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We can trace the lines they followed sixteen hundred years ago
Last night's dreams were full of rivers and rainforest and severed heads and people whose wrists were sliced with gills, like razor cuts. This stuff had better alchemize into story, or my brain has no excuse.
I am going to need to rent the first season of M*A*S*H after all: the episodes currently broadcast on TV Land are cut for commercials, and I haven't been watching them regularly anyway. At least I have had a good week for movies. In the last five days, I've seen Notes on a Scandal (2006) with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and nineweaving, Little Miss Sunshine (2006) with gaudior and weirdquark, and Dinner at Eight (1933) with my mother. And all of these I liked, although throughout Notes on a Scandal I kept thinking how much better the film would have been without Philip Glass' score, which was alternately minimalist and bombastic and at no point suited the story. But because of Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight, an entire character in Victor / Victoria (1982) finally makes sense, and for Steve Carell I will see The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and maybe the DVD of Notes on a Scandal will come with some option to turn off the score, because otherwise it was a terrific film. Next up should be Pan's Labyrinth. I've realized that there are many fewer movies than books with secondary worldbuilding that I really like—possibly because film often feels like a filter through someone else's resonance, while words on the page allow for more overlap between the writer's and the reader's particular images. But I am hardly averse to giving Guillermo del Toro's resonance a try.
Speaking of secondary worlds, I have been discussing Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle withfleurdelis28. Cut for anyone who cares about spoilers.
Along with The Lives of Christopher Chant, Howl's Moving Castle is one of the touchstone books of my childhood. I was six or seven years old when I read it for the first time, and it hardwired right in; this is one of the reasons, I suspect, that I still haven't seen the Miyazaki adaptation. And on the one hand, such an early influx of Diana Wynne Jones could not have been bad for me. On the other, though, I wonder whether certain aspects of the book might have seemed stranger or more familiar to me if I'd encountered them at a later age—I had far less trouble with moving castles and fire demons than I did with the scenes set in Wales, because at six-seven years old I didn't recognize Sophie's perceptions of computer games ("The main magic box had a glass front like the one downstairs, but it seemed to be showing writing and diagrams more than pictures . . . 'Don't interrupt,' one of the boys said. 'He'll lose his life'") or photocopies ("a strange, slightly shiny paper . . . printed in bold letters, but they were slightly gray and blurred, and there were gray blurs, like retreating stormclouds, round all the edges") or twentieth-century clothes ("Michael's jacket had become a waist-length padded thing. He lifted his foot, with a canvas shoe on it, and stared at the tight blue things encasing his legs"). Some of those details took years to come into focus. "Sospan Fach," etc.
In the same way, only on this latest re-read did it quite impress itself on me that while Howl is a magician so good he has to send Sophie to blacken his name to the King of Ingary ("Howell, you see, was my last pupil and by far my best . . . I saw at a glance that he had twice the imagination and twice the abilities"), wherever he comes from in Wales he's Howell Jenkins, disreputable and unemployed PhD, who keeps his car in his sister's garage and bribes his nephew with unique computer games and his niece adores him, however much her parents do not. In another book, this double-sided life might have been the main plot. Here, it's backstory that's essentially irrelevant to Sophie, who doesn't much care that Howl comes from another world, except insofar as meeting his family explains a few things about him:
"Don't keep interrupting!" Megan answered in a low, ferocious voice. "Listen now! I've told you before I'm not a storehouse for your property. You're a disgrace to me and Gareth, lounging about in those clothes instead of buying a proper suit and looking respectable for once, taking up with riffraff and layabouts, bringing them to this house! Are you trying to bring me down to your level? You had all that education, and you don't even get a decent job, you just hang around, wasting all that time at college, wasting all those sacrifices other people made, wasting your money . . ."
Megan would have been a match for Mrs. Fairfax. Her voice went on and on. Sophie began to understand how Howl had acquired the habit of slithering out. Megan was the kind of person who made you want to back quietly out of the nearest door. Unfortunately, Howl was backed up against the stairs, and Sophie and Michael were bottled up behind him.
". . . never doing an honest day's work, never getting a job I could be proud of, bringing shame on me and Gareth, coming here and spoiling Mari rotten," Megan ground on remorselessly.
Sophie pushed Michael aside and stumped downstairs, looking as stately as she could manage. "Come, Howl," she said grandly. "We really must be on our way. While we stand here, money is ticking away and your servants are probably selling the gold plate. So nice to meet you," she said to Megan as she arrived at the foot of the stairs, "but we must rush. Howl is such a busy man."
It is a safe bet, I think, that Megan is not the person responsible for the house being named Rivendell. But that's not a reference that Sophie would get, either. And I love that it doesn't matter to her or really to the story as a whole; the book is about other things. With additional awesome randomness thrown in.
I still credit it and Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles with instilling in me an early desire to learn Welsh.
I am going to need to rent the first season of M*A*S*H after all: the episodes currently broadcast on TV Land are cut for commercials, and I haven't been watching them regularly anyway. At least I have had a good week for movies. In the last five days, I've seen Notes on a Scandal (2006) with
rushthatspeaks and nineweaving, Little Miss Sunshine (2006) with gaudior and weirdquark, and Dinner at Eight (1933) with my mother. And all of these I liked, although throughout Notes on a Scandal I kept thinking how much better the film would have been without Philip Glass' score, which was alternately minimalist and bombastic and at no point suited the story. But because of Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight, an entire character in Victor / Victoria (1982) finally makes sense, and for Steve Carell I will see The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and maybe the DVD of Notes on a Scandal will come with some option to turn off the score, because otherwise it was a terrific film. Next up should be Pan's Labyrinth. I've realized that there are many fewer movies than books with secondary worldbuilding that I really like—possibly because film often feels like a filter through someone else's resonance, while words on the page allow for more overlap between the writer's and the reader's particular images. But I am hardly averse to giving Guillermo del Toro's resonance a try.Speaking of secondary worlds, I have been discussing Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle with
fleurdelis28. Cut for anyone who cares about spoilers.Along with The Lives of Christopher Chant, Howl's Moving Castle is one of the touchstone books of my childhood. I was six or seven years old when I read it for the first time, and it hardwired right in; this is one of the reasons, I suspect, that I still haven't seen the Miyazaki adaptation. And on the one hand, such an early influx of Diana Wynne Jones could not have been bad for me. On the other, though, I wonder whether certain aspects of the book might have seemed stranger or more familiar to me if I'd encountered them at a later age—I had far less trouble with moving castles and fire demons than I did with the scenes set in Wales, because at six-seven years old I didn't recognize Sophie's perceptions of computer games ("The main magic box had a glass front like the one downstairs, but it seemed to be showing writing and diagrams more than pictures . . . 'Don't interrupt,' one of the boys said. 'He'll lose his life'") or photocopies ("a strange, slightly shiny paper . . . printed in bold letters, but they were slightly gray and blurred, and there were gray blurs, like retreating stormclouds, round all the edges") or twentieth-century clothes ("Michael's jacket had become a waist-length padded thing. He lifted his foot, with a canvas shoe on it, and stared at the tight blue things encasing his legs"). Some of those details took years to come into focus. "Sospan Fach," etc.
In the same way, only on this latest re-read did it quite impress itself on me that while Howl is a magician so good he has to send Sophie to blacken his name to the King of Ingary ("Howell, you see, was my last pupil and by far my best . . . I saw at a glance that he had twice the imagination and twice the abilities"), wherever he comes from in Wales he's Howell Jenkins, disreputable and unemployed PhD, who keeps his car in his sister's garage and bribes his nephew with unique computer games and his niece adores him, however much her parents do not. In another book, this double-sided life might have been the main plot. Here, it's backstory that's essentially irrelevant to Sophie, who doesn't much care that Howl comes from another world, except insofar as meeting his family explains a few things about him:
"Don't keep interrupting!" Megan answered in a low, ferocious voice. "Listen now! I've told you before I'm not a storehouse for your property. You're a disgrace to me and Gareth, lounging about in those clothes instead of buying a proper suit and looking respectable for once, taking up with riffraff and layabouts, bringing them to this house! Are you trying to bring me down to your level? You had all that education, and you don't even get a decent job, you just hang around, wasting all that time at college, wasting all those sacrifices other people made, wasting your money . . ."
Megan would have been a match for Mrs. Fairfax. Her voice went on and on. Sophie began to understand how Howl had acquired the habit of slithering out. Megan was the kind of person who made you want to back quietly out of the nearest door. Unfortunately, Howl was backed up against the stairs, and Sophie and Michael were bottled up behind him.
". . . never doing an honest day's work, never getting a job I could be proud of, bringing shame on me and Gareth, coming here and spoiling Mari rotten," Megan ground on remorselessly.
Sophie pushed Michael aside and stumped downstairs, looking as stately as she could manage. "Come, Howl," she said grandly. "We really must be on our way. While we stand here, money is ticking away and your servants are probably selling the gold plate. So nice to meet you," she said to Megan as she arrived at the foot of the stairs, "but we must rush. Howl is such a busy man."
It is a safe bet, I think, that Megan is not the person responsible for the house being named Rivendell. But that's not a reference that Sophie would get, either. And I love that it doesn't matter to her or really to the story as a whole; the book is about other things. With additional awesome randomness thrown in.
I still credit it and Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles with instilling in me an early desire to learn Welsh.
no subject
You think that Wales is designed to be read as "somewhere else"? I see the trick as being that Ingary is "real world" to Sophie, and described as such, but the reader knows that actually it is "fantasy land" Wales is actually in the reader's "real world", but described through Sophie's eyes as if it were "fantasy land" - Wales is as much "here" as Manchester or Brighton.
So the problem for Miyazaki is how you depict the "real world", and whether you locate it in Europe (I'm assuming that Ingary is European, which seems justifiable) or make it Japanese... Yes, I can see that you might choose not to open that can of worms.