satisfying for a novella-length work; there's not enough else to it to make me want to linger on it.

Finished reading Lavinia, and I read a couple of the related essays while I did so

Another month with Ovid over

I read the entirety of "The Decay of Lying" assuming Vivian was a woman, but it turns out he was named after one of Wilde's sons, whoops

Disappointed to only now realise that "The Women Men Don't See" is the original "women would rather be in a forest with a bear than a man"

"And I Have Come Upon This Place By Lost Ways" is a reminder that we've been saying "don't let computers do all your thinking for you" for 50+ years and people still aren't listening

Robin Sachs is the perfect narrator for China Mieville, based on "Foundation" and "The Ball Pit"

Started reading Lavinia

"The Girl Who Was Plugged In" has depths to it that are far from exhausted in the age of influencer culture - although the idea that ads might be banned feels like a far fetched utopia now - but I still struggle to get through the language, especially in audio format. When I read this again in Warm Worlds and Otherwise, I'm going to try to take it slow, see if I can parse Tiptree's future dialect better.

I read this collection 11 years ago. The opening double header - a story about an airborn pandemic and a story about a massive growth in femicide - hit differently now. Stories from the 1970s, maintaining their relevance today - in a way I love it, but in another way, I hate it!

Werburgh's animal companions (geese) and Ia's unusual sea travel (leaf boat) made today's saint story dovetail nicely with Ovid's account of 3rd February in his fasti: explaining how the constellation of the dolphin came to be through the story of Arion, who was rescued by a dolphin when his boat was boarded by pirates

St. Brigid's Day: This might be Jeffs' best discussion yet: the stories of Brigid are told in a folk-tale manner that I found effective; the discussion acknowledges the interpretation of Brigid's "abortion" miracle, but also complicates it with the medieval context of "virginity", purity, and other saints - all male - who performed similar miracles.

I love Oedipus at Colonus as a conclusion to Oedipus's story. Firstly, his righteous anger that he has been held responsible for divinely prophesised acts he had no control over. Then for the weirdness - that Oedipus's broken, curséd body has become sacred; that his resting place must be unknown, his death mystical. Also, just being set in a grove with a rock. I like simple things sometimes.

I appreciate that we have three versions of the Electra/Libation Bearers myth, and that one of them should seem to simply allow Electra and Orestes to revel in what they do, the vengeance they take. It allows the myth to be complicated - can we really be sympathetic to Clytemnestra's suffering with regard to Iphigenia's murder, when she appears to treat her living children so poorly?

Antigone is excellent; while reading it I was also preparing some Black History Month stuff, which touches on the question of just and unjust laws; but I also read things that asked questions about our moral purity tests leading me to think about how Antigone kills herself after Creon changes his mind, and if expecting people to change their mind is valuable or not... always more to unpack with this one.

Oedipus Tyrannos: still the best play.

Started reading Searoad

St Agnes' Day (the last feast day in January); Jeffs uses this to highlight the iconography of sainthood through the Royal Gold Cup in the British Museum, showing the short life of St Agnes. I still find Jeffs' storytelling a little flat, but the historical information is always interesting.

Finished reading Howl's Moving Castle

I'm normally quite hard on Night Watch because (a) Terry Pratchett and I have different models of historical change and (b) no one else is, but I did choke up at the relevancy of this adaptation in a time when a mad patrician and a militarised police force are killing civilians. I'm just not sure that the solution is for us to sit behind barricades while the ruling classes sort things out for themselves.