vital functions

[kaberett]

Reading. Regular Ysewijn, The National Trust Book of Puddings. EYB indexing, part of the "National Trust cookbooks" sub-interest; see previous. I think I am unlikely to keep this one; I'm sorry but I don't love steamed puddings enough to actually make them (though I might try her baked rice pudding just to reassure myself that I still love my extant rice pudding recipes best). Mildly surprised that this is in the going-back-to-the-charity-shop pile, but probably it is, or at least will be once I've finished my proofreading second pass through the book.

McKinley Valentine, The Code For Everything, which I've had open in a tab since... probably when it was first published, oof. Short story. Some compelling individual portraits but it also feels very young; specifically the point-of-view character's apparent total lack of awareness of the significant meaningful difference between "situations where you have a job to do and a specific script to follow" and "situations where you are actually attempting to interact, socially, with peers, without the buffer of being literally a servant".

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David J. Linden, Touch, as mentioned last week. This went from "mostly very good and informative, my discomfort with the way he's talking about sex might just be me being prudish?" (which, well, it didn't seem hugely likely, but maybe?) to "... WAIT YOU JUST SAID WHAT"...

... via a page-and-a-half long diversion on autistic people that made me want to throw it across the room...

... to, infuriatingly, back to very good and useful -- and not just in the chapter titled Pain and Emotion that was the reason I acquired it in the first place.

Structurally, he's doing the standard thing of framing each chapter with an anecdote, sometimes dressed up as a thought experiment, right? Which goes along ... fine, up until chapter 3. Which opens with him cheerfully discussing a trial he served on the jury for, wherein the defendant was accused (and eventually convicted on all counts) of rape, battery, and unlawful imprisonment... of a sixteen year old. (In the USA, for the additional context that provides on ages of consent.) As, and this is the thing that really gets me, an introduction to the concept of the role of C-tactile afferents in pleasant sensation, where the punchline (yes, yes I did, and no it wasn't intentional) was the defendant's justification for subsequent violence, namely that "it was a really bad handjob".

Paragraph break.

Now let's imagine, in the style of a Quentin Tarantino revenge fantasy, that the girlfriend, newly empowered and burning with righteous fervor, has dragged her batterer/rapist into the alley behind the courthouse and forced him to undergo a painful biopsy of the sural nerve.

And on we merrily go into neuroanatomy.

To be clear: the sum total information we get about her actual interiority, as opposed to what her attacker did and how he felt about all of it and conducted himself during the trial, is "Her testimony was consistent with the medical examination, but she was concerned about the outcome of the case, as she said she still loved him."

So all of that, combined with the absolute insistence on referring to the kind of touch that optimally activates C-tactile afferents as "caress", and the footnote he merrily begins "In my limited erotic experience, women with small breasts..." , and the fascinating utter lack of any acknowledgement that "caressing" touch might ever induce anything but a sense of safety and trust and pleasantness (never MIND the part where the concept of rape never comes up again in the subsequent chapter on sexual touch) is... well, I found it really offputting, shockingly, and that was before I reached the aforementioned page and a half on how autistics are broken in the social cognitions because we rate "having our arm stroked with a soft brush, while we're lying in an MRI machine, by an experimenter we don't know outside of this very limited context" as less pleasant than allistics. Because, obviously, correlation of "the smallest activation of social cognition centres (the medial prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal sulcus by an optimum-speed arm caress" with "the most severe autism" (as measured by Simon Baron-Cohen's Autism Quotient questionnaire, and did I mention n = 19) reflects a "defect in caress processing". (Voos et al. 2012.)

Two further points to make about this one: firstly, the acknowledgements include this, which I will present without further comment:

I am also indebted to my lay readers who pushed for greater clarity, let me know when things got too nerdy, and rightfully insisted that I cut some of the lamest and most offensive anecdotes (they can't be blamed for the ones that remain).

Secondly, with the exception of the autism bit he's really careful to make sure to emphasise the distinctions between what we do and don't, and can and can't know; to highlight places where data is lacking or results didn't replicate; to make sure you can chase down all of his citations. Did I mention how infuriating I find the thing as a whole? Because good grief.

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Ann Leckie, Lake of Souls. Courtesy of the introduction to chapter 3 in the previous work, I desperately needed something Pleasant! So I finally got around to opening up this. I have a LOT OF FEELINGS about the titular story; I winced about the political commentary in Another Word for World; I am currently part way through The Justified. And I am looking forward, very much, to the comfort rereads that come in just a little bit.

Skimmed several more pain-related papers.

... and I am also making some actual progress on catching up with my reading page! By which I mean "... I'm almost a whole entire week into May." I make no promises about how far I'm going to actually get.

Watching. 'nother episode of Farscape: S02E05 The Way We Weren't. Will concede that this made me go "... okay, yeah, I see why I needed to watch everything that went before, and damn it I am Having Some Feelings".

I have now sat or indeed wiggled my way through through Squish The Fish (Cosmic Kids' "baby yoga") in its entirety, it being a great favourite of The Toddler. I continue to have fascinating conversations about things that are easy for toddlers versus for grown-ups with the resident physiotherapist.

Cooking. A sweetcorn, tomato and runner bean curry, unearthed via Eat Your Books when I realised I had somewhat unintentionally got the nice organic veg box people to bring us runner beans (of which I am generally suspicious because of the texture of the pod).

Two loaves of actually vaguely competent bread (turns out scraping together the executive function to make the timing work... works better).

For breakfast this morning: the next recipe from the Welsh cakes book, being blackberry and apple splits (thereby using up some of the stewed apple in the freezer!). Could stand to have significantly less sugar than the recipe suggested and frozen blackberries very much want to make something that could only generously be called a purée rather than a soup, and definitely benefitted from being left to stand and cool before any attempt is made at the actual splitting, but A is very happy so I am content :)

Eating. Pizza Express takeaway to go with the Farscape on Tuesday evening when we were very, very tired.

Lunch in the café at Forty Hall this afternoon, featuring orange-and-lavender loaf cake!

Blackberries and onions and tomatoes and my mother's fig jam. Many very good food. Very pleased yes.

Exploring. Forty Hall! We went on an ADVENTURE this afternoon to get LUNCH there, which was slightly complicated by the part where I Induced Bronchoconstriction via Exercise very early on it the trip out such that I spent a significant amount of time on the way both there and back again going "nope, need to stop" and spending a while lying on the grass staring up at the blue sky and the wispy white clouds through the various oak trees we passed. I have thoughts about this specific medical experience that I might write up elsewhen, BUT we WENT ON AN ADVENTURE and explored the farm shop and had lunch/afternoon tea in the café and walked around the walled garden and went home VIA THE (outskirts of the) BEAVER ENCLOSURE (thank you all, looking up that link means I have just discovered that TOURS NOW EXIST as of last month!!!) (more context: first beavers reintroduced to London after something like 400 years, back in 2022). Very very pleased to have managed this.

Creating. Hmm. I haven't been creating, as such, but I have definitely been consulting with A about some 3d prints to make sorting the in-game currency easier at Admin: the LRP!

Growing. Everything is tomatoes. I have not managed to get overwintering onions going; maybe tomorrow?

Rooted lemongrass potted up; let's see how long it takes me to kill it this time.

Observing. Alas no beavers, but lots of excellent birds, including two excursions (one solo, one partnered) to visit the cootlings :) The one that hatched last (by a considerable margin) is very definitely still no more than about half the size of its elder siblings!

Comments

[aldabra]

Hang on. It is a defect in caress-processing that the pleasantness of the caress is modulated by the nature of the thing doing the caressing? That's the absolute minimum I would expect from anything pretending to be a caress-processing module.

That's like the argument that everyone is obviously bisexual because you would respond positively to sexual stimulation even if you didn't know who was stimulating you. I think there are a whole lot of people who would not respond positively in that situation. Is this also an autistic thing?

[kaberett]

APPARENTLY SO. At least according to the study authors and this dude. SO ANGRY I CONSIDERED THROWING THE BOOK.

I have no idea whether the sexual stimulation example is an autistic vs allistic thing but I strongly suspect that even if it is there are also significant gender correlates.

[vass]

Re Linden, what the fucking FUCK?

[kaberett]

I AM SO CROSS ABOUT IT. IT'S SO NEARLY SUCH A GOOD BOOK and as it is I... am reluctant to mention it anywhere without MASSIVE caveats.

[davidgillon]

Linden: I had to stop and wonder why my face was suddenly hurting - it was the expression I was pulling, simultaneously boggled and horrified and with mouth skinning back into a growl.

And wrt his 'lay readers', my immediate conclusion is that they're clearly all also allistic. Which probably didn't need a great deal of insight.

[enismirdal]

Oh oh! The PhD student I supervise has some experiments at Forty Hall. So if you saw a crate of tomatoes and strawberries and marigolds and things with a sign on it, that was us! (She is looking at how different types of urban and peri-urban site support pollination and other ecosystem services relevant to food production.)

[kaberett]

Oh awesome!

[fyreharper]

That Author: augh, creeping horrors. Made me want to throw things also. What the fuck.

(How irritating that he apparently also has useful things to say.)