No, not those, those are my time-travel trousers

[sovay]

1. My poem "Taking the Auspices" is now online at inkscrawl. The rest of the issue is impressive, too—selkies, Catullus, cities in translation.

2. I still don't know that I'm going to see Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011), but I will take any excuse to read an interview with John Hurt, especially when he talks about weedkilling and Facebook: "I think people should be protected from being made to feel that they want to know what somebody famous had for breakfast."

3. Counteract Orson Scott Card; help rachelmanija list queer main characters in genre YA. Also, write Hamlet slash.

4. Courtesy of someone I met, appropriately, on Sunday at Tea: chap-hop.

5. lesser_celery and I are starting Millennium (1996–99) tonight.

Comments

[sovay]

My opinion on "Auspices" hasn't changed (well, it's risen just a bit, but I loved it from the first, so it's not as though you'd notice).

Thank you. I do take you seriously.

Any chance of the magazine getting a review in Versification? I have no idea how one goes about that sort of thing, except that I'd love to see the major (and minor) speculative magazines reviewed regularly, not just as chance and taste take them.

In all other things, we agree, but our taste in movies is often north and south.

It's not so much the film itself—the cast is a gallery of character actors to queue for, never mind the source material or the director—as the fact that I consider the original 1979 BBC series to be one of the great Platonic adaptations of novel to film and I can see almost no way of improving on it, except perhaps in the casting of Toby Esterhase. (I am very fond of Bernard Hepton, but he is very little like the slight, silvery, self-acknowledged "creep" of the novel; for which I blame the script more than the actor, since he is nearly pitch-perfect in Smiley's People (1982), where the character is written much more closely to the books.) Six hours is the appropriate runtime for a novel, especially one with such a controlled complexity of stories within stories, plots within plots. Compressed, it might retain the bleak, exhausted busywork of post-imperial espionage where a cold war is no substitute for the lines that everyone once knew drew allegiances comfortingly here and there, where there were never any heroes, but now there are even fewer friends; but I think by necessity much of the individual richness will be sacrificed, the slow accumulation of lies and rumors and the brittle evidence of memory that all together mean something like a horror novel, those fabled things that no one was meant to know. I love Colin Firth, but Ian Richardson looked like Bill Haydon: "The leather patches of his jacket were stitched on like diamonds, not squares, which from behind gave him a harlequin look. His spectacles were jammed up into his hair like goggles. For a moment they followed [Peter Guillam] uncertainly . . . Then he grinned, so that his crescent eyebrows went straight up like a clown's, and his face became handsome and absurdly young." And I am sorry, Gary Oldman is not Alec Guinness, who got so deeply into le Carré's head as Smiley that his acting in Tinker, Tailor influenced the writing of Smiley's People (a hall of mirrors, since Guinness in turn was stealing from le Carré himself). I would like to see the film, but I am afraid it will register constantly as an unsatisfactory, beautifully surfaced kind of Cliff's notes, which would not be fair.

The gorgon's asshole, perhaps.

Thank you for that image.

Someone who isn't me should write the Big Gay Hamlet where Hamlet's father is gay, Gertrude was a dynastic marriage, and that's why he's always off at war, kicking ass and taking Norwegian names, because fighting, he's very good at; trying to be a husband to a woman he never wanted in the first place, who'd much have preferred his brother and doesn't even make a secret of it, not so much.

I enjoyed "Fighting Trousers," and if this something new in that vein, I am prepared to be amused.

This is "Fighting Trousers," I'm afraid, but kenjari provided a link to the tea-paean "Cup of Brown Joy," and of course he's got a deeply entertaining website.

Speaking of which, say hello to Lucy Butler for me. Actually, just run.

. . . So noted.

Millenium is an interesting show.

I really should write it up; it just hasn't been a conducive day. Three episodes in, I'm just in love.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of asking Erzebet if I could do the first two issues. I just need to get some other stuff out of the queue.

[sovay]

I was thinking of asking Erzebet if I could do the first two issues.

Yay!