Dog is a good old cat

[sovay]

My afternoon blew up on me. At least I spent the remainder of it with 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)

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

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.

LOL! I think I might be with him on that...

(Although settings and events were totally from life: I've just been going through 19th C London newspapers a lot. Dickens is just fact.)

[strange_complex]

That Julio-Claudian comic is awesome - thanks for sharing. So many little details, all absolutely on point. I think my favourite of all is the use of the Snapchat styling for Caligula, though. :-)

[moon_custafer]

E. M. Forster: ...at any moment we may look at Mr. Pickwick edgeways and find him no thicker than a gramophone record. But we never get the sideway view. Mr. Pickwick is far too adroit and well-trained.

Mr. Pickwick, 2D, scuttling sideways like a crab: no one must learn my shameful secret

[cmcmck]

Shrewsbury school?

Know it well- we pass it often.

[sartorias]

I suspect I'd know the name of the zine ed who published K/S. The first story was actually "August Moon," (Kirk and Spock alone on some planet when Spock goes into pan farr) which electrified the (mostly female) fandom.

Equicon, which was at that time the biggest con ever, was a Trek con, and mostly female, a huge change from the mostly male Worldcon. I think that was '73.

[ethelmay]

I remember the Seattle Weekly publishing an article about K/S fic in the mid 1980s. Joanna Russ got mentioned a lot, IIRC.

[cyphomandra]

I am sympathetic to this argument, to a point.

I have just finished reading Sarah Rees Brennan's Tell the Wind and Fire, which is her YA fantasy take on Tale of Two Cities, and ends with an acknowledgment "to any out there who loved Sydney Carton at age eleven, because you're me, and I am you."

[asakiyume]

That's interesting: presenting flat characters in such a way that the reader rounds them out. I feel like that happens a **lot**--I feel like with fanfic, that's what we see: people rounding out characters. (In some cases maybe the characters are already round, but I think in many cases they aren't really, but they're constructed in such a way--or put in situations--that let people fill in what's missing.

Is the E. Em Forster critique online, or did you come across it elsewhere?