Dog is a good old cat
My afternoon blew up on me. At least I spent the remainder of it with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
a_reasonable_man, drinking iced herbal chai and learning about Sam Houston and the gonzo run-up of Texas to the Civil War; I got to meet his [not Houston's] daughter's French bulldog and eat homemade biscotti and I had to borrow an umbrella to wait for the bus because the weather in Cambridge had by then returned to its regularly scheduled monsoon, but I am reliably informed there was a rainbow afterward. In the evening I watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) with my mother. spatch brought me coconut-lime ice cream when he got out of work. Autolycus has been attempting to distract me from the composition of this post with earnest headbutts and a purr that would put bandsaws to shame.
1. I am charmed by this comic about the Julio-Claudians.
2. I am really charmed by this epic hockey cross-stitch, whose perpetrator I am proud to know.
3. Courtesy ofumadoshi: the woman who invented slash.
4. This is some excellent sociopolitical jewelry analysis.
5. E. M. Forster famously thought that Dickens hardly ever wrote three-dimensional characters, the kind he called round; instead he thought Dickens had a genius for flat characters presented so cleverly that the reader could be fooled into recognizing them as human beings as might be found in the reader's own life when they were nothing but vivid types in two dimensions.
I am sympathetic to this argument, to a point.
"The old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School," said Stryver, nodding his head over him as he reviewed him in the present and the past, "the old seesaw Sydney. Up one minute and down the next; now in spirits and now in despondency!"
"Ah!" returned the other, sighing: "yes! The same Sydney, with the same luck. Even then, I did exercises for other boys, and seldom did my own."
"And why not?"
"God knows. It was my way, I suppose."
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
a_reasonable_man, drinking iced herbal chai and learning about Sam Houston and the gonzo run-up of Texas to the Civil War; I got to meet his [not Houston's] daughter's French bulldog and eat homemade biscotti and I had to borrow an umbrella to wait for the bus because the weather in Cambridge had by then returned to its regularly scheduled monsoon, but I am reliably informed there was a rainbow afterward. In the evening I watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) with my mother. spatch brought me coconut-lime ice cream when he got out of work. Autolycus has been attempting to distract me from the composition of this post with earnest headbutts and a purr that would put bandsaws to shame.1. I am charmed by this comic about the Julio-Claudians.
2. I am really charmed by this epic hockey cross-stitch, whose perpetrator I am proud to know.
3. Courtesy of
umadoshi: the woman who invented slash.4. This is some excellent sociopolitical jewelry analysis.
5. E. M. Forster famously thought that Dickens hardly ever wrote three-dimensional characters, the kind he called round; instead he thought Dickens had a genius for flat characters presented so cleverly that the reader could be fooled into recognizing them as human beings as might be found in the reader's own life when they were nothing but vivid types in two dimensions.
I am sympathetic to this argument, to a point.
"The old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School," said Stryver, nodding his head over him as he reviewed him in the present and the past, "the old seesaw Sydney. Up one minute and down the next; now in spirits and now in despondency!"
"Ah!" returned the other, sighing: "yes! The same Sydney, with the same luck. Even then, I did exercises for other boys, and seldom did my own."
"And why not?"
"God knows. It was my way, I suppose."
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
no subject
That's really nice. (I was not eleven. I was in tenth grade and assigned it for English class. My mother took it as an opportunity to show me the 1935 film.) Did you like it as a retelling?
no subject
No, sadly; I like that it centres Lucie and makes it her story, and there's some interesting stuff there about the double nature of using your femininity as a public figure, but the worldbuilding never entirely worked for me (Manhattan is divided into Light and Dark cities; the Dark are oppressed, the Light oppressors, and there's a rather vague magic system involving rings and blood). Because of that the violence ends up feeling arbitrary rather than inevitable. And I agree that Brennan loves Carton, but her version falls a little too far towards snarky bad-boy.
Paula Volsky's Illusion has a great fantasy version of the Terror, where by great I mean that I still get unnerved thinking about her sentient guillotine equivalent.
(and I suppose the retelling did work on one level; I'm now 115 pages through a re-read of the original)
no subject
Ah, well. I definitely think of him less as a snark monster and more of a human disaster zone.
[edit] Paula Volsky's Illusion has a great fantasy version of the Terror, where by great I mean that I still get unnerved thinking about her sentient guillotine equivalent.
Yikes.
(and I suppose the retelling did work on one level; I'm now 115 pages through a re-read of the original)
It's certainly a testament. Enjoy! I re-read scattered chapters after having a line stuck in my head all day.