I think I know by now what evil really is

[sovay]

I am evidently not the target audience for Tim Powers' Hide Me Among the Graves (2012), which rushthatspeaks has been reading and describing to me; I think that if one of your central characters is vampire John Polidori, people should always be asking him if he got it from Lord Byron and he should be so tired of having to tell them ("Byron wasn't even a vampire, damn it!") no.

Comments

[kore]

Yeah, I was talking about this with spiralsheep re Stoppard and Invention of Love -- which I really do like -- but seeing Housman say things to Jackson he wrote secretly was really weird. Byron worked better in Arcadia because he was always offstage, and part of the whole plot was trying to figure out what actually happened and how we construct legends about the past. But I love Housman and read a lot of his work, and biographies, and even have his collected classical papers (not that I can understand half of them, if that) and so that AEH is more like a weird OC construct. Which is what historical fiction is, anyway! and to be fair, a lot of what gets called history as well.

I'm just still stuck going CHRISTINA WOULD NEVER. Christina Rossetti of all people was a fairly powerful woman, especially for her timeframe.

[sovay]

but seeing Housman say things to Jackson he wrote secretly was really weird.

That's a dramatic device I am generally all right with: when I saw the broadcast of Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art in 2010, I recognized stray lines in Britten's dialogue and mostly found it interesting how they were repurposed (and then laughed at one of them because I recognized it from the original setting, which was fair, it was a laugh line, but I was the only person in the audience who did. See also: the stupid joke in Christopher Nolan's Insomnia). If it's done badly, though, I can see it landing like a sore thumb.

(I have read The Invention of Love, because I don't think you get to be a classicist without people handing you copies. It may still be my favorite Tom Stoppard. I admire Arcadia, but I might have to see a production to love it.)

I'm just still stuck going CHRISTINA WOULD NEVER. Christina Rossetti of all people was a fairly powerful woman, especially for her timeframe.

. . . What happens to her when written by Tim Powers?