inveniam viam

Walkouts, feuds and broken friendships: when book clubs go bad. I don't think I've ever been in a book club of this kind. Many years ago at My Place Of Work there used to be an informal monthly reading group which would discuss some work of relevance to the academic mission of the institution, very broadly defined, and that was quite congenial, and I am currently in an online group read-through and discussion of A Dance to the Music of Time, but both these have rather more focus perhaps? certainly I do not perceive that they have people turning up without having reading the actual books....

Mind you, I am given the ick, and this is I will concede My Garbage, by those Reading Group Suggestions that some books have at the end, or that were flashed up during an online book group discussion of a book in which I was interested.

Going to book groups without Doing The Reading perhaps goes under the heading of Faking It, which has been in the news a lot lately (I assume everybody has heard about The Salt Roads thing): and here are a couple of furthe instances:

(This one is rather beautifully recursive) What if every artwork you’ve ever seen is a fake?:

Many years ago, I met a man in a pub in Bloomsbury who said he worked at the British Museum. He told me that every single item on display in the museum was a replica, and that all the original artefacts were locked away in storage for preservation.
....
Later, Googling, I discovered that none of what the man had told me was true. The artefacts in the British Museum are original, unless otherwise explicitly stated. It was the man who claimed to work there who was a fake.

This one is more complex, and about masquerade and fantasy as much as 'hoax' perhaps: The schoolteacher who spawned a Highland literary hoax

This is not so much about fakery but about areas of doubt: We still do not understand family resemblance which suggests that GENES are by no means the whole story.

This time it was online, in Teams, and worked a bit better than some Team events I've attended, or maybe I'm just getting used to it.

A few hiccups with slides and screen sharing, but not as many as there might have been.

Possibly we would rather attend a conference not in our south-facing sitting-room on a day like today....

But even so it was on the whole a good conference, even if some of the interdisciplinarity didn't entirely resonate with me.

And That There Dr oursin was rather embarrassingly activating the raised hand icon after not quite every panel, but all but one. And, oddly enough, given that that was not particularly the focus of the conference, all of my questions/comments/remarks were in the general area of medical/psychiatric history, which I wouldn't particularly have anticipated.

For the first time in forever I have been making The Famous Aubergine Dip (the vegan version with Vegan Worcestershire Sauce, I discovered the bottle I had was use by ages ahead, yay). This required me acquiring aubergines from The Local Shops. There is now, on the corner where there used to be an estate agent (and various other things before that) a flower shop that also sells fruit and vegetables, and they had Really Beautiful, 'I'm ready for my close-up Mr deMille', Aubergines, it was almost a pity to chop them up and saute them.

A little while ago I mentioned being solicited to Give A Paper to a society to which I have spoken (and published in the journal of) heretofore. Blow me down, they have come back suggesting the topic I suggested - thrown together in a great hurry before dashing off to conference last week - is Of Such Significance pretty please could I give the keynote???

Have been asked to be on the advisory board for a funded research project.

A dance in the old dame yet, I guess.