![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In the shade of the blackthorn and the touch of the frost
Sirenia Digest #7 arrived in my inbox this afternoon, and it's beautiful. Vince Locke's illustration for "Constellations, Conjunctions" looks exactly as the character should, like a cut-out from the night sky and the stars (. . . and, when he shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars, / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night . . .), and the second half of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
greygirlbeast's "The Black Alphabet" completes one of the most amazing pieces I've read recently or ever. From Absinthe to Zoosporangium, it's not precisely like anything else out there, and that's as it should be; and I would be remiss if I did not also mention her "Giants in the Earth," which caused me to read Michael Moorcock's An Alien Heat in 2002. Subscribe, for God's sake, if you haven't already. You want this kind of strangeness in your life.
The rest of this entry, that's just me obsessing. The usual.
(Cut for Black Books and Bernard Black.)
It's all the fault of a laudatory back-of-the-DVD comparison between Black Books and Blackadder. I started thinking about protagonists. From a thumbnail sketch, Bernard Black and Edmund Blackadder are not so dissimilar: both posssess limitless funds of bitterness, misanthropy, and the general conviction that the world has been populated with other people solely to annoy them; and the wit with which to express these sentiments in withering one-liners. Blackadder, however, lives in the narrow space of perpetually frustrated ambition between his inferiors (whom he can talk into ridiculous schemes) and his superiors (from whom he endeavors to hide the aforesaid schemes), all of whom make his life difficult in their own special ways and most of whom would indeed lose an argument with a stuffed iguana. Bernard Black, on the other hand, operates essentially in a universe of one. If he has any ambitions, I suspect they revolve around alcohol, cigarettes, books, and being left the fuck alone. So, of course, he opens a bookshop.
"Come on, you time-wasting bastards. Back on the streets. Out, out, out. Back to life, back to reality. Thank you!"
The sequence in which Bernard leaves his newly-hired assistant Manny to mind the shop while he runs some old clothes to Oxfam rather nicely sums up his personality—in that one afternoon, while Bernard is away, Black Books makes more of a profit than in the entire previous year. Manny doesn't need to be a good salesman. All he needs to be is not Bernard, and the money rolls in.
"No one is willing to admit that wine doesn't actually have a taste!"
"Of course you can't taste anything—you smoke eighty bajillion cigarettes a day. What's that you're eating?"
". . . Some sort of delicious biscuit?"
"It's a coaster."
And yet, of course, I'm fond of Bernard. His saving grace as a character, and perhaps the reason why the other two regulars haven't yet run shrieking into the night (though in all fairness neither Manny nor Fran is a paragon of normality), may be his haplessness—he's a spectacularly cranky bastard, but he's also totally adrift in the functional world. I'm not even talking about his lollipop-in-the-navel party trick or the level of apartmental neglect that can produce molluscs on the pipes ("It's just that, traditionally, they live in the sea . . ."), it's his panicky bewilderment when faced with anything that doesn't involve reading books and shooing away customers. Admittedly his next reaction is usually profane irritation and profound resentment, and Bernard Black certainly wasn't standing behind the door when malice was handed out, but so far in the show he's fundamentally someone who's woken up not just on the wrong side of the bed, but very likely on the wrong planet and maybe in the wrong universe as well.
"You could use somebody normal around here."
"Normal? Normal, is he? Well, what am I, then?"
"Well . . . you're a freak, Bernard. You know that."
"Yes, I know . . . But I have rights!"
So he careens back and forth between the acerbic and the incoherent, with occasional forays into the plain old common or garden bizarre—one of the better visual moments this season has been simply the series of expressions that pass across Bernard's face as he awakens, badly hungover and sprawled backwards across a couch, which ledrushthatspeaks to comment, "I think his face has broken." He's so lacking in self-awareness that he becomes theatrical by default, and consequently I will watch just about anything Dylan Moran does onscreen as Bernard.
Though I still think that, in real life, he'd lead to murder.
greygirlbeast's "The Black Alphabet" completes one of the most amazing pieces I've read recently or ever. From Absinthe to Zoosporangium, it's not precisely like anything else out there, and that's as it should be; and I would be remiss if I did not also mention her "Giants in the Earth," which caused me to read Michael Moorcock's An Alien Heat in 2002. Subscribe, for God's sake, if you haven't already. You want this kind of strangeness in your life. The rest of this entry, that's just me obsessing. The usual.
(Cut for Black Books and Bernard Black.)
It's all the fault of a laudatory back-of-the-DVD comparison between Black Books and Blackadder. I started thinking about protagonists. From a thumbnail sketch, Bernard Black and Edmund Blackadder are not so dissimilar: both posssess limitless funds of bitterness, misanthropy, and the general conviction that the world has been populated with other people solely to annoy them; and the wit with which to express these sentiments in withering one-liners. Blackadder, however, lives in the narrow space of perpetually frustrated ambition between his inferiors (whom he can talk into ridiculous schemes) and his superiors (from whom he endeavors to hide the aforesaid schemes), all of whom make his life difficult in their own special ways and most of whom would indeed lose an argument with a stuffed iguana. Bernard Black, on the other hand, operates essentially in a universe of one. If he has any ambitions, I suspect they revolve around alcohol, cigarettes, books, and being left the fuck alone. So, of course, he opens a bookshop.
"Come on, you time-wasting bastards. Back on the streets. Out, out, out. Back to life, back to reality. Thank you!"
The sequence in which Bernard leaves his newly-hired assistant Manny to mind the shop while he runs some old clothes to Oxfam rather nicely sums up his personality—in that one afternoon, while Bernard is away, Black Books makes more of a profit than in the entire previous year. Manny doesn't need to be a good salesman. All he needs to be is not Bernard, and the money rolls in.
"No one is willing to admit that wine doesn't actually have a taste!"
"Of course you can't taste anything—you smoke eighty bajillion cigarettes a day. What's that you're eating?"
". . . Some sort of delicious biscuit?"
"It's a coaster."
And yet, of course, I'm fond of Bernard. His saving grace as a character, and perhaps the reason why the other two regulars haven't yet run shrieking into the night (though in all fairness neither Manny nor Fran is a paragon of normality), may be his haplessness—he's a spectacularly cranky bastard, but he's also totally adrift in the functional world. I'm not even talking about his lollipop-in-the-navel party trick or the level of apartmental neglect that can produce molluscs on the pipes ("It's just that, traditionally, they live in the sea . . ."), it's his panicky bewilderment when faced with anything that doesn't involve reading books and shooing away customers. Admittedly his next reaction is usually profane irritation and profound resentment, and Bernard Black certainly wasn't standing behind the door when malice was handed out, but so far in the show he's fundamentally someone who's woken up not just on the wrong side of the bed, but very likely on the wrong planet and maybe in the wrong universe as well.
"You could use somebody normal around here."
"Normal? Normal, is he? Well, what am I, then?"
"Well . . . you're a freak, Bernard. You know that."
"Yes, I know . . . But I have rights!"
So he careens back and forth between the acerbic and the incoherent, with occasional forays into the plain old common or garden bizarre—one of the better visual moments this season has been simply the series of expressions that pass across Bernard's face as he awakens, badly hungover and sprawled backwards across a couch, which led
rushthatspeaks to comment, "I think his face has broken." He's so lacking in self-awareness that he becomes theatrical by default, and consequently I will watch just about anything Dylan Moran does onscreen as Bernard. Though I still think that, in real life, he'd lead to murder.
no subject
Of course, I can only stand Bernard for an episode or so.
(no subject)
(no subject)
no subject
Or alcohol. don´t forget the alcohol.