Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

It's one of those weeks when my responses apply to more than one post at once, often more than to the specific posts individually. Also often tangentially. So:

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Umm. This ran longer than I thought, so I'm going to say more on different subjects later rather than trying to jam them all into the same post.

ETA: This just applies to performance music. I'm also uninterested in performing dance or poetry at this time. I'm pretty comfortable reading prose.

As we were putting our coats on at Caribou, I was raving to Ginger about how wonderful Vilhelm Moberg's two-volume History of the Swedish People is, how he assumes you can tell Sten Sture the Elder from Sten Sture the Younger in a dark alley and goes on from there to sink his teeth into Swedish history, such that secret history fantasy novels practically write themselves from it and I might as well just sit back and do my nails and watch it happening.

I turned to leave, and I noticed that the three people (man, woman, child) at the next table were all staring at us. "What's your name?" asked the little girl. I said, "Marissa, what's yours?" "Siri." "That's a very pretty name," I said, "a very pretty Norwegian name, if I'm not mistaken." "That's right," said her mom, and then her dad chimed in sheepishly, "I couldn't help hearing you talk about Moberg. I love Moberg. I'm in the middle of rereading his tetralogy, you know, the --" "Emigrant books," I said with him. He grinned: "Yeah. I think it's really neat what you're doing, the stories you were telling her." "Oh, wow, thanks!" I said.

It was good.

(And seriously, I know matociquala says all history is like this, but come on! These people have last names like Night-and-Day and Sun-on-the-Water! They differentiate between branches of a family with alchemical symbols! They go around making peasant treaties regardless of what their lords think! It's just so fabulous. They make my job so much fun.) (Well, maybe I have a little something to do with that. Still: fun!)