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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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read Peter Dickinson's King and Joker
I have this odd on-again, off-again with whether Dickinson's books work: there are some that are talismans, and others I can't finish. How was this one?
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It made me very happy.
How was this one?
I really liked it. It's not otherwise connected to Jo Walton's Small Change trilogy, but it's very much the same kind of alternate history: the plot requires a royal scandal which the current configuration of the British royal family will not support, so we skip back to Prince Albert "Eddy" Victor—who did not succumb to influenza in 1892—and proceed forward from his coronation as Victor I to the novel's present day in which the paparazzi-ridden household of his grandson Victor II is taking suggestions on how to economize life at Buckingham Palace (there's still a recession) and fourteen-year-old Princess Louise is beginning to grapple with the split between public face and private person that her life as a king's daughter demands of her, trying to figure out who she really is. There is a co-protagonist, Ivy Durdon, nurse of four generations of royal children, bedridden and dying but still mentally sharp, making connections no one else in the story has the history to. She once met Queen Victoria. It's the kind of mystery where the solution is at once entirely beside the point and thematically essential. Everything that happens in it is less familiar than the genre makes you think it should be. The internet indicates there's a sequel, but the internet also indicates no one thinks it's as good, so I don't plan to read it unless persuasively argued otherwise. Between this and The Old English Peep-Show (UK A Pride of Heroes, 1969), which I read last month, I am coming to the conclusion that I like Peter Dickinson so long as he's not writing YA.
Which are your talismans? I imprinted in elementary school on Merlin Dreams (1988).
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making connections no one else in the story has the history to.
Which, to sidetrack slightly, I've often thought is the real argument for keeping a monarchy around: the Queen is primarily a great statesperson because of the wealth of institutional wisdom she provides ever-available to her succession of Prime Ministers.
Merlin Dreams! I love that one, and had forgotten he was the author. The illustrations are very clear in my mind.
Perhaps not too surprisingly, I recall some that shade into his YA output. My go-to ones are A Box of Nothing, probably because it is so dreamlike, A Bone From A Dry Sea, which I love for the concepts and keep getting poems from (though I haven't reread for years; hopefully the Suck Fairy has not visited it), and The Blue Hawk, which is gently Egyptian and worldbuilds gloriously.
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Have you seen "Springtime Will Kill You" (http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2012/works/598600), a noir/Greek Myths mashup in which P.I. Orpheus tries to track down missing daughter Persephone?
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http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/01/a-real-princess-peter-dickinsons-lem-gking-and-joker
I read Skeleton-in-waiting when it came out mostly because I was desperate to have more of Louise, but all I remember of it was that she took care of her infant son herself, rather than having a nanny.
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Sorry you're having no success on the housing issue. Wish I had anything more useful to say or do than wishing you luck.
I hope ye enjoy the ice show!
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You're welcome. I was really impressed.
a noir/Greek Myths mashup in which P.I. Orpheus tries to track down missing daughter Persephone?
No, but if it's done well, it'll be brilliant. Excuse me a minute here.
[edit] Brilliant.
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Let me know what you think! It's in print from Felony & Mayhem.
the Queen is primarily a great statesperson because of the wealth of institutional wisdom she provides ever-available to her succession of Prime Ministers.
I had not considered that. What a neat reason for governmental continuity.
I love that one, and had forgotten he was the author. The illustrations are very clear in my mind.
My introduction to Alan Lee, although I didn't realize it for years. He also illustrated Joan Aiken's The Moon's Revenge (1987) and Michael Palin's The Mirrorstone (1986), which I read right around the same time.
My go-to ones are A Box of Nothing, probably because it is so dreamlike, A Bone From A Dry Sea, which I love for the concepts and keep getting poems from (though I haven't reread for years; hopefully the Suck Fairy has not visited it), and The Blue Hawk, which is gently Egyptian and worldbuilds gloriously.
I have not read any of those, although I have the impression I tried A Bone from a Dry Sea in elementary or middle school and bounced. If you get poems from it, I'll try it again. I have a copy of Tulku (1979) because I bought it on sight from a used book store; I remember it interested me historically, but not that I connected with it otherwise. I had a violent antipathy to Eva (1988) in middle school and I don't know if it was me or the book; I've never gone back to check. City of Gold (1980), however, his book of Biblical retellings, I love.
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Thank you! Hah. A sort of connection after all.
I read Skeleton-in-waiting when it came out mostly because I was desperate to have more of Louise, but all I remember of it was that she took care of her infant son herself, rather than having a nanny.
That's not exactly a rousing recommendation.
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It was fun and we were shown around the backstage afterward. TD Garden has a kosher hot food vending machine. I did not know these things existed. Open 24/6, the logo says, and a small sign informs the prospective user that some of the items are parve food prepared on dairy machines. I am a little terrified by the idea that I could put quarters into a machine and get a knish.
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3. Continued good wishes against the frustration of the housing search.
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Let me know what it was if you track it down! The script must have been published; it's famous. I'm unfamiliar with the radio play but not at all surprised it exists. I wonder if there was ever a prose treatment à la The Third Man (although unusually for Greene, it's a better film than it is a novella).
Continued good wishes against the frustration of the housing search.
Thank you. If you know anyone in Boston, I am happy to hear about it.
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I want to read your Sigyn, but there are lines here I like.
(I tend to stay away from mythological retellings in Yuletide unless specifically recommended because there are so many ways to do it wrong. You are a very good fic-canary. Thank you.)
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Also, I like the business cards; I'd use those myself (crossing out the "non", obviously).
Thanks for the archive links - I'll be checking out the Black Books one later.
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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.
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At this point it's strictly a backup (and I need to update it for comments), but yes. I haven't got a friendlist or anything set up yet.
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I hadn't been . . .
Wow.
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I should take a photograph! I mean, it's an origami Viking helmet ornament. I shall place it somewhere on a tree every Christmas for the rest of my life, but it still deserves to be memorialized this year.
I still say that you put Boxing Day to good use.
Thank you.
Thanks for the archive links - I'll be checking out the Black Books one later.
It's just really charmingly done.
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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.
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I didn't, either. Ah, wonderous world that has such vending machines in't!
I am a little terrified by the idea that I could put quarters into a machine and get a knish.
The horror of vending machine knishes is a bit abstract to me, but I'm sure the knish* has much greater cultural significance to you. I'm sorry it's terrifying to you. I hope they're at least borderline adequate knishes--it would be a great pity for them to cause even a mild degree of angst, fear, and/or horror and to not even be enjoyable for those who try them.
*Bagels, latkes, blinztes, corned beef or pastrami on rye, and chicken soup with matzo balls were features of my childhood (I was more than once asked as a child if I were Jewish, apparently on the basis of the contents of my lunch), but knishes weren't. I've no explanation for that absence.
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Dude, I didn't write it; it's Yuletide! Go for it!
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Mostly I know *of* people in Boston (met once at a conference five years ago seems very lean), or know folks who haven't space to share a room. Will definitely keep you in mind if I hear of anything, even so!
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