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Når bakken er frossen og dammen er kald
This is one of those bunch-of-things posts. It is raining rather drearily outside when I hoped for post-Christmas snow. There are several months for that yet.
1. Christmas. Worked really well. There was eggnog in the afternoon with about a dozen people, one of whom stayed for dinner; in the morning, I opened stockings and exchanged books with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel; my brother and his wife were around in the evening and I read Peter Dickinson's King and Joker (1976) on the couch while listening to a sampler CD of live jazz. rushthatspeaks made me an origami Viking hat ornament. The fact that someone has figured out how to fold such a thing affirms my faith in humanity and the fact that Rush did it for me is one of the reasons I love them. I did very little of anything yesterday except hours of Nokia and writing very flash fic for handful_ofdust, but it was good quiet. Leafed through my book on Etruscan cities. I have new software to play with.
2. Yuletide. I have not finished reading my way through the archives, but I am pleased to have found some things already that make me as happy as the first year I discovered this project.
"The Very Secret Diaries of Saint Augustine." The Very Secret Diary form should be played out. It should not play well—if at all—with early Christian history. I am considering recommending this fic to anyone who ever has to read the Confessions. As Cliffs Notes. I wanted to excerpt a line or two as illustration, but I kept just re-reading the thing and snickering.
"Vigil." I complained once about Yuletide and Measure for Measure. I feel slightly bad about that now, because someone has written fix-it fic for the ending without changing a word—or a silence—of the script. It's hard to argue the play doesn't need it. I need to write a post about definitive interpretations sometime.
"Cotton Tail." A novel-spanning, thoughtful look at an unsympathetic character from Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953). If it was not written by the author of "Að fara til Íslands" and "Those voices that will not be drowned," I hope they've seen it. It may succeed in making me re-read the novel.
"On Formally Undecidable Propositions in Principia Mathematica." It's Lovelace and Babbage and it's cute. I'd have thrown in a Turing joke, but that's me.
"Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua." This is another one of the Yuletide stories which could be published as original fiction, because it may draw its interpretation of the characters from Pat Barker's Regeneration (1991), but Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were very real and it is no slight on the author that I envision this brief ghost-meeting as a tableau from Derek Jarman's War Requiem (1989).
"Lebenswerk." All the backstory you never knew you needed for Sunset Boulevard (1950), bleeding in and out of the lives of Wilder's actors and the historical Hollywood that would have surrounded Norma Desmond and Max von Mayerling. With stills. I don't know whether this particular layer of meta was intentional, but a laptop is a very small picture indeed.
"Moving In." I think this is the conclusion everyone who watches Black Books (2000–2004) eventually arrives at, once it crosses your mind to wonder (beyond because it would be funny) why somebody as socially dysfunctional as Bernard Black would run a bookshop in the first place, but it's very neatly written. The blurry staccato mutterings of Bernard coming to his limited fund of senses are the verbal equivalent of that one hungover scene in the first season whererushthatspeaks and I stared at the screen, impressed, and decided he'd broken his face.
"Girl of My Dreams." Because whoever wrote this one not only loves Singin' in the Rain (1952), they have Cosmo's voice exactly: I can hear Donald O'Connor. There are two lines in here I love for the different things they say, accurately, about him.
"How Many Strawberries Grow in the Sea?" I am not quite sure how to categorize this one: it's a novella-length crossover between Eric Williams' The Wooden Horse (1949) and Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953), meaning that strictly speaking it's about half RPF—Williams' book was a fictional treatment of his real-life escape from Stalag Luft III, expanded from an earlier memoir and changing all the names. It works, though.
3. All of my leads for Boston-area housing have either failed to pan out or fallen through. I am ending the year in many better circumstances than I began it, but my living situation is something I really want to resolve.rosefox put together a useful and rather wonderfully worded post at the time, to the point that I might put "queer and nerdy, nonsmoking" on business cards if I had them. Further suggestions would really be appreciated.
Rob and I are going tonight to see Disney on Ice: 100 Years of Magic at TD Garden, tickets courtesy of a friend of his who works for the show. I can't remember the last time I saw an ice show live. Possibly never. Winter Olympics doesn't count, especially with all the commercial breaks these days.
1. Christmas. Worked really well. There was eggnog in the afternoon with about a dozen people, one of whom stayed for dinner; in the morning, I opened stockings and exchanged books with
derspatchel; my brother and his wife were around in the evening and I read Peter Dickinson's King and Joker (1976) on the couch while listening to a sampler CD of live jazz. rushthatspeaks made me an origami Viking hat ornament. The fact that someone has figured out how to fold such a thing affirms my faith in humanity and the fact that Rush did it for me is one of the reasons I love them. I did very little of anything yesterday except hours of Nokia and writing very flash fic for handful_ofdust, but it was good quiet. Leafed through my book on Etruscan cities. I have new software to play with.2. Yuletide. I have not finished reading my way through the archives, but I am pleased to have found some things already that make me as happy as the first year I discovered this project.
"The Very Secret Diaries of Saint Augustine." The Very Secret Diary form should be played out. It should not play well—if at all—with early Christian history. I am considering recommending this fic to anyone who ever has to read the Confessions. As Cliffs Notes. I wanted to excerpt a line or two as illustration, but I kept just re-reading the thing and snickering.
"Vigil." I complained once about Yuletide and Measure for Measure. I feel slightly bad about that now, because someone has written fix-it fic for the ending without changing a word—or a silence—of the script. It's hard to argue the play doesn't need it. I need to write a post about definitive interpretations sometime.
"Cotton Tail." A novel-spanning, thoughtful look at an unsympathetic character from Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953). If it was not written by the author of "Að fara til Íslands" and "Those voices that will not be drowned," I hope they've seen it. It may succeed in making me re-read the novel.
"On Formally Undecidable Propositions in Principia Mathematica." It's Lovelace and Babbage and it's cute. I'd have thrown in a Turing joke, but that's me.
"Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua." This is another one of the Yuletide stories which could be published as original fiction, because it may draw its interpretation of the characters from Pat Barker's Regeneration (1991), but Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were very real and it is no slight on the author that I envision this brief ghost-meeting as a tableau from Derek Jarman's War Requiem (1989).
"Lebenswerk." All the backstory you never knew you needed for Sunset Boulevard (1950), bleeding in and out of the lives of Wilder's actors and the historical Hollywood that would have surrounded Norma Desmond and Max von Mayerling. With stills. I don't know whether this particular layer of meta was intentional, but a laptop is a very small picture indeed.
"Moving In." I think this is the conclusion everyone who watches Black Books (2000–2004) eventually arrives at, once it crosses your mind to wonder (beyond because it would be funny) why somebody as socially dysfunctional as Bernard Black would run a bookshop in the first place, but it's very neatly written. The blurry staccato mutterings of Bernard coming to his limited fund of senses are the verbal equivalent of that one hungover scene in the first season where
rushthatspeaks and I stared at the screen, impressed, and decided he'd broken his face."Girl of My Dreams." Because whoever wrote this one not only loves Singin' in the Rain (1952), they have Cosmo's voice exactly: I can hear Donald O'Connor. There are two lines in here I love for the different things they say, accurately, about him.
"How Many Strawberries Grow in the Sea?" I am not quite sure how to categorize this one: it's a novella-length crossover between Eric Williams' The Wooden Horse (1949) and Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953), meaning that strictly speaking it's about half RPF—Williams' book was a fictional treatment of his real-life escape from Stalag Luft III, expanded from an earlier memoir and changing all the names. It works, though.
3. All of my leads for Boston-area housing have either failed to pan out or fallen through. I am ending the year in many better circumstances than I began it, but my living situation is something I really want to resolve.
rosefox put together a useful and rather wonderfully worded post at the time, to the point that I might put "queer and nerdy, nonsmoking" on business cards if I had them. Further suggestions would really be appreciated.Rob and I are going tonight to see Disney on Ice: 100 Years of Magic at TD Garden, tickets courtesy of a friend of his who works for the show. I can't remember the last time I saw an ice show live. Possibly never. Winter Olympics doesn't count, especially with all the commercial breaks these days.
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Is it that it's a disappointment compared to its predecessor, or that it does unreasonable things with the characters as established in King and Joker, or what?
The Dickinson you want to read if you haven't is A Proper Gallows. It's about a production of The Tempest in 1944, and it's about art and selfishness.
I haven't. That sounds very good. Thank you.
no subject