Holly

Today was a day of ADVENTURE.

Okay, it wasn’t. I had a bagel for breakfast, I went with my parents to choose some kitchen tiles, and then I came home and read a bit.

YEAH.

Ophelia Xx

Episode 14.

( Spoilers )

What do I do now? Anya is asleep with her head on my hand! Isn't there some story about Mohammed cutting of the sleeve of his shirt so as not to disturb his favorite cat who had gone to sleep on him? Send help; I'm writing this one-handed on my phone.

The theme at movie night tonight was "uplifting Canadian movies about CANCER." I bet you didn't think it was possible to make a theme out of that! I certainly didn't. But in fact there are at least two movies that can be described thus, neither of which I enjoyed very much:

Les invasions barbares, a.k.a. The Barbarian Invasions. This is a film by québécois wankmaster Denys Arcand, and it's a sequel to his tedious 1986 vehicle The Decline of the American Empire. One of the boring people in that film gets cancer and reminisces about all the women who've given him blow jobs while his son, who looks suspiciously like David Duchovny, barks numbers into a telephone to inform the viewer that he is an important businessman. Meanwhile, the most beautiful heroin addict you've ever seen floats around in flawless makeup and everyone smirkingly name-drops Marxist authors because they are intellectuals. Arcand has really weird issues with Canadian hospitals (I remember almost identical scenes in Jesus of Montréal, a movie that I must confess I loved as an undergraduate) and stupid ideas about both labour unions and cops. When the plot isn't clichéd it's ridiculous. Why did this piece of merde win the Palme D'Or?

It must be the David Duchovny thing. No, seriously, can't you see it?



One Week. A thirtysomething guy discovers he has cancer and takes a motorcycle trip across Canada to find himself. This movie is more Canadian than Timbits. It's filled with over-the-top CanCon in the form of landmarks, in-jokes, and cameos, and I think it was deliberately designed to make all its Canadian viewers (I doubt there will be any other kind) nod knowingly to themselves as they recognize the Sudbury Nickel or the main drag in Banff or the Wawa goose or whatever.

The movie wasn't actually that bad, but I don't think I'm really wired for road movies, and there was something very "guy" about this one as Joshua Jackson expressionlessly chews up the miles on his suspiciously new-looking Norton motorbike, ignoring frantic phone calls from his family and getting into "deep" conversations with Gord Downie outside motels and whatnot. It just wasn't the sort of thing I find all that moving, and by this point in the night I was getting really tired of super-healthy-looking people who supposedly have cancer and also listening to the earnest CRTC-approved singer-songwriters on both soundtracks.

That said, on my walk on my way home tonight I was thinking about what an awesome country this is I live in, with all of its mountains and prairies and shit, and even if I don't like all the movies ever made about it I still love it in all its vastness.

A few nights ago I watched A History of Violence, which I chose as my Free Coupon Movie on my new cable. It was okay, but it didn't have as much of an impact on me as it seems to have had on some of you. I couldn't shake the impression that every actor in the entire production was reading lines off a teleprompter. The script was really stiff and awkward, too. But I liked the premise and Viggo Mortensen is okay-looking even if he is not a very subtle actor I guess!

http://www.xorph.com/anacrusis/2009/07/10/duncan/

http://www.xorph.com/anacrusis/?p=2961

Membership in the Differently Voiced used to just get you snickered at, until three different members at three different hospitals predicted the Buenos Aires crash and people got spooked. There’s less snickering now. More suspicion.

“Do you think the voting public is ready for an openly schizophrenic candidate?”

“That’s pejorative,” says Duncan, “and shouldn’t you be asking the voting public that?”

“He has laid traps for you,” warns Temperance in his head.

“I know,” says Duncan.

“Let him burn,” hisses the Queen of Swords.

“What?” says the reporter.

The rest of his chorus, as usual, just laughs and laughs and laughs.

Hi Internet. Are you one of those liberal arts "I can quote the page number when Chomsky said that bit about having a dream about a squirrel once" types? If so please contact me and give me a brief overview of anything you know on Wittgenstein, or any online sources you might know of that could be an easy overview. Ideally it would specifically address the propositions-as-images thing, to be fair, but anything helps.

Today I had my second day working at the gallery. It was good! I spent the morning hangin’ out in a small room at the top of the building, which is currently housing some post-war abstract paintings by Mary King that were inspired by Surrey gardens. It was very quiet—there’s little passing traffic in that room because it’s down one end—but I was given a book to read about Leonardo Da Vinci’s mechanical drawings (because there is going to be a big Da Vinci exhibition at the gallery next month, to which you guys should all come, by the way, as the gallery I work in is the only scheduled UK venue for the exhibition, and it is going to be amazing). I was really taken, strangely enough, with his design for a self-releasing hook for crane loads. The loop of rope would unhook itself from the load when it hit the ground and took the weight off the mechanism. The drawings were so beautiful, and the design so practical and economic.

Then I went into town with my mum to buy a new academic diary. Yeah. Why are diaries so expensive? I don’t understand. :( Also, why is it that week-to-view academic diaries so often have smaller spaces for the weekends than for the week days? Er, guys! Students make all their plans for the weekends! Silly.

After that, my mum bought me some nice olive bread for my lunch (not sure what brought that on), so I had that with a little bit of pesto spread on it, and a mug of vanilla rooibos. Then my mum and I baked a ginger cake, but we had to substitute treacle for most of the golden syrup because we ran out, so I think it will come out very rich and sticky. several_bees has very kindly told me where to find a very fine recipe for freezable biscuit dough, so maybe while the ginger cake is maturing I will make some biscuits to placate me and my family while we wait.

It’s the weekend already? What have I done this week?! (Er, don’t answer that.)

Ophelia Xx

It had been 25 years since I had seen him and I didn't remember him at all, when we met again in Waiuku. He drove us along the beach in the pouring rain, through small rivers that had formed, and past the remains of tree roots, exposed. We'd get closer and closer to the waves, and zig-zag around the tideline, and then when we couldn't go any further, we got out and wandered around on the black sand, feeling windswept in the rain.

It continued to rain as we walked up to the lighthouse, where apparently there are usually good views, but I could just see a blankness, a whiteness, where the fog had settled in. I remember being able to see phormium, as we walked up the steps.

We visited my aunt and uncle's house, but they were in England at the time, and it felt somehow weird being in their house while they weren't there.

That night, we stayed in Waitomo and visited a local pub, and tried out the local cider and the feijoa Archers. I had only tried the fruit, feijoa, a few weeks before, for the first time, in Melbourne.

--

I floated through a cave on a boat, loooking up at the glow-worms above, mesmerised by the glowing. After that, I walked through the spiral entrance down to Ruakuri Cave, and was intrigued by stalactites, weird shapes forming. It seems so magical that such things exist underneath the ground and I wonder what else is below.

We headed onwards from Waitomo to Taupo.

Steam arose from the Craters of the Moon, and I stared at the mud bubbling and the steam, so much steam, and at the pretty colours of the rocks. I hadn't imagined the moon would have so much vegetation.

OH MY GOD DANCES WITH WOLVES FILLS ME WITH SO MUCH RAGE. I just finished this racist, patronizing, clumsy, sophomoric piece of shit two hours ago and I'm still frothing at the mouth. The book is actually assigned in classes here, presumably because its "sympathetic" portrayal of Native Americans is "educational" for our students. Presumably this means "I like the Comanche because they recognize the awesomeness of white guys. Oho, they may resist at first, since they are a feisty lot, but when they see that the handsome and skilled lieutenant knows how to use a coffee grinder, they have no choice but to be impressed by his l33t magickul powerz and accept him as one of their own!" (They've never seen a coffee grinder before, get it? LOLOLOL.)

I've never actually seen the movie, in which President Laura Roslin is apparently a white-girl-gone-native who has sex with Kevin Costner. WHAT. WHAT. I have a feeling the movie might be maaaaarginally less stupid than the novel because it doesn't spend all its time telling us how awesome everybody is. The novel is written in sloppy third-person omniscient narration, which means that the narrator does not have to stop at telling us several times per page how good-looking, talented, and charming the main character is. Nay, afterward the protagonist thinks that to himself (he literally admires his own handsomeness as he passes by reflective surfaces); and then, because we haven't yet gotten the message, we learn that each aboriginal character also thinks that Lieutenant Dunbar is the bees' knees. This is shitty adolescent fanfic is what it is, though I don't know what it's supposed to be fanfic for. RAGE. FROTH. RAGE. I am going to vent a bit more in tolle_lege at some point soon but for now I'm just going to flail impotently as I try to come up with ways to tutor students who are trying to do assignments about this smooshy turd.

Believe it or not, though, that's not why I'm writing! I'm writing because I have some technical questions to ask about English grammar. All of you who think you are good at English grammar, try teaching ESL. That'll humble you somethin' awful. I've never felt so ignorant about my own native tongue.

Onward!

• What is the difference between gerunds ("I like dancing") and present participles that have been "hardened" into pure nouns ("he went to a gathering")? You can't say *he went to a dancing but I can't figure out why.
  
  I mean, um, gerunds are essentially nouns, right? But you can't pluralize them or anything. Except when you, um, can ("she created seventeen paintings" -- or is that not a gerund any more?). And sometimes present participles are already intrinsically plural ("the living and the dead"), though I presume that has something to do with the abstract sense of the verb "to live"? Or not? WTF ENGLISH.



• I have another complaint about gerunds! I always learned that they were more or less equivalent to infinitives in meaning ("I like killing" = "I like to kill"), but occasionally you encounter examples where their meanings are completely different ("I stopped smoking"; "I stopped to smoke"). WTF ENGLISH.



• A recipe contains the sentence "Put the beans in a pot with enough water to cover." What function is the "to" serving in that sentence? Is it an adverbial clause denoting purpose/result (as in "she went to the hardware store to buy a chainsaw")? Or is "to cover" an infinitive here (as in "I want to cover myself in war paint")? I can see that it's hanging on the word "enough" but I don't know exactly how "enough" governs the clause that follows it.



• In other WTF news, WTF ARTICLES. My students have so, so, so much trouble with "a" and "the" and nothing-at-all, and I don't always know how to help them with that. I mean, I can correct their papers, but I can't always explain why I've made the corrections I have. This web page is the best summary of article usage in English that I've found; printed out, however, it comes to eight dense pages (followed by three pages of exercises). What ESL student wants to memorize eight pages of rules? Why can't we just do it like Hebrew does, where an article means DEFINITENESS and a lack of an article means A LACK OF DEFINITENESS and we can go on our fucking way?

I have somehow managed to get jet lag from a two hour flight from the south of France. Something to do with delayed departure, not getting home until one in the morning, and not getting to sleep until three, I think. Briefly: fantastic couple of weeks with my brother, his wife, the nephew and niece, and various French relatives. I have firmly acquired the nickname "juicy" which I'm not altogether keen on (but the point of nicknames is that you don't get to choose them). It does have the advantage that both young children and French people can pronounce it, which is not the case with "Andrew". Saw the Tour de France passing through Nice, the Fondation Maeght, various villages in the mountains, Antibes, etc. Proved my credentials as the world's greatest sportsman by beating a four-year-old at badminton, read a pile of books, ate lots of cheese (but returned to the UK pining for a nice piece of mature cheddar, the world's greatest cheese), drank one glass of wine, one of champagne and one of beer, and gallons of coffee. I would do it all again (especially the camping, at the bottom of a steep river valley away from the heat), but I think I'll wait until the exchange rate is slightly more favourable (three coffees and four scoops of ice cream at Tourrettes sur Loup yesterday came to something like fifteen quid - excellent coffee and ice cream, but almost everything was that eye-wateringly expensive even in supermarkets).

Anything exciting happened? I see nobody seems to give a stuff about MPs' expenses any more.

YAY WEEKEND

Poll #1427836 emily
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

What was the last book you recommended to someone?

( Chapter 17. Tanya Finds the Healer-Pharmacist, and With Him The Second Vial Marked  )

Today has been a long series of small problems, most of them physical. My left ear is blocked by ear wax and I can't hear out of it; I've got a very annoying case of thrush; I had a rather spectacular trip over a suitcase in the bedroom, which led to another trip over something else as I tried to catch myself (Chris, we are cleaning the damn bedroom floor this weekend), which caused me to sort of land on the end of the bedframe in a way I can't really describe, suffice to say that multiple bruises and a lot of swearing resulted. And other small things. Nothing exciting in and of itself. Well, the blocked hearing is very frustrating, but it's happened to me in the past and I can cope (so long as it doesn't last a bloody MONTH like last time, which it won't because that was the fault of idiot nurses who didn't know how to use an ear syringe, though I can't get that done for a week and a half so I'm stuck unless the ear drops start working or the wax gets knocked loose by luck). But the combination of all of these things and a few more in rapid succession, plus some snarky encounters at work, has left me glum and snarly and wishing I could go back to bed and ignore the rest of today.

And oh man, the urge to try and use a q-tip or something to get wax out of my ear is overwhelming, and I know that it's the worst possible idea and I must not (even more so than I previously thought, I did some research today), but my whole body is honestly itching get this stuff out of my ear so I can hear again right now dammit!!!!! and arrrrrgggghhhhhhhh distractions please!

I want my hearing back!!

At least, part of Soho is. We're all rubbernecking out of the office windows and hoping we get sent home early. Crumbs.

ETA: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8144708.stm

"Someone even suggested that the cubicle workers do their work in HAZMAT suits." "That sounds a little..." "Save your breath. They already told me 'no.'" – Veronica and Ted, Better Off Ted

[Please note: I have never seen the movie that was based on this novel, and would be curious to hear your impressions of it.]

I really loved the first half of this book, which describes in affectionate detail the mental collapse of a man after his son dies and his wife leaves him. Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates travelling. His tourist guides become bestsellers among businessmen who want to avoid strange food, strange customs, and strange languages; the prissy, xenophobic advice found in these guides provides a glimpse of the many neuroses that drive their psychologically damaged author.

Macon is obsessive in ways that are both endearing and infuriating. He seeks efficiency in all things, so he rigs bizarre little contraptions throughout his house to save him time and effort. He jams all his experiences into "systems" and primly corrects everybody's grammar. While he was married, these may have been tolerable eccentricities, but after his wife moves out, Macon's despair leads him to more and more mechanical and soulless decision-making about his day-to-day affairs. The effect is worsened when he moves in with his family after an injury; his siblings are even more obsessive than he is (his sister Rose alphabetizes her kitchen shelves so completely that "you'd find the allspice next to the ant poison") and amplify one another's neurotic behaviour. Macon's sister and two brothers indulge him in ways that are comforting to Macon and funny for the reader, but which are also classic enabling behaviours that make everything worse for everybody.

Tyler deftly handles Macon's blindness to his own neuroses. When he is left to manage his own affairs, Macon is quite proud of his "brilliant" ideas -- but the cold light of day, sometimes encountered only a few pages later, makes him seem pathetic and deluded even to himself. The best example of this is probably his neglectful treatment of his dog Edward, whose constant barking and aggressive behaviour is described flatly and without interest by the narrator. The reader, like Macon, is vaguely aware that there's noise and trouble in the background, but it is only when a visitor comments on the out-of-control dog that the creature's obvious suffering comes into focus.

An animal trainer named Muriel also notices Edward's problems, and imposes herself on Macon's life, ostensibly to train the dog. For me, this is where the book started to fall apart: I simply hated Muriel, though it's obvious that Tyler was quite smitten with her. I guess she is supposed to be "offbeat" and "spunky" and "charming," an inspiring alternative to Macon's humourless fastidiousness. But to me she was insufferable, rambling for pages about stupid crap, picking fights for no reason, and being stalkery and aggressive with Macon in a way that ought to have earned her a restraining order. I was also irritated by Tyler's treatment of Muriel's son, Alexander, a sickly boy whose health improves vastly once Macon enters his life. Clearly we are meant to understand that handicaps can be improved through sheer force of will.

Even during the parts of the book that I disliked, however, I must admit that Tyler has a brilliant eye for detail, and her turns of phrase throughout the novel struck me as sweet, funny, and wise.

But after they had landed [...] a very small child ran headlong into Macon's kneecap. This child was followed by another and another, all more or less the same size -- some kind of nursery school, Macon supposed, visiting the airport on a field trip -- and each child, as if powerless to veer from the course the first had set, careened off Macon's knees and said, "Oops!" The call ran down the line like little bird cries -- "Oops!" "Oops!" "Oops!" -- while behind the children, a harassed-looking woman clapped a hand to her cheek.

The book is filled with powerful visuals like this one and I never tired of them.

Now I'm not the sort of reader who holds opinions on who characters in books "should" fall in love with, and I don't ever complain that the ending of a book is "wrong." The text you've got is all there is: Macon makes his choice and, unless you want to write some fanfiction or something, that's the fictional reality we're stuck with. But I will say that an author who takes pride in an idiotic character is an almost guaranteed way to make me hate the book. The Accidental Tourist has too much going for it for me to hate it, exactly, but the shine came off about halfway through for me. I still think it's worth reading, but I'm sorry that a thoughtful exploration of human neurosis had to turn so completely and so predictably into a silly romance.

Okay, this time I have something like a plan.  I have enough friends and acquaintances at Readercon that I do not need to feel like I am tagging along with anyone.  I have benzos in case I get all freaky.

More importantly, I have ~5K on a new novel and I know where it's going and what it is going to be.

Short Pitch: Seven kids get recruited and bonded with one another and their potential future offspring in the form of swords and then sent to war to battle the monstrous and alien captains of an invading general called the Chariot.  The story focuses on the relationships of the band with one another as they fight through to the end of the war.

Short-short Pitch:  Shade's Children meets The Dark Tower meets Shadow of the Colossus.

Most importantly, I have 39 stories and flash pieces that are either ready to roll or within a day's work of being ready to roll.  I have massive backlogs of poetry, too.

It's going to be a good weekend.  This could be the year.

I've not done this for a while - but here's episode 13.

( Spoilers )

Our round four book is another crossover - Dorothy L. Sayers' crime/romance novel "Busman's Honeymoon".

( Blurb )

( Extract )

This book has a prologue (called a "prothalamion"); I'm ignoring that for the purposes of the game, and want first lines for chapter one.

Poll #1427477
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None

Suggest a first line for "Busman's Honeymoon".

Placetne, magistra?

Deadline is 13:00 Irish Summer Time (GMT +1) on Sunday, July 12th.