| 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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| These books sound so horrible, but the review is so funny. |
[Apr. 18th, 2008|05:31 pm] |
OH JOHN RINGO NO!
aka, a review of John Ringo's SF series starting with a book called Ghosts in which there is constant rape and an unending fascination with whores and politics so far to the right that, no, they don't actually make any sense even if you are Republican.
Now I know what straight men read for porn instead of bad slash fanfic. |
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| Poetry week 2- Hertha, Algernon Charles Swinburne |
[Apr. 18th, 2008|11:56 am] |
This, for me, is the most beautiful of Swinburne's anti-Christian/alternative religion poems. Not only the phrasing and the rhythm but the philosophy expressed (that humans are kin to animals; that nature continues existing whether you believe in it or not; that nature, the only force which is anything like what we call divine, requires no worship) thrill me. I can't say I believe in Swinburne's visions all the time, but I believe in them while I'm reading the poetry, and "Hertha" comes closest of his poems to expressing my permanent ideas.
"Hertha" by Algernon Charles Swinburne- originally published in Songs Before Sunrise, 1871.
I AM that which began;
Out of me the years roll;
Out of me God and man;
I am equal and whole;
God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul.
( Read more... ) |
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| Poetry week post 1- George Meredith, Love in the Valley |
[Apr. 17th, 2008|09:00 am] |
This week I'm going to post a poem a day that I find beautiful- in the imagery, in the rhythm, and in the thoughts presented. That's a very particular category, since it cuts out poems I find cute, purely satirical poems, and poems like "The Waste Land" where I might find individual lines beautiful but do not understand what the fuck is going on,* so I don't admire them as a whole.
Today's piece of poetry is, surprise, mid-Victorian, and by George Meredith. He's known for obscurity in his poems, and "Love in the Valley" is not entirely free of that, while at the same time having some of the attributes of a traditional love poem. However, the natural images are beautiful; it's not quite a narrative but a series of images in which the relationship between the girl and the narrator, and the natural world, are both important; and the rhythm is wonderful and almost unique, since only two or three other poems in English use it from what I've read.
Love in the Valley
Under yonder beech-tree single on the green-sward,
Couched with her arms behind her golden head,
Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly,
Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.
Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her,
Press her parting lips as her waist I gather slow,
Waking in amazement she could not but embrace me:
Then would she hold me and never let me go?
( Read more... )
*In general, Modernism and I do not get on.**
**Except for Virginia Woolf. |
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| Well, *finally*. |
[Apr. 16th, 2008|08:10 am] |
I now can finally use the Internet again, after some screwup on the part of my university that meant I had none for two days. Who knows what went wrong? First they said, "The connection's fine and it isn't our fault"; then they sent a flyer around to everyone saying essentially, "Actually it was our fault, whoops! Tee-hee."
Anyway. I finally got through the last round of the papers I was grading, though I am about to be snowed under by another (and then another, since it's so near finals week now). Someone at the library in my parents' hometown has changed their book-buying habits and now actually orders some new-ish SF and F books, which means I have books to read that I don't have to pay for, and which I was iffy about buying thanks to mixed reviews (Dust by Elizabeth Bear, in particular). I got all excited when I thought the new Steven Brust was coming out next week and then I realized it's not and I need to wait several months. There are just a few more weeks of school left, and though they'll be hectic, I then have almost four solid months off.
Yay. |
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| I do not know what the fuck I did to my shoulder, but I wish it would stop. |
[Apr. 4th, 2008|02:45 pm] |
I took a nap yesterday leaning upright against some pillows, and when I woke up, my left shoulder, just above the place where my collarbone is, hurt horribly. It hurts horribly now, more than twenty-four hours later- just random, stinging jolts of pain that come at any moment, not only when I'm trying to move it around. The pain goes both up towards my shoulder blade and down my left arm. Ibu-Profen, which usually mends anything like this, does not help.
Stupid shoulder. I'm going to try a warm cloth. |
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| *snort* |
[Apr. 1st, 2008|09:06 am] |
FW_Whut.
Supposedly a "safe haven" to discuss "the hypocrisy" of fandom_wank. Maybe an early April Fool's Joke, but if so, not a very funny one. (It could also be the alias of a recent wanker given the recent wank it's chosen to concentrate on).
The odd thing is that it friended my LJ, which I haven't updated in months, since I left LJ during Boldthrough. I do not know why people keep doing this. |
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| Why I like writing, Reason # 4758937363 |
[Mar. 19th, 2008|09:28 pm] |
Within the last few hours, Incarnation has developed:
-A third viewpoint character
-A brand-new set of character traits for Leonan (this is why my character profiles do not work; I can know what the character is like up until the moment of the story's beginning, but once they get on the page and start acting, they change)
-A brand-new side-plot that links up with the third viewpoint character, thanks to said viewpoint character's monumentally stupid brother (sometimes you just need a character who's an idiot, and Mynhaw doe Tyjhan is mine)
I used to stress over the fact that I don't really work with an outline, because it seemed all "real writers" did, and there are advantages to it, like being able to jump ahead and write a part of the story that you know is going to matter soon and which you're in the right mood for writing. I can't do that, because I don't know what is going to happen ahead of my writing it. But working in partnership with a story like this suits me just fine.
Yay. |
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| What the hell. |
[Mar. 19th, 2008|08:14 am] |
It is pissing down rain, and a large pond has formed in a depression next to one of the sycamore trees behind my apartment building. (It always does this when there's heavy rain). I glanced out the window a minute ago, and there's something strange in the middle of the pond. After some squinting, I figured out it is...a duck.
Boy, is he going to be disappointed when it stops raining. |
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| Hee. Darwin on novelists |
[Mar. 4th, 2008|07:38 pm] |
He's commenting on how he's lost his taste for poetry and music as he grew older.
“On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if it be a pretty woman all the better” (Autobiography 138-9). |
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| Writing character clash stories |
[Mar. 2nd, 2008|09:14 pm] |
In the past, I’ve written rants about how I like stories where the plot forms naturally from the clash of characters’ personalities, as opposed to characters compelled against their wills by an outside force (destiny, a prophecy, the gods, unspeakably evil and inhuman villains, etc.) But how, exactly, do you achieve a character clash story? Especially when it’s so much easier to steal a set of tropes and plot devices from a famous or archetypal story and just use them instead?
( Here are some ways ) |
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| Kage Baker, Race, and Gender (contains mild spoilers for the Company series) |
[Feb. 24th, 2008|05:41 pm] |
Warning: Some comments to this post contain major spoilers.
It's bothersome. I already bought all ten books in the Company series, and I really do like the style of humor and the narrative drive behind the plot, so you'd think I'd zip right through them. But I'm stuck in the ninth one.
( Brief introduction to the Company series )
( Race and gender issues )
It's too bad, because I really do like the plot in these books. It moves along! It's connected! It's complex and ties back to itself! (I value that all the more because it's one of the qualities I read epic fantasy for, but other qualities inherent to the epic fantasy genre keep me from liking those books now). But the race and gender politics bother me to the point that I haven't felt like picking up Gods and Pawns in a week- and since I'm in the middle of a story where Mendoza and a white male character investigate the secrets of a native Bolivian tribe, I'm not really sure I want to finish. |
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| Some of my conlang that I am putting here so I do not forget it. |
[Feb. 18th, 2008|08:06 am] |
I've been working on a constructed language in my head for the past few nights before I fell asleep, and since I'm in danger of forgetting some of the words already, I am dumping them here.
( Quick Pronunciation Notes )
( Brief vocabulary thingy )
Have to go look at drafts now, but at least this assures I won't forget that much. |
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| Random thought for the day. |
[Feb. 16th, 2008|09:25 pm] |
You know what my real objection to reading fanfic with the characters as children in it is? It's not the mpreg (I just back-button out of that, and anyway it's less of a risk when we're talking about canon characters). It's not the fact that these children may become Mary Sues (again, easy to back-button out of it if there's a sign of their growing Speshul Powers). It's not even the fact that the plots may be insipid and uninteresting, as some authors unfortunately feel that anything with children in it is automatically interesting, and they don't need to do that actual writing thing.
It's that authors so often feel the need to make the children talk baby-talk. Every r or l becomes a w. Simple words that I think most six- or seven-year-olds would know how to pronounce are shrunk down to one or two syllables. Verbs lose their tenses. Contractions that make no sense take over the page.
Is it really so hard for the authors to realize that not every kid talks like this, and even when they do, such things are hard on the audience's eyes? I mean, really. |
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| *Wow* |
[Feb. 16th, 2008|10:44 am] |
My apartment looks out over a small, grassy expanse with several sycamore trees. There are birds there constantly, but this morning there were a whole bunch of small and noisy ones- starlings, probably- so I went to the window to see them better. A squirrel came down one of the sycamores and was hopping around the base.
This brown shape came over the roof of my building, dived straight down, and suddenly, no more squirrel.
I could see what it was after I got over my blinking: a hawk that I've seen flying around the sycamores before. It flew off over the nearest apartment building, probably to enjoy its dinner in peace and quiet. (The starlings were screaming more frantically than ever, of course).
...That was sudden. But cool. |
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| Anti-fanfiction authors |
[Feb. 14th, 2008|10:48 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | fandom | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | researchy | ] |
For some reason, I was thinking that the majority of authors I know about who disallow fanfic for their works are female:
Anne Rice
Anne McCaffrey
Laurell K. Hamilton (not that this stops anyone; there is a whole LJ community devoted to killing her characters in embarrassing ways)
Robin Hobb
Mercedes Lackey
Whereas the only male anti-fanfic authors I can come up with off the top of my head are Terry Goodkind and George R. R. Martin. (With Martin, though, I think it's only fic; there's a thriving fanart community).
Does anyone know of any other male ones? Living authors, not authors whose estates have strict policies on fanfic, like Edgar Rice Burroughs. |
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