redroanchronicles

This week's bread: I actually set out to make a Standen loaf, and discovered when I was already into the process, warming the milk and water, stirring up the yeast, etc, that I did not in fact have any buckwheat flour. So what I made was a loaf of 4:1 strong brown/einkorn flour, with maple syrup and Rayner's barley malt extract, which actually turned out quite nice.

Friday night supper: ven pongal (South Indian Khichchari).

Saturday breakfast rolls: basic buttermilk: 3:1 strong white flour/buckwheat flour (in this week's grocery order): nice.

Today's lunch: asparagus steamed and tossed in lime butter, Dulce Deliciosa Vine tomatoes roasted in olive oil with thyme, golden butternut squash roasted in toasted pumpkin seed oil with paprika, and aubergine slices grilled and then splashed with tamari/mirin/lazy ginger (memory said this was nicer than this turned out, a bit dry?)

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In accordance with tradition for my natal day, I pass round virtual rich dark gingerbread (and also gluten-free, diabetic-friendly, etc, versions), sanitive madeira (eschewing rather tired Duke of Clarence jokes) and other beverages of choice, and lift a glass to my dr rdrz.

Though honestly, given the gloom-n-doom about Teh Menz of late, this is really rather cheering:

It’s often assumed straight men are not interested in romantic fiction – but many are sharing their passion in forums online:

He doesn’t talk to anyone about his love of romance novels, communicating only with other users of a Discord channel called Romance for Men.... Straight men like Paul who read and write romance are largely invisible to the wider world. Women are the genre’s main audience, followed by queer romance, which is a well documented success....
At Mills & Boon, the best known publisher of romantic fiction, men account for only 4% of sales, according to an editorial director, while less than 2% of the UK’s Romantic Novelists’ Association is male. Almost nothing is known about how many men read romantic fiction, and why.
For those I spoke to, however, reading romance is more than just entertainment. It offers a kind of liberation, allowing them to feel deeply, imagine being desired, and accept parts of themselves that conventional masculinity has little room for. Many would only speak anonymously, worried about being misunderstood or mocked.

I have a vague, very vague, feeling that there have been male romance authors who concealed themselves under very femme pseudonyms (rather than the initials that women have concealed themselves under) but would be hard put to it to actually name any. Trying to remember whether Orania Papazoglou/Jane Haddam's Patience McKenna mysteries, set largely in the world of romance writing, at any point mentioned men among the various authors. In Robert Barnard's The Cherry Blossom Corpse, the apparent romance writer is not actually the author of the works attributed to her, but a hired performer at the event to be Cartlandy for promotional purposes because actual author is (?stereotype) a shy mousy girl, rather than a huge bearded bloke.

This is so something that is facilitated by The Internetz and e-readers. In bygone days, did men sidle into bookshops and say they were buying the volumes from the romance shelves for their wives/girlfriends/sisters?

(The 'shedding manly tears' thing was massively prevalent amongst the Victorians and seasoned veterans of Her Majesty's wars were soaking their whiskers over The Heir of Redclyffe.)

What I read

Finished The Whim of the Dragon.

Re-read of Dorothy Richardson, Oberland (Pilgrimage, #9) (1928) in anticipation of next week's online group discussion.

As it arrived, Sara Paretsky, Bad Company, just out, not VI Warshawski (chiz) but a standalone thriller which I give points to for having the protag a 70+ year old woman even if she was CIA back in the day: the intricate plot deals with stuff coming back from the past, a made-up former Soviet Central Asian country, billionaires who want to live for ever, almost as much internecine shenaningans as fighting the enemy, etc. Very readable, but I really wanted more Vic, really.

On the go

And then I finally succumbed to Pamela Dean, Tam Lin (1990). Have been trying to remember which trip to US it was during which I bought a second copy to sustain me during the trials of the return flight.

Have also started the 2 books for essay review, having got the review hanging over my head off to relevant reviews editor.

Up next

Some little while ago I discovered that there is a Robert B Parker Spenser thriller of which I don't seem to have a copy - I appear to have read but don't recollect much about it - have obtained cheap p/b off eBay and maybe that's next.

Lovely autumnal day for my walk today, masses of conkers dropped about the paths in the park. Think I have queried before whether conkers are still A Thing (probably an app, these days).

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You know, I'd have expected Jonathan Jones to get all Mybuggery about landscape and its painting:

The stems reminded Mr Mybug of phallic symbols and the buds made Mr Mybug think of nipples and virgins.... Yet there were occasions when he was not reminded of a pair of large breasts by the distant hills. Then, he would stand looking at the woods upon the horizon. He would wrinkle up his eyes and breathe deeply through his nostrils and say that the view reminded him of one of Poussin’s lovely things.

Painting the French Riviera review – about as erotic and glamorous as a wet day in Margate

O JJ, nevair evair change. So predictable.

[I]t is Matisse who defines with one captivating work what Painting the French Riviera should have been about. His 1904 Study for Luxe, calme et volupté, in the little Fauve room, depicts a seaside Eden with unfettered passion and hedonism. Gold, green and violet dots, much freer than the neo-impressionists’ pedantic fields, fleck this little canvas in which Matisse experiments with a group of female nudes, gracefully posing by the shore, that he would finalise in the completed version of Luxe, calme et volupté in the Musée d’Orsay. “Luxury, peace and pleasure” – the title comes from Baudelaire – is Matisse’s ideal. It’s 1904, the new century is full of nationalists, revolutionaries, discontent, but he dreams of a perfect day by the sea surrounded by beautiful beach bodies.

And he diss on Monet. I diskard him utterly.

Looking over tabs I have open, these are bleak/distressing about The State of Knowledge

Historic England’s Vanishing Archive NB the actual, physical, archive, is still there and available for people to go and look at in person:

["T]he third-party service that we use to display Archive images on our website has ceased trading and entered administration.”
The 11 September version named the damage:
"This means that images are not currently available across Archive records and the Aerial Photo Explorer. Images of England images are also not available on the National Heritage List for England.”
Ground shots, architectural stills, catalogue images, aerials, and the old Images of England pictures on list entries. All of it.
The third party, named by Michael Pritchard on British Photographic History, is SmartFrame Technologies Limited. Henry Page and Shaun Walker of Mercer & Hole were appointed administrators on 26 August 2026. BusinessCloud reports assets of about £2.3m, cash of £182k, liabilities of £1.7m, and a firm that “failed to secure further funding.”
SmartFrame did not store the Archive. It streamed it: zoom, captions, right-click protection, screenshot blocking, anti-scrape. A public body wrapped a national collection in a start-up’s DRM. When the start-up died, the pictures went with it.

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A Bookseller Confronts a Mysterious Company Hunting His Rarest Books:

DiSabatino did not fill Blue Angel’s purchase orders. But he kept ruminating uneasily on the specific request for the Burden book. “This thing doesn’t have a barcode or an ISBN number. Typically those things don’t end up on those bulk platforms” like AbeBooks or Amazon, DiSabatino explains. So how AI companies could, if an AI company were in fact involved, become “aware of something as obscure as a Chris Burden self-published artists’ book is also baffling,” he told me. “Why does it want it? It can’t learn anything from the text because there’s barely any text. If one were to have a more possibly grim dystopian—or hell, realistic—perception, one could say that it’s a lack of linear thought. It’s just all appetite. It’s a fuckin’ predator.”
“Books have an ephemerality to them,” DiSabatino says. “So to further endanger the availability and access to them by having them be destroyed and the information isn’t retained… I don’t know where that leaves us. We’re eliminating portions of our cultural history and sending us back to this area of: who controls information, who has access to information?”

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AI is distorting archaeology and flattening Indigenous Knowledge (are we surprised):

While GenAI, the technology behind chatbots and image generators, has the potential to broaden access to knowledge, it can also popularise false histories and strip Indigenous Knowledge of its context.
It’s something that can undermine both scientific expertise and Indigenous authority.
As researchers, we are increasingly concerned about how these systems scrape and reuse Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) without consent.
So, how do we combat misinformation while keeping genuine scientific knowledge publicly accessible? And what do we give up when we share that knowledge openly, only to have AI appropriate it?