Thoughts while rewriting

Years ago. From my journal as I created Lifestyles in Early South Asia, while I was still hundreds of pages from finishing...

Patience, patience...
I've got about 500 pages left of my work with my super rough first draft. Patience is a great virtue for me here; if I hurry through, I'll just have to do the rewrite again. I can't help, though, but compare it with how I was able to edit novels in one weekend when I headed a book line -- but, yikes, the writers had done their work, I had done my work by contracting decent writers, plus the novels were like 100 pages, not 700 to begin with, and also I didn't have to keep 650 very complex pages in mind (in my work's case of earlier eras) except in novel series just to know the characters...
Current time travel apparatus location: The Round Library, Bangalore, India 

GET YOUR FREE VOLUME II HERE!

The second volume of my Lifestyles in Early South Asia: A Sourcebook for Time Travelers is at last available to all time travelers!



For more information on what this volume covers, see the ad copy on the right-hand side of this computer site.

Access your own free copy through this link:  Volume II Lifestyles in Early South Asia .

Note: Parents and teachers can make sure material is appropriate for their charges in the "ratings" in the right-hand side of the computer site (so far the mobile site does not display those properly). 

Français du jour

From 2010 language studies thoughts...

From my fabulous French textbook: Sans que nous nous formions aux disciplines de la recherche, nous ne pouvons rien faire d'important....Nous ne pouvons rien faire d'intéressant sans que nous nous formions aux disciplines de la recherche....Sans que nous rédigions les résultats de nos expériences de sorte qo'on puisse les étudier,  notre travail va être inutile. (About the importance of knowing how to research, in order to do anything of importance or even of interest; and the importance of writing it up -- my word du jour -- rédiger.) 

 

A Glimpse at My Writing Life in India

A glimpse at life in India, as chronicled in your researcher's journal as I researched my history of early lifestyles in South Asia...

I for like the 2nd time in a year took my supposed-to-be-monthly day off. I finally remembered that when I don't take that day off, because I feel I'm behind or something, I end up accomplishing less because my brain is just tired or something. Though I did historiographical stuff today, as I was in the mood to read nonfiction. Unfortunately the thing that was supposed to be The Super Fun Moment of the Day Off didn't work out because the antique store I wanted to visit seems to be closed. Oh well, it always had ridiculously inflated prices anyway so I never bought anything, and apparently others caught on as well. We find lovely Indian antiques through a retired general down the street, including my cool filing cabinets -- which I always thought had to be ugly and dreadful until I met these. You can see my manuscript cabinet here, the dark rosewood one just behind my desk with the South Asian atlas and dictionaries on top of it. At the moment I'm sitting at the table with the blue lamp you can see near the window in the photo.
Current time travel apparatus location: The Round Library, Bangalore, India


My favorite-so-far Instagram

Just this morning I discovered Jesse Lauzon's witty wonderful work.


 Here's a favorite: https://www.instagram.com/p/BnQ43GYnLrC/?taken-by=jesselauzon . And a favorite bit of it:
If you collect old things (please tell me that you collect old things too) then you'll know that old books aren't that hard to find....With so much choice the difficulty is in narrowing the search. Old cookbooks, old fiction? Maybe nature or garden or style?........Please and thanks to all of the above. I've never met an old book that I didn't want and these days it's the really very old ones that I save. It's the crispy crunchy fragile ones from a time when books were treasures that I treasure now.

A fancy dinner c1889

As I posted at my https://favoritefoodthisweek.blogspot.com/2018/10/how-to-serve-meals-in-1889.html ...



I've been learning that at a nice dinner you would want to...
Keep the dining room "neither too hot nor too warm; the temperature should never exceed 60 degrees"! Brr!

You'd want salt at each place. Why? So your guests don't need to ask your servants for it, of course.

You'd have a floral centerpiece, of course, but also, at each place, a "bouquet" for each lady and a boutonniere for each man. I vaguely remember having a fancy meal in Philadelphia in the 1970s where this was still done.

You'll want a menu card at each place as well.

Also on the table:

  • a plate of radishes and/or olives
  • a plate of celery (without this and the above, it would "look like a boarding house table"!)
  • little dishes of black pepper and of red pepper
  • 2 fruit stands, 1 on each side of the floral centerpiece, with the best seasonal fruit
  • assorted cakes next to the fruit (though the fruit and cakes aren't actually eaten until late in the meal)
  • your wines, liqueurs

The glasses at each place include a green one for the sauterne and a red one for the Rhine wine, of course, plus glasses for sherry, Champagne, Latour wine, Chambertin red wine, and water (the last one is placed closest to each person's plate).

You may wonder if there's room for the rest of the food on the table. Well, probably not; M. Filippini suggests your servants hand it around and serve it, and gives detailed instructions.

Surprises and not-surprises in my language work

From 2010 studies again...

I was surprised to discover while on my nearly-month-long trip that I knew a bit more French than I thought I did. I had some French magazines and a book to read, but no dictionary, so I was forced to try to read without looking up words I didn't at first recognize. This made me pay more attention, and made me dredge my memory for vocabulary and verb endings -- and lo and behold, I could make more sense than I expected. I guess what I learned was how to skim in French, searching for as much meaning as possible. I didn't know all the words, but enough to make sense of some simple writings.

I noticed when I got home that I am actually almost halfway through my great reading-French textbook, so it's not surprising that I can read something by now without a dictionary handy. However, it's also not surprising that when I downloaded a history magazine in French a couple days ago that I found that its style was much more complex than I had been reading on my trip, and with lots of new vocabulary (unfortunately many to do with assassinations, which is not fun). I still have loads to learn! (Though would be perfectly happy to skip the gross bits, thank you.)



But I think the moral of my story today is, try to skim your foreign language at some point. You might know more than you thought you did.