Things I learned while looking up other things, 2024.02.11
Dear friends,
London is a city that rewards the reader. It is all reader fan service, as far as I can tell. Literary references lurk in alleys, lounge in doorways, nod genteelly to you on the street. It's not just Dickens and Woolf, either. I stumbled across a map of European writers writing about London; this entry is very close to where I've been staying the last few days.
I visited this picture today (which I'd never seen in person before) and have now decided on a new way to find historical/alternate history fiction: look at portraits until you see someone interesting and then see if there are any books featuring them. Seeing Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, made me realize that I should really try the Baroque Cycle again (only in ebook format this time, those books are enormous). Also on the reading list: this comic version of a long-lost play about Toussaint L'Ouverture.
I almost went to this exhibit based on this sentence alone: "In 2000, American artist Pope.L created the world’s most precarious toilet. It was a vast rickety wooden tower, topped with a porcelain throne upon which he sat, covered in flour, and ate The Wall Street Journal."
I was trying to explain Tang to someone born in this century and found this marvelous factoid: "In the Middle East, more than half of Tang’s annual sales happen in just six weeks around Ramadan" which, okay? Is Tang the eggnog of Ramadan? Mazout ('fuel oil') is the name for cola mixed with beer in Belgium. (No idea if it's associated with a holiday).
Under 'surprising but not surprising, really': "The name Aztec was first coined by an outsider—the Aztec called themselves the Mexica (also Culhua-Mexica). In the early 1800s, German scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt coined the term for the people of Tenochtitlan based on the word “Aztlán,” the traditional name of the Mexica’s ancestral homeland."
Stay well!
Your friend,
Erin
PS Hi to all y'all who joined on Robin Sloan's kind suggestion!