Might I take up a bit of space here in order to complain about my current copy of Little Women? (Er, yes, I can. This is my journal, and I needn't ask for permission. Right?) --I say current because it is my third one--I had a shabby thriftshop paperback first, which was the one my mother gave me to read when I was nine and therefore the one that I fell in love with. It was in very nice shape when she gave it to me, if a bit old with yellowy pages and dog-eared covers, but after a year or so I had worn it to bits, and both covers were off, and the two halves of it were taped together with a great deal of clear packaging tape. So for my birthday (my eleventh, it must've been--for my twelfth, I got The Lord of the Rings), I got this beautiful, splendid, glossy-papered copy, done by a series called 'The Whole Story', which takes lots of classic literature suitable for children to read, gives them lovely watercolour illustrations, and endless, fascinating marginal notes, explaining references, allusions, and various cultural and historical bits we wouldn't necessarily understand nowadays, or things that are just interesting and related to the text. I loved that copy, except for one glaring, awful omission: the second half of the book. (See, Little Women was originally just the first half that ends with Meg's engagement to John Brooke, and it was so well-liked and well-sold that Alcott wrote the second half, published as Good Wives, and for quite a long time the two have been packaged together most of the time so that hardly anyone remembers that there are or were two, myself included.) I made do for a while, but there wasn't any Professor Bhaer, and that was somewhat dreary, you know. (I was a fangirl even then, oh dear, only I didn't know it as such.)
At some point, one of Mum's friends was getting rid of loads and loads of books and let us go through them and take out what we wanted, and there was, to my utter joy, a great thick hardcover copy of Little Women--so as not to fall apart quickly!--with woodcut illustrations done in eighteen-hundred-and-something, and notes on the text and discussion questions about the Ship War of the Ages. I was, of course, very happy with this arrangement, and have been reading from that copy ever since, taking a detour to the 'Whole Story' copy every so often because the marginal notes are really enlightening and interesting. (We've got one of The Jungle Book, too, and one of Poe's short stories: there was this spiffing warehouse sort of shop in Massachusetts called Building #19 that had piles and piles and veritable piles of irregular and surplus books, and very often good ones. I miss it dreadfully and am kicking myself for not buying the lot of Robin McKinley titles they had once. We did get all of the nice somethingth-anniversary full-colour-illustrated glossy-paged Narnia books, though. Mum covered them in contact paper so they are very nearly hardcover, too. Anyway, Mum found a lot of the 'Whole Story' series there.)
ANYWAY. Sweet Eru, my rabbit-trails are worse than usual today. The bone I have got to pick, that is the reason for this entry, if I could remember it from time to time. The editors of this particular edition of Little Women have taken it upon themselves to update the text to make it more palatable for modern readers. And by 'update', I mean 'massacre Alcott's punctuation and italics beyond belief'. It was worse than the snotty footnotes in Sherlock Holmes, it really was. Whenever Alcott alludes to something (which is very often, as allusion was a craft practiced with more skill and flluency in the nineteenth century; it has since fallen much out of fashion, more's the pity), it is put in quotation marks--whenever she uses a word that might be particularly unfamiliar to a modern audience, it is put into quotation marks--whenever an idiom is used (or half the time, anyway), it is put in bloody quotation marks, and you begin to get the feeling that the poor little bits of punctuation are panting for breath and binding up their sprained ankles and joining unions and things. It was really pitiful and pulls one out of the text abruptly.
And I haven't got to the italics yet! Italics had not yet come into vogue for the writing of thoughts, I think, because most of the nineteenth century literature I can remember has thoughts being put into quotation marks (which is sensible, I agree; and I am becoming less and less fond of the italic method myself anyway because it makes things awkward for a) long blocks of thought, and b) needing to italicise things within the thoughts), and at any rate, Alcott certainly didn't use them. "OH YOU FOOLISH WOMAN, FEAR NOT, FOR WE HAVE AMENDED YOUR SILLINESS!" cry the editors, who must have had some traumatising experiences with nineteenth century literature in their childhoods (or college days, I suppose) as they are so apt to do dreadful things to it. So, whenever someone is thinking, and whenever someone may be thinking, and whenever the third-person text sounds a little bit like someone's thoughts, THEY ITALICISE WITH A VENGEANCE. I wanted to rap their knuckles with their own sharp little italics and give them a hearty scolding and direct them to Mr. Carpenter who will give them a much heartier scolding than I've got the moxie for.
It's a nice copy for all that, with very nice font and illustrations--er, sometimes. When their own nineteenth-centuryness doesn't do them a bad turn. I mean, all through the second half, they've got Laurie with this huge, ridiculous moustache. It looks as though he waxes it. Copiously. Not that I would put a silly moustache past Laurie, but the second half begins when he is nineteen. Nineteen-year-olds cannot grow moustaches like that, except with magic, and sometimes not even then. They can barely grow substantial facial hair at all, most of the time, which is why they go about with goatees that are usually sort of peculiar.
What, to you, is the first sign of spring? Have you seen it yet?
Submitted by Spy.
Ahahahaha.
You see, we don't get spring here until we get breakup. It's sort of a...transition period. I wouldn't see spring as having arrived until leaves start budding on the trees--which generally doesn't happen until May, I guess, because I was gone May 10 through June 5 or so last year, and I missed it. No leaves when I left; full leaves when I got back.
But yeah. Before we can get to that point, we have to see most of the ice and snow melt into puddles of mud and slush, and it's just nasty. Even that wouldn't be so bad, though, because it would mean that winter is ending, finally.
Right now, as I write this, it's snowing outside. Has been for...oh, I dunno, five hours?
Fnahrr.
I just finished my first decent go at Holmes--last night, actually--and came out rather liking it a lot. I'm always fascinated by mysteries that concentrate on details, intuition, and, you know, people using their heads instead of having machines and funny lights and DNA do it for them. (I think I find crime-solving fascinating in general--not so much the crimes as how one goes from a piece or two of evidence and slowly expands their view backwards until the whole picture swims into clarity. My mind boggles at being able to come to so many conclusions from a torn bit of cloth or a fingerprint or a mobile phone message that leads to another bit of evidence which leads to another and another until all the bits come together and everything is startlingly clear.) This probably stems from my love of psychology and the workings of the human mind, so Holmes' method of deduction is endlessly fascinating to me.
And then, of course, there's the whole Victorian Era thing, which is always good, always; the more abstract little details I learn about it, the happier I become.
Holmes himself, as a character, is also endlessly fascinating, most particularly because we never learn very much about him outside of his investigations, and I am only now realising how incredibly perfect Rupert Everett was to play him in the Masterpiece Theatre film I saw the end of on PBS last year. (Side note: I had to think for a minute to remember Rupert Everett's name because I have fallen into the habit of referring to him as 'Algie'. Er, yes, I am a nerd, and quite happy, thankee.) We know that he is very brilliant, suffers from depression and uses cocaine as an anti-depressant (this was before we realised that cocaine was extraordinarily bad; remember, Coca Cola, originally marketed as a medicinal drink, got its name from the cocaine it contained!), doesn't have much of a life outside of his cases, and doesn't have any particular love for humanity; his detecting is merely because he is interested in the work, not because of any especial desire to help people. This is, of course, all very interesting, and I am kind of wondering, wow, where is all of the fanfiction?, because if this were being serialised in a newspaper today, the fandom would probably be huge. It's got all of the right elements, particularly that of a substantial amount of unknown factors begging to be expanded upon.
Conan Doyle, because he was Like That, didn't much like the popularity of Sherlock Holmes, because he was busy writing what he thought was More Important Stuff (most of which is overblown and very, very Victorian and melodramatic), so he finally got fed up and--I don't think this counts as much of a spoiler because everyone seems to know this and I had a vague idea of it even before I read the forward to my book--wrote 'The Final Problem', which is probably one of the worst bits of classic literature ever, especially as it involves a supervillain of an antagonist and there isn't a mystery in sight and its entire purpose is to dispose of the protagonist. I hated it. The public outcry was so intense (ha! fandom is power!) that he eventually resurrected him, though I haven't any idea how, as my collection ends with 'The Final Problem' (succeeding in annoying me greatly).
* * *
There are a great deal of notes in my edition, which made reading a bit awkward because I kept having to flip back to the notes to have things like 'dog-carts' and international relations explained to me, and also, because the bloke writing the notes was (obviously!) a bitter, vengeful nutter who was forced against his will to read and dissect Holmes in school, every single mistake Arthur Conan Doyle made, in geography, history, international relations, his own plots, and so forth, pointed out in great detail. This got to be a bit much after three or four stories. Look, I'm not going to be scarred for life by reading briefly about someone walking up Pall Mall from a direction that it is apparently impossible to walk from; it isn't as though I'm going to remember it and use it to instruct other people on how to go about Pall Mall when they holiday in England. Honestly.
Several weeks ago, Dad showed us (meaning Mum and I) Rober Altman's 3 Women, which he said was his very favourite film in high school (he went to see it in the cinema twice, which means it must have meant something to him, because at least nowadays he has this absurd rule about not seeing a film twice in ten years). May I give a hurrah for Netflix and the wonderful individual who saw fit to bless us with a six-month subscription?--as without it I would not have seen this film. If I am not beset with laziness, there will likely be a great deal more film reviews hereabouts. (Feel free to nag. Er. I think. I ought to be updating this every weekday again, since school is trying to get back into rhythm and Mum is no longer in the hospital.)
Well, anyway. 3 Women is a difficult film to describe--it's eerie, unusual, and thought-provoking; it's weirdly charming and a little bit scary: what most people seem to gravitate towards is dreamlike, because it is--there are references to dreams and a truly magnificent dream sequence, which felt more like what dreams actually are than any other dream sequence I have ever seen represented in film, and it's also illogical, confusing: yet it makes its own sort of sense. Dreamlike is probably also the most apt description as director Robert Altman crafted it from a dream he had.
The photography, by the by, is particularly good, especially for a seventies film, from which era I have come to expect rather lurid colouring (seriously, what is with the orange-skinned men?). The colours are muted, adding to the dreamlike quality (the film is also very quiet and has a rather langorous feeling), and there are many water motifs throughout.
In conclusion (I'm sounding terribly stuffy today), 3 Women is an unusual, eerie film that is fulfulling and yet keeps your mind running long after it is finished. There's your pretentious sentence for the day, eh?
This is Sir James Murray, (third) editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; and verily, he is Awesome.
(I am reading The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester. More on that later.)
The short version is that Ophelia: A Novel by Lisa Klein is exceedingly dull. Don't bother. The slightly longer version is that it is full of stilted, stiff dialogue (Shakespeare's characters talked oddly because they were in a play; a novel version would certainly have cause for archaisms, but not unrealistic formality), uninspired and equally stilted prose, uninteresting characters, and lots of v. boring lovesick!Ophelia. And lots of cliches in the prose, too--honestly, why does anyone even use the phrase 'gilded cage' anymore? Editors should ban it posthaste. Also, the strong female character = tomboy with no use for court fripperies & such cliche has lost all meaning and only makes me dislike characters ferociously. (Well, usually. Sherwood Smith managed to pull it off quite well.)
Mainly the book concerns Ophelia Sue being in love with Hamlet and not being dead and not being mad, either, which kind of ruins everything, because of instead of being a rather fascinating madwoman, she is a very tiresome and sentimental Mary Sue who insists on rambling on about her entire life, which really hasn't much to do with the plot, and the whole book reads like very average fanfiction (which, in retrospect, was exactly what it was). This is something of a pet peeve of mine, actually: why is it that when someone writes a novel about a character in classic literature (or, occasionally, history), they feel as though they must go on at length about the character's childhood and previous life up until the bit where the plot begins. It's rarely necessarily and often (though I am overusing this word and variations thereof) boring, and one doesn't see it nearly so often in completely original fiction.
Anyway, as I said, very unexceptional book which turns an interesting character into a weepy two-dimensional Sue (despite the author's claims of being "dissatisfied" with portrayals of Ophelia and wanting to "breathe new life" into the character). Why did I check it out? Well--the cover is very nice. Pardon my moment of frivolity. :D
MY MOTHER: You haven't written anything in here all week. *ominous mothery sort of look*
ME: OH DRAT.
So, here I am. Writing. When there really isn't a whole lot to say, because I am not feeling a very great deal out of my school reading, and the Library Fines of Doom have kept me from most pleasure reading lately. I have been plugging through Paradise Lost (and will be forced to resume, because it was found--I swear I didn't hide it; I don't hate it that much), and, um, I thought I was a little intoxicated with words sometimes, but Milton? Oy vey. I can't even understand what he's saying half of the time. Then again, I also have found some truly lovely bits of text, such as 'and fast by hanging in a golden chain // this pendent world, in bigness a star // of smallest magnitude close by the moon'. Something about that image of the small, insignificant earth dangling by a chain from the vastness of the universe makes my mind whoosh widely, fantastically open for a moment.
All the same, I'm kind of glad that I'm not technically required to read every little bit of the book. (Which makes me feel like a teenager, and a cop-out, so I solemnly vow to read it over again someday when I can take much more time about it. Like, say, a year.) Too much epic poetry begins to wear on one after a while: I have read Beowulf, and some Chaucer, and started on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and, oy, can I have something I don't have to work so hard to understand, please (whether it be the concept or the English)? Which was why I began on Alice early. Speaking of which, I am supposed to write some sort of reaction paper contrasting Alice and Looking-Glass, which I ought to have begun on yesterday, but Mum took my book into the bath and then I had to find it again and I have been Cleaning and Baking today, agh.
Have also begun on Joyce's Dubliners, which I am rather liking so far (and, um, skipped ahead to that one, too, on account of having wanted to read it for a while), although I get the feeling that I would be liking it considerably less had I not extensive notes on what the stories mean. This also makes me feel like a stupid high-schooler, because some of the things I missed seem awfully clear after they are explained. Oh, well, I will sound smarter than some of the class in college, then, won't I? Oh, and where are the un-hyphenated words smashed up together? The hearsay went that Joyce was rather fond of those, and so I am, in the right sort of context. (I have been known to hyphenate some combinations and not hyphenate others in poetry. It is an artistic thing, I reckon.) Drat. I am feeling a bit lonesome for them.
Audio: Show us cover art or share a track from the first band or solo artist you flipped for.
Submitted by Red Pen.
There were two, actually, in two very different stages of my life--discovering that
music meant something, for the first time in my life, and quite a lot of years later, having forgotten that and discovering it again. When I was six, my father got a copy of Steeleye Span's album Time from the library, and, for reasons I still do not quite comprehend, I fell madly in love with it. I can't remember if that was the first Steeleye Span I'd ever heard, because I do have these persistant and much-talked-about memories of dancing around a green snow-hat/scarf thing to 'All Around My Hat' (which I took literally), and I don't know how old I was then. Was likely earlier, because we actually own that album, albeit on sort of groaning cassette. Anyway, here I was, this messy-haired, four-eyed six-year-old, listening to a British folk-rock group from the sixties and suddenly discovering that music--meant something. Music was a huge part of my childhood; I was going to concerts when I was still in the womb--but it was mostly background noise until that point. None of it belonged to me, until Steeleye Span came around. I used to sing 'The Prickly Bush' in the bath, belting out 'hangman, oh hangman, hold your rope awhile' and liking the sound of my voice echoing off the ceramic. I still get a warm and fuzzy feeling listening to the song--and am probably the only person odd enough to do so. That fiddle getting all excited amidst the electric guitars still gets me, though. I'm rather pleased that I had such good taste at six.
Unfortunately, good taste kind of dribbled away as I neared my teens, and I don't remember a whole lot of particular music for a while--concerts and festivals I went to, mainly, and albums Dad listened to, but none of them belonged to me. And then I was nearly a teenager and my musical taste sort of--died. I started listening to this really ghastly CCM pop music which I still cringe to remember. Fortunately, I discovered music again as this was happening, and hence the very first album I ever owned: Solas' (still brilliant) The Words That Remain, which was a Christmas gift from Dad when I was twelve.
The first time I saw or heard Solas was at the Lowell Folk Festival (in, of course, Lowell, Massachusetts), which is free, and is, ergo, sometimes really, really good, and sometimes not so much. This--2002--was one of its better years, although I don't remember it very clearly--mostly dancing to Old Blind Dogs (a Scottish band who is probably very good; I just don't remember a whole lot of what I heard, or trust my twelve-year-old taste very much), and then Solas, at the end, which I think I mostly ignored--by that time, I was exhausted from walking and dancing and sat on the concrete beside the stage, doodling (and probably reading). I got up and danced at one point, but I don't remember anything at all about the actual performance, which is really sort of sad.
Several weeks later, Dad got The Words That Remain from the library (we had a really excellent library), and I slowly fell in love with it. It seeped into my consciousness and suddenly I understood music again and was carried to places I'd never been before. I remember listening to it in the car, loving the energy of 'Pastures of Plenty' and being perturbed by the banjo solos in the reels that followed ('banjos don't belong in Celtic music!' --oh, how little I knew!), haunted by the melancholy 'The Grey Selchie'. I got it for Christmas that year: it was the first album I'd ever owned. I bought a discman with spare Christmas money as soon as we got home from our holiday dealings and listened to it obsessively. For a blessed several months, Solas and the Lord of the Rings soundtracks comprised my entire musical collection, and then I descended into musical depravity and didn't come out of it for a good year and a half. Solas and their creative energy may very well have saved me. I used to belong to a drama club when I was thirteen, at the school my father taught at, and he'd drop me off at the library two blocks away for two hours when he went to work, and when it was time for the meeting, I'd bundle my books into my (horribly balanced!) roller-wheel backpack, pop The Words That Remain into my discman, and jog to the school. I can't listen to some of those songs without being reminded of the Salem library, and racing myself down occasionally icy sidewalks between lines of stern antediluvian buildings.
And here, for your listening pleasure, 'The Prickly Bush' (its only demerit being an unfortunate shortness on Maddy Prior's vocals), and 'Pastures of Plenty'.
I am supposed to say something every day now. This does not bode well. I do not actually have a lot to say about things, generally. Also I am feeling rather sour at the moment so forgive my terse sentences. My head feels like oatmeal and the things I read today are not exactly standing out in my mind.
Finished Nicholas and Alexandra this morning, which was an excellent book, and I did like it, but I am not feeling even vaguely thoughtful right now. In fact, the only thing that is really standing out at the moment is a bit of vexation: why did the author insist on using Anglicisations of everyone's names? You hear enough about 'Tsar Nicholas' (rather than Nikolai) and Alexis rather than Alexei, so that wasn't very disconcerting, but Kaiser William? Honestly, I have never understood this need to Anglicise personal names. If you use the common form in the English-speaking world rather than the real form, it isn't their name. If people started calling me Josephine all of a sudden because Jolene is 'too Spanish' or something (too Dolly Parton? :D), I would be perplexed and probably not take it very well. (Never mind that 'Jolene' and 'Josephine' are not actually two versions of the same name. I like my name, but it has no linguistic background at all.) Why and how did this whole business start, anyway?
It was an excellent book, though, as I said; very meticulously researched and thoughtful. I will have to go on about it more when my mind feels a little more like thinking.
So, I'm reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass--just finished this afternoon, actually, and because this blog is now largely for scholastic purposes, I am supposed to say something. I would like to say something witty and profound, but, really, this is Alice: it's witty, and probably genius, but it is not supposed to make a great deal of sense. Reading the notes in the front and back of my copy, I'm rather astonished at all of the people trying to pull meaning out of it. There are inside jokes, to be sure--the way Carroll mocks various popular sentimental poems of the time is absolutely fantastic, and I wish I were Victorian so that I understood the joke without having to have it explained to me; and there are also various references to things (songs, books, phraseology) that the real-life Alice Liddell was familiar with--but the very purpose of Alice is to be--not mindlessly diverting, because the two stories are splendidly clever, but they're not meant to be picked apart and considered, except where outdated terms are concerned. (I now know what an antimacassar is, and, ergo, exactly what Aunt Ruth accused Emily of leaving crooked in Emily Climbs. Apparently it is to prevent men's hair-oil from ruining the sofa. Did Andrew Murray wear hair-oil, I wonder? I can't imagine Ruth Dutton having an overwhelming amount of male visitors, particularly the hair-oil sort. But I digress.)
This rather makes me sound as though I am avoiding the subject of Alice, trying to talk as little as I can about the books themselves--it's really that I'm not entirely certain what to say. I love the books, though I haven't read them since I was ten or eleven, I think, and Lewis Carroll understands children better than most authors--children and their relationships with nonsense and logic, practicality and whimsy in particular. One of the most attractive and engaging aspects to the books, in my opinion, however, is that you can feel that they were a heck of a lot of fun to write. Carroll's revelling in worldplay and riddles and joyful nonsense, and it shines through brightly.
Mum and Dad and I watched The Bridge of San Luis Rey last night, from the Thornton Wilder novel, which was a bit of a difficult film, but worthwhile in the end. I can't say I understood a lot of it--the characters drifted through situations a bit confusingly sometimes, and I found myself mixing some characters with others, but fortunately the main issue of the film was very clear and straightforward: five people die in a freak accident when a bridge collapses, and a Franciscan monk searches to understand why they died. The lives and natures of each of the five, and the people they interconnect with, is painted through the research of Brother Juniper, who examines every possible detail of their public and private lives in his quest to understand whether or not there was a reason for their deaths. It's a very philosophical film, and raises interesting questions about the nature of God, of fate, and, surprisingly, the importance of love. The last words we hear in the film, a monologue by a nun with important connections to all of the main characters, are deeply poignant:
"But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."
(And, as Banui the Film Geek cannot possibly be squelched any longer: could there be more amazing art direction? The cinematography is elegantly, carefully crafted, and the camera occasionally moves in unexpected ways--when two characters are kissing, presumably as a prelude to sex, the camera wanders upwards with a flowing sort of motion, as if to give them their privacy, which gives the scene an incredible quiet intimacy. In another scene, a character is apparently either trying a metaphor on for size or is actually delusional, and is shown, as the text of a letter she has written is spoken, taking a necklace straight out of a painting in a gallery. One of the painted figures bows his neck to allow her to take the chain, and it is one of the most beautiful bits of surreal art I have ever seen. And the costume design--gorblimey!! It's so rich and detailed and real--the setting is the late eighteenth century, I believe, judging particularly by the wigs many of the noblemen are wearing, and someone must have done some incredible research. The costumes are so detailed, so intricate, that you can hardly believe they are costumes. I think I was gaping and drooling profusely for a great deal of the film.)
