orichalcum

Carobeth Laird, Encounter with an Angry God: Recollections of my life with John Peabody Harrington (1975)

Skimmed, partial---amidst the readings for one of my classes, I was reminded that an undergrad prof had mentioned Laird years ago. The prof said that Laird's book made Harrington sound both brilliant and "like ... not just a piece of work, but a pile of work."

I'd say that from Laird's text, it seems that Harrington was firmly neurodivergent, unable to connect with Laird, apt to project his mother ineffectually onto her (without understanding that he was doing so or that his repeated errors were painful for Laird), and lucky in benefiting as a white man from the work others did for him and around him. Yes, also quite bright, but the inability alongside it to balance schedule disruption and the undertaking of basic self-care, including regular meals, is awfully familiar from at least one person I've dated previously. He didn't "have to" learn it because others sort of handled it, until they didn't.

Laird downplays her own brilliance in the text, though it's clear that she knew herself. She managed to secure a divorce from Harrington in an era when her father could appear in court on her behalf.

The long-ago undergrad prof was a person with a teenaged child, at the time, and had recently divorced a husband who was a piece of work. Harrington's work was amazing, she said, though a lot of "Harrington's work" is only attributed to him---often by him, unfairly. She had been working on Harrington's work, including his letters, and--- The classroom full of students interested in Celtic studies blinked at her, she realized she'd hared off on a tangent, and we went back to how the late Romans wrote about, or misattributed stuff about, continental Celts. What Harrington worked principally on, and what the undergrad prof doubled in, was indigenous languages, mostly in California.

Well, drat, the things I wanted most to do with Python to Excel files have needed the skimming of another book: Felix Zumstein, Python for Excel, 2nd ed. preview---that is, O'Reilly will release the second edition in June 2026, but its semifinal draft is on Safari already, for community comment.

Stephens's book, in yesterday's post, is published by No Starch and thus also on Safari (to which one local public library subscribes). Its first three chapters ( in case anyone else were pondering Python x Excel--doubtful )

Once upon a time, I used an old copy of Pkzip to peek into a v2 .epub file (they are in fact .zip containers) and devise a plan to crosswalk Adobe InDesign epub-export XML to the XML grammar I needed. It was InDesign CS6, I think. Today I used a copy of 7zip to peek into an .xlsx file, then closed it without skimming the XML bits within. Python on Excel will be fine, thanks, in preference to reminding myself about the XSLT I used to know, because Python can open and close files safely as part of the scripted processing steps.

I did end up finishing Uzma Jalaluddin's Detective Aunty. It's fine---in particular, it's fair about the social roles in which it places its characters. I liked (and had totally predicted) a particular pairing revealed during a pivotal scene near the story's resolution. Would read another, if it becomes serial.

With similar slowness, I'm now about halfway through the second Thursday Murder Club title. It's also fine, a bit bumpier and more obvious than Aunty.

I think my next read, in parallel, is about to be Tracy Stephens' Python for Excel Users (2025). I might know more Python than Excel, if considering any vintage of either one, and there are other recent books that land more firmly on the Python side of the join---but spreadsheets have been my acquaintance for longer, my tasks with Excel over time have been more varied, and (honestly) I've heard more people complain at length about it.

(First spreadsheet acquaintance: AppleWorks 1.1. heh. When I had to make my father's resumes and cover letters, it was clear pretty quickly that AppleWorks could not help us; my mother brought home a copy of pfs:Write, the only word processing app that the local ComputerLand retail shop had. Soon afterwards, fortunately, my mother gained access to WordPerfect 5.0 (and Lotus 1-2-3) via her bus-ad classes, and I moved the job-app stuff into WP, which unlike pfs:Write could hold its tab stops consistently from screen display to dot-matrix printer output.)