| Sorry for causing such worry! |
[Nov. 13th, 2008|07:05 am] |
I only now realized how long it's been since I updated on either JF or IJ. A number of circumstances combined to make that true, but once I found my way back onto the Internet, I should have started updating again. I'll try to update at least once a week from now on.
( Short explanation of what happened )
Sorry, again, for worrying anyone. |
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| Wow, Anthony Trollope actually made me snicker. |
[Jun. 27th, 2008|11:34 am] |
Considering how hard I found it to get through most of The Eustace Diamonds, that's saying something.
"There is no vulgar error so vulgar,—that is to say, common or erroneous, as that by which men have been taught to say that mercenary tendencies are bad. A desire for wealth is the source of all progress. Civilization comes from what men call greed. Let your mercenary tendencies be combined with honesty and they cannot take you astray." This the future Chancellor of the Exchequer said with much of that air and tone of wisdom which a Chancellor of the Exchequer ought to possess.
-From Can You Forgive Her?. |
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| Ouch |
[Jun. 10th, 2008|04:21 pm] |
We just had to take our dog to the vet. Something bit him, and given the lack of non-ferocious dogs in the neighborhood (seriously, the only dog that might have done anything like it is a bulldog that lives almost a mile away), it was probably a coyote. He's very lucky he managed to get away.
He'll be all right, but he's a thirteen-year-old dog, very small, and it was hard on him. |
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| What *could* actually make the LJ elections funny |
[May. 27th, 2008|02:12 pm] |
-If someone conducted a poll of how many people changed their votes to ones against the people Aja recommended after reading her post.
-If people who are fans, but not fans in the way Aja defines it*, had their own candidates and a hope of winning.
-If more people remembered that not even Brad has been able to make the advisory board do squat.
Do you have more suggestions to make the elections funny? Share them here!
*Once again, "media fandom" rules all; people who are SFF fans, attend conventions, and run committees are not good enough to be "part of the Livejournal incarnation of fandom." You have to write fanfic, draw fanart, or vid, donchaknow. Those are the Holy Trinity. |
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| Yay! |
[May. 19th, 2008|11:00 am] |
Incarnation is finished, at 119,200 words.
I ended up more satisfied with it than I thought I would at first. In the middle, the plot went all bendy, and I had to chase the characters around to figure out what they were doing. This is definitely the section in need of the heaviest revision.
But I managed to find an ending that suited the characters without resorting to the violence that seemed inevitable for a little while- fitting, since Incarnation is largely about politics, diplomacy, individual choice and sacrifice, fudging "inviolable" standards, and other means of avoiding war. It's set among a nation of religious dissidents who left their native country, went into uninhabited country, and used magic to make themselves native to that country instead of invading someone else, and who have very strict prescriptions against killing one another. Anything is better than war and its consequences, murder and torture and the waste of life and land. I've always been interested in writing a novel like this, since so many fantasies do assume that war is necessary, even if sadly so, and the characters tend not to make more than token gestures toward preventing it.
I like it. |
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| Goddamn it, I knew I should have banned him. |
[May. 16th, 2008|10:01 am] |
"Him" being millennium_king, who's made several trollish comments about race and gender on my IJ, and now is in an argument about the same issues on a post months old over there. It's the usual stupid "White privilege doesn't exist, you're the one being racist and sexist by talking about race and gender issues" shit.
*goes to ban_set* |
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| The Politics of Attitude |
[May. 4th, 2008|08:03 pm] |
This is a problem I try to address in all my writing, but often have little success with. I think it's one of those ideas that are inherently difficult to do well.
( The Politics of Attitude ) |
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| Hee. Sometimes I love nineteenth-century reviews |
[Apr. 26th, 2008|01:14 pm] |
They say scathing things in such an uptight manner.
This is from a review by J. W. Marston, in 1862, of Meredith's "Modern Love" (his long poem on the failure of a marriage, based on his own desertion by his wife):
"We are not sure that, after great labour, we have arrived at Mr Meredith’s drift; but we are quite sure that, if we have, we do not care for it…We have already intimated that ‘Modern Love’ contains passages of true beauty and feeling; but they are like the casual glimpses of a fair landscape in some noxious clime, where the mists only break to gather in again more densely. Besides, the best gifts of expression would be wasted on a theme so morbid as the present." |
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| Because sometimes things bother me more the more I think about them. |
[Apr. 24th, 2008|10:25 pm] |
Okay. So I'm familiar with A Door Into Ocean and the Holdfast series by Suzy McKee Charnas, but are there any other books- preferably SF or fantasy, but I'm so irritated at this point that I'll happily take a look at mystery, mainstream, or maybe romance, too- someone could recommend me where a woman actually has sex with a woman?
Not has sex with a man.
Not has sex with a hermaphrodite (because it is so totally better to have sex with someone with a cock than with just those female body parts, and we all know cocks have their own sort of inherent attractiveness, even for someone who prefers women!)
Not falls in love with and pines after the unattainable straight or asexual woman.
(Those last two may or may not have happened in the same book). *explodes*
Anyone? |
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| Goddamnit |
[Apr. 23rd, 2008|01:51 pm] |
Goddamn it, why is a FEMINIST SCIENCE FICTION AUTHOR defending theferret?
(In case you're not sure whom I mean, ![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif) matociquala is the LJ name of Elizabeth Bear, who has written several feminist SF books, including the gender-reversed Carnival, about gay male ambassadors to a planet ruled by women).
And it's the same "But it was consensual! And anyway, people hug at other cons, so no one has the right to object to someone asking to grope you!" line of bullshit as appeared in other LJ's.
That makes me feel unclean. |
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| Poetry week post 6- Alfred Noyes, Sherwood |
[Apr. 22nd, 2008|08:06 pm] |
This is a poem I discovered by accident a few years ago when wandering around bartleby.com. I love the rhythm, once again, and the use of relatively simple words to create and sustain a mood. This poem is almost always best if read aloud.
Sherwood
Sherwood in the twilight, is Robin Hood awake?
Grey and ghostly shadows are gliding through the brake,
Shadows of the dappled deer, dreaming of the morn,
Dreaming of a shadowy man that winds a shadowy horn.
( Read more... ) |
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| Well, I ended up not teaching yesterday |
[Apr. 22nd, 2008|12:03 pm] |
The glorified cold got worse; I got two hours of sleep Sunday night in spite of going to bed at 10 P.M., and then I went to the doctor. She did tell me it was only a cold, but it would be in my best interests to stay home, sleep, and take NyQuil and a cough suppressant. I was able to get someone else to go to class, give back papers, and take roll; I ended up not going into work today, either.
( Medical TMI ) |
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| Poetry week post 5- Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Triumph of Time |
[Apr. 21st, 2008|08:15 am] |
Some people think this is Swinburne's greatest poem. I'm not so sure about that, but it is one of the most beautiful- mixing deep, bitter personal sadness (it's now generally accepted that Swinburne was deeply in love with his cousin Mary Gordon, and devastated when she married someone else; he never married himself) with highly poeticized language and a sea-section that evokes the ocean only to find out that it is never going to be enough to make the speaker forget.
The Triumph of Time
Before our lives divide for ever,
While time is with us and hands are free,
(Time, swift to fasten and swift to sever
Hand from hand, as we stand by the sea)
I will say no word that a man might say
Whose whole life's love goes down in a day;
For this could never have been; and never,
Though the gods and the years relent, shall be.
( Read more... ) |
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| You know what I could do without right now? |
[Apr. 20th, 2008|05:15 pm] |
The feeling that I'm choking on liquid in the back of my throat, that's what. Stupid cold/bug/whatever. |
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| Poetry week post 4- George Meredith, "The Lark Ascending" |
[Apr. 20th, 2008|04:41 pm] |
This is one of the few poems I've ever read where I can hear the bird singing. Poems like "Ode to a Nightingale" and "To a Skylark" are more about the metaphoric images the bird brings up in the mind of the poet with its song. But Meredith was usually interested in reconciling human imagination with literal nature, and this poem is one of his more successful efforts to do that.
The Lark Ascending
He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,
All intervolved and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls
And eddy into eddy whirls;
( Read more... ) |
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| Poetry Week post 3- William Sharp/Fiona Macleod, The Tryst of Queen Hynde |
[Apr. 19th, 2008|04:41 pm] |
This poem is by a minor late Victorian author, William Sharp, whose own poems didn't sell very well. He created a female pseudonym, Fiona Macleod, whom he successfully maintained for over ten years, whose poems were very different (drawing on Celtic myth and a Celtic "atmosphere"), and who sold very well. Other than his wife and a female cousin whom he asked to pose as Macleod a few times, not many people knew Sharp's secret; "Fiona" was a recluse in Scotland and wrote long letters to other authors, including W. B. Yeats. Sharp seems to have regarded her as a separate personality, and the strain of keeping it up may have been one reason he died young.
I like this poem because it's very sharp, uses simple words to make a great impact, and tells a legend about an adulterous queen that's, well, pretty damn different from the usual.
THE TRYST OF QUEEN HYNDE
Queen Hynde was in the rowan-wood
with scarlet fruit aflame,
Her face was as the berries were, one sun-
hot wave of shame.
( Read more... ) |
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