life, liberty and the pursuit of geekiness

I'm liking O Come O Come Emmanuel at the minute, for a carol. It doesn't cloy. It's the combination of its expectation, rather than realised triumph, and its minor key, I think.

I don't know what masochistic influence made me go trawling around the Pit of Voles, but when I turned up this horrible thing (Willie goes to act Romeo and Juliet on Broadway, yeouch) in the Goodnight Mister Tom section, I couldn't help thinking of what one or two of you would think of it. Talk about missing the whole tone, setting and point of your canon....It looks like a school assignment; imagine how depressing to be an English teacher and have to read through what are essentially 25 Pit-worthy fanfics of whatever children's book the class is doing, in the guise of homeworks!

Talking of children's books, I've had a scenario in my head, but I can't remember what book it comes from and it's driving me crazy. Basically the currently absent father, before he left, told the children not to worry their mother; one of them is using this as an excuse not to tell her what they're up to, and another offspring comments, 'He meant not do things to worry her, not tell her lies to make her happy.'
Can anyone place this for me? I'm thinking Antonia Forest or Arthur Ransome, but I may have been misled by the naval fathers.

And lastly, a grammar peeve.

If Blank would have verb-ed

What is this grammar construction I see everywhere? What ever happened to 'If Blank had verb-ed'?

It's always a good thing to remember when you've pre-ordered books from amazon.co.uk.

Anyway, I now possess the paperback of Going Postal. ( Spoilers )

( Spoilers for Monstrous Regiment )


( Thud summary, if it counts as a spoiler )


*Apart from in the rooms of Leonard da Quirm, where it is probably forming part of an experimental toenail-clipping machine.
**According to the Theory of Special Relativity, Rincewind is stationary in Rincewind's frame of reference. Everything else tends to move backwards very rapidly, though.

Borrowed A Presumption of Death from the library; it really isn't a bad one considering it's in a mobile classroom in a car park.
A Presumption of Death is written by Jill Paton Walsh, set in the period covered by the Wimsey Papers in the early part of 1940. I consider it as paid fanfiction rather than anything definitive about Peter's and Harriet's future. (I have a great envy of those who are paid for works in other people's fandoms, especially the Star Wars people who have made such a hash of it).
( Spoilers )

However, all these nitpicks didn't destroy my enjoyment of the book. I would say it's worth reading, but only after you have finished all the Sayers originals.

I picked this book up a couple of weeks ago, just to see what it was about when I'd heard so many people talk about it. I have to say I wasn't impressed. This review has been written for a bit, but I'm unlocking and redating it now.

By the time I'd finished the book, I felt like I'd read the history of the world, as rescripted by Sigmund Freud. Like King Charles' head, the female reproductive organs just won't stay out of the book. I felt like going, 'Not everything is about sex; get laid and get over it!' at about the halfway point. My disbelief was unsuspended with a crash when Mary Magdalene codedly starred in Disney films.

Then I got the feeling it was dodgily researched, or at least that the facts weren't allowed to get in the way of a good story. I can't see any unaccounted-for hands in The Last Supper, and they all look like girls to me anyway :D
'Jehovah' isn't extant before the 12th century AD, and is a conflation of the consonants of the Name with the vowel sounds of 'Adonai (Lord), the word Jewish readers used to replace the Name with. And that's connected to the verb 'hwh', a earlier form of the verb 'to be'(L. Koehler, W. Baumgartner,Lexicon in Veritas Testamenti Libros, 1958).
Oh, and Teabing (was I the only person to read this consistently as 'Teabag'?) was fake-English-as-written-by-Americans. Way to be over the top. As Teabag was merrily debunking Christianity, no one seems to realise that Goddess-worship (and all other religions) can be debunked just as easily, leaving us all back where we started, more or less. You can't play that game. Oh, and if you're going to make wild guesses on the basis of the historically iffy Gnostic gospels, why not include the horrible passage where 'Jesus' says Mary cannot enter heaven, being merely a woman, but it's all okay, as he will turn her into a man! (Where's the mpreg in this freaky scenario? It's all it needs to shove it into the realm of badfic)

I wasn't much up on the 'great scientists and philosophers through history guarding and keeping the secret of the Grail' thing either. The thing about all the scientists I've ever meet, is that they are incapable of leaving well alone. It's that 'poke it and let's see what it does', that's their defining factor. I really can't see it lying dormant in the charge of all those nosey people (who all seemed to be men; what gives?) I was waiting for the secret to turn out to be that there was no secret, as well. I love that sort of twist.

Also, I thought that the Opus Dei and the Grail-people's attitude to women equally creepy. Must the feminine be either demonised or deified? Why? I have a vagina, but I also have a mind and a soul. I'm not a temptress or a priestess. I'm a person.

Oh, and the Head Honcho can achieve Nirvana or whatever during orgasm when having ritual sex with a woman *pukes* And that leaves women where, exactly? Going 'is that all?' Lean back and think of Jerusalem?
Could I also point out that the Christian religion does not consist solely of the Roman Catholic church. kthnxbye. And in casting it as suppresors of teh evol sacred feminine1!!, the BVM seems to have been factored out of the equation. Seeing as it seems only a matter of time before she's elevated to Coredemptrix by Papal decree, I'd say the RCs are pretty well up there with the sacred female. I can see why they had to be the villians of the piece for historical reasons, but still.

And the book ended with our Gary Stu hero (professor of ohsocoolinvented subject1!!) praying at the relics of a saint. Fit right in with the Roman Catholics, that would.

It's late, I'm snarxy, this post comes across as a mixture of mockity and serious criticism. Bite me.

Gaudy Night is a detective story; a love story; a psychological novel; an Oxford book, in the sense that Oxford is not merely the setting but also a character; a book that sings; that rare thing, a nearly perfect book.

( Integrity, "good work" and opposing forces )

Cross-posted to my own journal, talboys and reading_sayers. Isn't Livejournal wonderful--where else could I post something like this?

All my presents were useful and boring, except for a copy of War and Peace, which in patches is just boring. I'm on page 316 at present. For some reason best known to herself, my mother decided to work off her dinner by cleaning, and she made me dust the drawing room chairs and hearth. Sigh.

Books in bold I have read.
Books in italic I have started, or attempted.

( My Literary Accomplishments )

Looking at my list, I've mostly read children's books and 'classics' (they cost £1 each, is why) with a few school set texts--Mockingbird, Grapes of Wrath