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Violet Crown

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Violet Crown last won the day on November 17 2019

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About Violet Crown

  • Birthday August 24

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  1. Book Friends, After many years of posting at TWTM, I think it's time to be done. I didn't just want to disappear from Book a Week, though. Robin, thank you for your years of keeping this thread going.
  2. I started it as a read-aloud once and discovered it was shockingly anti-Catholic, even by the standards of the time. The Roman Papists are the enemies of free thought and liberty, etc. That didn't work for our family.
  3. Hello friends! This week I obligingly read one of dh's favorite books, Francis Beaumont's satirical play The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607). If the title makes you snicker, it was supposed to. Jacobean drama always reminds me how people tend to think that the arc of history is especially easy to read backwards: today we're frank about sex and violence, whereas the Victorians were prudish, and the Puritans more prudish still, and so we can just keep extrapolating backwards culturally with our three data points. But in fact the English Civil Wars and the Puritan Interregnum had a pronounced effect on English culture. There was a reason the Puritans of the 17th century promptly banned the theater, and the sex and violence of Beaumont's time never really came back. Currently reading William Langland's great satirical allegory Piers Plowman. I've read it before in Middle English; this time I'm going through it quickly in a modernized version for Middle Girl's English course. I was going to quote a bit but MG is off somewhere with it.
  4. I have not finished anything. It hasn't been a week for reading, as a previously difficult situation has gotten significantly more difficult. I may need to take a break from the boards for a while. ETA: @aggieamy, I'm glad John got to have a normal trick-or-treat. Middle Girl and one of her friends put a card table on our porch, taped one of those social-distance-stand-here floor stickers to the walkway at a 6-foot distance, and used a pair of replica trebuchets to launch candy into small children's buckets (or heads). A good time was had by all. I sat inside with MG's friend's mom, a/k/a my friend, and talked to her about everything and drank the wine she thoughtfully brought. So that was all good.
  5. Congratulations @Junie on completing your Bible in a year! And I love the Coronasquash, @Kareni.
  6. Order placed! Would it be too much to inquire what people ordered from BWB?
  7. Poor Sophia! On the other hand, I was always able to be excused to go home by saying I felt weak and dizzy - "Oh dear you're so pale I can see you're really ill!" I'd be doing great with my 10x10's this year if they were from this year, but they're from 2019.
  8. Wait, I buy books frequently from Better World, usually at <$1 plus shipping. I didn't see any minimum book price. Can this be true? There's an asterisk by "free shipping" but I can't find what it is asterisking.
  9. Medieval writings from Italy to England refer to "first sleep" and "second sleep." It was taken for granted that sleep was biphasic, and the awake time between "sleeps" was, at least in England, thought of as a time for conversation and reflection (and of course propitious for conception), as one was rested from the labors of the day but the new day's work couldn't be started. I've run into the modern notion that one of the ascetic rigors of medieval religious life was sleep deprivation from rising in the middle of the night to pray (Nocturns/Matins); but this was simply a natural waking time and so marked by prayer before returning for second sleep. When I had my first baby, I was struck by the emphasis in "mommy" books and discussion on the difficulties of teaching the baby to sleep through the night, and thought how strange that would have seemed to the medievals. I wonder if this is our last vestige of cultural awareness of biphasic sleep.
  10. It needs "England calls Ireland to come help. Ireland walks up behind England and punches it in the kidney."
  11. @Little Green Leaves Catherine of Siena sounds fascinating. Still looking for an affordable copy. What I did find a copy of was a lovely little 1908 edition of Yonge's The Daisy Chain, thanks to being its sole bidder on Ebay. So that's on the stack.
  12. I haven't read Sire, nor Ripperger. I read earlier this year the recently deceased Fr. Cekada's book on the New Rite, which touched on some Vatican 2 issues but didn't have much new to say there. I'd gotten tired of reading critiques of the New Rite that used Fr. Cekada's original research without crediting him, presumably out of concern for guilt by association, and wanted to see for myself what he had to say. His research is well-documented and his conclusions from it are convincing, except for his key conclusion of invalidity, which relies on a singularly unconvincing (to me) line of argument. Of course as a sedevacantist, Fr. Cekada cuts the Gordian knot of magisterial authority, though not in a way I can agree with. Iota Unum is a very different book. Amerio was an academic, and writes like it; some sections are eye-glazing. But he is devastatingly thorough, and had available to him a wealth of untranslated primary sources in Italian, French, and German. It may take me a while to get through it. I've taken a brief break from everything to join in Robin's challenge for this week and am reading this evening Plautus' comedy The Ghost. Said ghost is of course not an actual ghost, but a ploy by a clever house-slave to protect his dissipated young master (and himself) from the wrath of young master's father, a rich merchant just returned from years abroad, who will learn how his son and slave have been wasting the merchant's fortune on wine, women, and feasting. In other words, a variation on essentially the same plot as every other Roman comedy.
  13. I found this to be helpful in keeping the countries straight. No, seriously. If World War I was a Bar Fight
  14. Of course people can be overwhelmed, and express it in what seem to be minor complaints. That's exactly why I would find a "21 Days of Judging Others' Complaining" challenge to be inappropriate. My own complaining, though, is usually of the "That reminds me of this sub-optimal thing someone did a few years ago, did I ever tell you that story?" type. I'm happy to take up the challenge of thinking before I babble for a few weeks. ETA: I started exactly one of those complaints yesterday evening (a few hours after signing on to the challenge), and Middle Girl interrupted with "Oh Mom's gotten started on that one again." 😬 Teenagers are like consciences with extra snark.
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