HSU IT Department

I very nearly gave up on this, due to fear of anticipated witch/vampire paranormal-romance cheesiness, and had it not been for the luscious descriptions of Duke Humfrey's reading room at the Bodleian, old manuscripts, food and wine, I might have bailed early on. But perseverance was rewarded: the author came through in terms of plot and I'm glad I stuck with it, because it turned out to be quite good. Some of the romance is, I freely admit, indeed a bit cheesy -- the male lead really needs to stop growling and purring -- and after the horror that was Twilight I have very little patience for the "I want you desperately but we cannot have sex now, we must wait until it's PERFECT" nonsense, but in the end these were minor quibbles in light of the intriguing plot. A plot, I might add, which manages to combine witches, vampires, demons, alchemy, secret crusader societies, and just about every magical power known to witch-kind. Not to mention some supremely good descriptions of wine (she said, smacking her lips).

The main character's irritating Mary Sue-wimp-ness ("No no no, I don't want to be a witch, I don't want to be magic" -- what are you, NUTS, woman??!??) does at last get explained in relatively credible terms. I suspect that in book 2 (forthcoming) she'll be a much stronger person, since there are some strong female characters, the best being Matthew's mother Ysabeau; when she faces down her other son, Baldwin, it's quite a scene. The Bishop House turns out to be a pretty strong character itself; I love the way it creates new bedrooms and spits out useful items as needed.

The intertwining of alchemy and genetics, magic and evolution, past and present are engrossing, and a nice change from the fluff that makes up most vampire/witch/demon fiction in these degenerate days. I'm looking forward to Book 2.

I'd post something witty, but it's Wednesday and I have nothing to say. Instead I will share this truly epicly (epically?) HILARIOUS animated Harrey Podder cartoon. All I can say to this is "Bwahahahahaaaaaa!"

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Our local Ren Fest opened this weekend, huzzah!!! Of course we went, of course we got all dressed up for it, of course we ate turkey drumsticks and drank ale at 10am and sang silly songs and generally had an awesome time. And of course we bought new garb.

Yes, it's only the FIRST DAY and we've already heavily indulged our garbaholic weakness. This does not bode well for our pocketbook for the rest of the season. Spouse has been complaining that he looks like he's slumming when he's with me since I go for the wench look while he goes for the Sir Walter Raleigh look (apart, thank gods, from the ruff that makes you look like a bird who swallowed a plate). So I gave in and got a gorgeous chocolate-brown velvet surcoat over a cream underskirt, with a new shirt to boot. Of course that meant Spouse had to upgrade as well: he picked up a new silk taffeta doublet that looks great and is ten times lighter than the heavier one he's been wearing.

We look fabulous. Except now I need a hat and some accessories. Oh what a shame.

On another note, I apparently qualify for AP History level nerdiness due to the fact that at least one of our cats is named for mythological/defunct or pre-modern era deities. I'm not sure about the other one, but they don't have a category for Greek superhero so I'm going to assume she'd qualify us for this category as well.

Translated from the Russian, this book first relates the events of LoTR as seen from the other side (Mordorians, orcs, Haradrim, etc.) and then segues into What Happens After (conspiracy, espionage, secret missions, etc.)

It's probably a good idea to read the author's essay on Salon.com before tackling this book. He's a Russian palaeontologist and wrote it because he was puzzling over some geological oddities of Middle Earth -- e.g., single continent but no mid-continent mountain range, and also what's on the rest of the map south and east of Morder that you never see?? (There's also another good article on salon.com that preceded the author's piece.)

The first part, where LoTR is recapped from the Mordorians' perspective, was interesting and rather creative (who knew it was all a plot by the elves to take over Middle Earth??), but then it turns into a military/spy thriller dealing with the quest to destroy Galadriel's mirror and send the elves back where they came from. At that point I got bored with it, since spy thrillers aren't a genre I like. f you like Tolkien, military-oriented fantasy, and John Le Carre & Co., you'll probably enjoy it. Since I only like the first of those three things, I didn't get much out of it and in fact didn't finish it.

Some people have suggested it's fanfic, but I'm not sure it qualifies as that since it's actually been published and won a couple of awards in Russia. The translation was done as a labor of love by ymarkov in his spare time, just because they thought it was interesting, so no professional editing, which it would have benefited from -- for example, the tense shifts all over the place, which drove me crazy. Presumably it isn't this way in the award-winning original Russian.

Worth reading, particularly if you write fantasy as well as read it, is another essay that the author mentions in his piece on salon.com, by another Russian fantasy author and critic. It's called "Must Fantasy Be Stupid?" and is an exploration of why so many fantasy authors seem to think their readers are idiots, or are willing to pretend to be idiots. His scathing attack on authors who create special one-off rules solely for the purpose of being able to do something they need/want to do in their story, like making lava flow uphill, is pretty funny ("well, in general lava always flows under the incline, but in this place of the Earth there is a geomagnetic anomaly, connected with sunken Atlantis, because of which..."). I couldn't find an English version, but the article in the original Russian is here and you can use babelfish to get a comprehensible, though exceedingly rough, translation into English.

Oh look! I can finally log in again. The LJ gremlins have been hard at work on my account (no matter how many times I logged in successfully, when I went to any entry in my OWN journal, it showed me as not logged in -- very weird) but apparently they're all sleeping it off now and I can get in. Yay! So I have a book recommendation and a funny video to share.

First the book: Idlewild by Nick Sagan, son of Carl "billyuns and billyuns" Sagan. Intriguing and highly original: braids together AI, virtual reality, post-plague-apocalypse, adolescent rebellion and more into a strange and unusual tale that keeps you guessing, wondering what's real and what isn't. In some ways it previews ideas played out in the movie Inception, in that there are layers within layers of things going on. Although you're uncertain what's happening a lot of the time, the author doles out information at a proper pace so you're intrigued and drawn on, rather than frustrated, and some of the small details (the mail bag of letters, for example) are very powerful. I didn't find the ending completely satisfying -- it was fitting and appropriate, by no means bad or wrong, it's just that I wasn't done with the characters and wanted to know what happened next. Fortunately, it turns out there are two sequels, Edenborn and Everfree, so I shall have to get right on them. Three cheers for not having to wait for sequels!!

Now for the video. Meet Amy Walker, accent artist extraordinaire. She can do any accent on the planet (her YouTube channel, amiablewalker has lots more) but this is one of my personal faves:

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I don't know who azalea is, but as soon as I can stop laughing she's got my vote for Cleverest Shakespeare Adaptation of the Year. Or maybe the decade. Her spoof of King Lear, entitled (what else?) King Winchester, contains, among other gems, the following:


Dean: For God’s sake, let us sit upon the couch,
And talk about this in a reasonable way.

Sam: O, insupportable!
Dean: Dude, calm thyself.

Dean: ...How shall Sammy fare, outside our lines of salt
And from the cover of my Glock remov’d?

*snort*

Having finished the freelance consulting work which absorbed (sucked dry?) most of my free time for the past six months, I've fallen back into reading with a vengeance. Thus:

Caleb's Crossing, by Geraldine Brooks. Brooks just gets better and better. I started out with People of the Book and was a convert almost immediately; Year of Wonders confirmed it and by the time I got to March I'd become an evangelist. Her writing is truly luminous -- spare but every word well-chosen, and she evokes a time and place better than almost anyone I've ever read. As with People of the Book, she's taken a small historical snippet and built an intensely believable story around it. Her fiction is more real than most people's history.

Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century, with everything from big-game hunters going after triceratopses to unresolvable paradoxes to an old man visiting 1950 in an attempt to find a nice Jewish boy for his daughter. Great fun, if a bit uneven (some are better than others). The Le Guin at the end was, as she always is for me, the star of the show.

All four Tiffany Aching books from Terry Pratchett. All of his books make me laugh; the best ones also make me cry. These did. His witches are the most practical, hard-headed, loving, smart, wonderful women I've ever encountered, whether they're practicing "persickology" or avoiding "the cackle", and the Nac Mac Feegles are the best anti-fairies you'll ever meet.

Dracula, My Love, a huge disappointment. Thin, boring, uneven. Skip it. If you've read Fred Saberhagen's The Dracula Tapes, you've read a far far better version of this already. The author tries to turn Mina into a modern woman but doesn't succeed very well -- instead of thinking for herself she's like a weathervane, swinging around to believe whoever is telling her tales at the moment, so it comes across as more of a slightly discordant medley than a coherent tune. In fact, Bram Stoker's Mina is in some ways a more consistent and stronger character than this one. There's a completely irrelevant sub-plot about Mina finding her father and mother, which doesn't even make Mina a more interesting character since it's a very cliche Victorian solution. The book was a bit of a snooze in places because James had to recount in all the events of the original book in order to tell Mina's version of them; apparently she didn't want to assume that anyone had actually read the original, which to my mind is a major flaw (what's wrong with demanding your readers come to a book with a little context??). Finally, the ending, while not bad in and of itself, was entirely wrong for the story thus far. It would have been a tolerable ending for a different version of the story, but for me it didn't fit this one well at all.

So there. Right now I'm working on A Discovery of Witches, which I was excited about until I found out it was only #1 of a trilogy. Why must everyone do trilogies? Why??? I blame it all on Allen and Unwin.

The Toronto Star had a truly scathing piece on the hat crimes committed at the royal wedding. Being a nice person who doesn't violate copyright I won't post the entire column (and besides it's really long), but here's an excerpt:

Friday was a dark day in hat history. Crimes were committed that would harrow thy soul and freeze thy young blood. I offer Exhibit 1, Princess Beatrice’s blot on millinery, and throw my client on the mercy of the court. Not myself, of course, your Honour, as I have a number of other clients who have yet to enter a plea.

Beatrice is wearing what appears to be a mushroom-coloured silk doorknocker surrounded by an octopus in strangely Fallopian death throes. It might just as easily be an ancient birth control device known as a Dutch cap — they were still making them that beige colour in the mid-1970s — or a still-rolled condom combined with a snake metaphor, stuck for reasons best known to Beatrice on the top half of her face rather than her actual head.

Read the rest of it here. And laugh.

Of course the wedding itself was beautiful, elegant and all that is classy (and yes, I got up for it but not at 3am!). But oh, the hats. The strange exotic weirdly-positioned did-they-look-in-the-mirror Alice-in-Wonderland hats.

I love that we brought with us from Ye Olde Countrye the English Common Law, cask-aged ale, tea (earl grey hot) and the tune for "God Bless America," but thank all the gods of whatever flavor and denomination there may be that we did not import the British worship of hats on important occasions.*

I mean, Aretha's at the inaugural was humorous enough but can you imagine the respect the U.S. would have (not) commanded if Dubya had had to flaunt the c'boy hat at every formal event? Yikes!

*Disclaimer: I have NO DOUBT that all MY British friends and acquaintances would have had far far better taste.

This week I got to do the following:

* Spend several many hours with my six-year-old nephew (he can spot a police car six blocks away and says very firmly that we are not allowed to manipulate (!) his words -- such the vocab!)

* Play "I spy with my little eye" with nursedarry's six-year-old twins (Me: "I spy with my little eye something yellow." Twin 1: "Is it [twin 2]'s bogeys?")

* Hang out with my supremely smart/talented/interesting brother and introduce him to the movie District 9 (in exchange he introduced me to Dead Silence, which cements my belief that clowns and ventriloquist's dummies are CREEPY AS HELL)

* Go to my half-sister's wedding (she's six months pregnant, so when the minister got to the part about "Will you accept any children God sends you?" somebody shouted, "It's a bit late for that, isn't it?" and we all fell about laughing)

* Have lunch with a friend from high school whom I have not laid eyes on in about 30 years (we're, um, wider and grayer than we used to be, but still had lots to talk about)

* Spend a couple of hours with my 92-year-old grandmother (who still goes to her French Club and walks every single day, I should be so lucky when I'm 92)

* Do happy hour with a guy who was my boss at Domino's Pizza about 25 years ago (the day I walked in to apply he and one of the cooks were quoting Monty Python; I dropped the next line of dialog and he said, "Excellent, you're hired!)

and finally...

* Take to lunch and get to know cassie_black12 and alovelycupoftea, brought here by nursedarry from across the pond, who are delightful and interesting women, just as nice in person as they are here on LJ

* Adventure to the house of lijahlover, who was kind enough (THANK YOU!!!) to have nursedarry and the rest of us all over along with veritas03 who is not from across the pond but who adventured from the wilds of the American South to be there and who is also lovely in person :) We were highly amused because as we drove up we could see the males fleeing the premises ("Aaaaaagh! Mum's crazy online smut-writing friends are here -- run, run, run!!!")

(Alas, I did have to miss out on Sunday lunch at ladyoneill's house, where I'm sure A Good Time Was Had By All!)

So yeah, week made of awesome :) I could not have crammed in more excellence if I'd bribed the aliens who run the universe personally.

I'm not quite sure what to make of Our Tragic Universe other than that I liked it. It was a bit like a reality show (an actual reality show, not one of those fake ones where everything is scripted) in that the characters and events were incredibly realistic and believable, to the point where you felt as though you were watching real people living their real lives.

This is something several of the characters talk about in the story: the idea of writing "fictionless fiction" or a story so real that it doesn't seem like a story but like real people. The book fits that category, apart from the odd coincidences -- for example, they apparently live in an incestuously tiny universe in which everyone is either related to, sleeping with, or broken up with everyone else. "Meet Bob. Bob used to date Mary, and is Fred's brother. Fred used to date Susan, who is Mary's co-worker and the sister of Al, Bob's boss." That sort of thing. I suppose in real life that's probably not far off, though: Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon demonstrates we're all much more closely connected than we think, and even without that I'm willing to bet that most people have a relatively small social circle, and meet new friends through their existing friends.

Lending additional verisimilitude to the events of the book is the fact that not everything is explained, tidily wrapped up. There are loose ends (what the heck was the Beast on the Moor?!), unresolved emotions, all is left open-ended -- much like real life, it's messy, not neat. And this too is discussed in the book: the idea of a storyless story, in which there are no pat answers.

At least two of the characters are writers, including the main character who is working on a novel, This is supposed to be a no-no in the world of writing, a lazy author's way out. "I have no ideas...I have no ideas...Aha! I will write a novel about how hard it is to write a novel!" In this case, the main character's ambitions to write were peripheral, not the central core of the story but rather a useful vehicle for creating situations where the characters could have philosophical discussions about what literature is, what story is, what kind of meaning we look for in a story. It certainly was not centered on the mechanics of writing, cranking out stories. So it didn't feel like a cop-out at ll.

Despite the loose ends and questions, I felt quite satisfied by the end. Other things it reminded me of: My Dinner With Andre and beer-fuelled late-night college bull sessions :)