between the rock and the cold, cold sea

I have been to the hills, for two days' worth of blessed peace. There is snow yet in Wicklow, lying on high stoney reaches and under brown pines like the breath of the north, chill in places with ice that has not melted since it froze before the New Year. I'd forgotten what silence sounds like, under the shadow of trees with no noise but that of wind in rock and branch and the distant clamour of rushing water.

It's healing, in a way. I didn't know how many knots I had in my shoulders until they started to unkink.

I hacked my lungs out, and walked, and ate beef and venison, and ended weak and weary as a half-dead thing. I suspect my body disapproves of what I do to it: by the amount of rest it's been demanding, I need to take better care of it. But I have a slight wheeze now rather that the colony of snot I had three days ago, which is all to the good.

---

Tonight I had company, in the form of a couple of friends who came over to watch Sharpe's Rifles on DVD. We've agreed we have to do it more often: Sean Bean is worth a little effort.

It's something to have friends. How strange that is. It's less than six years ago that I can remember having none worth the name, and that's changed beyond all expectation. Sometimes I think I don't deserve to be this lucky. But let me only be lucky a while longer, because dear god, it's so much better than to be alone.

---

I have a thesis yet to finish. If I can get my citations inserted and an introduction written by the end of next week, there will still be four weeks before the end of term and six before the exams in which to fit all the studying I have neglected thus far.

(I am a poor student, though an adequate learner. Memorising things is not fascinating.)

So. That is, I suppose, sufficient unto the day.

I'm probably going to be an intermittent presence in the internets from now til Judgement Day (hey, what else are you going to call the beginning of Final Exams?), considering I haven't even written in my off-line diary in weeks. And I suppose I should start making lists.

Perhaps at a point that isn't 0330, though.

Books 2009: 16-18

16. T.A. Pratt, Spell Games.

Another Marla Mason book, this time with mushroom gods and fungi sorcerers. Also, Marla's brother turns up, up to no good.

The ending is not exactly a cliffhanger. Not exactly. But it's very hook-y. A good, fast, marvellously entertaining book.


17. Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension.

Mistborn had a caper plot going for it. Well is very close to being bog-standard epic brick fantasy. With angst. I am tired of mysterious dark forces and evil warlords in my fantasy, kthnx? Caper plots = interesting. Evil warlords with armies = boring.

It was entertaining enough, and I still like the characters, even if I did want to strangle Vin over her angst. But it did drag on a bit.


18. Holly Scott and Jaimie Duncan, Stargate SG-1: Hydra.

I read tie-ins. Well known fact. This one? Not exactly the best ever.

---

So, Doctor Who.

Somewhere, in the furthest recesses of a childhood that started in the middle of the eighties, I remember a man with big hair and a little blue police box. Or possibly I have imagined remembering it. But, anyway, point is, I don't actually remember watching the pre-reboot Doctor Who. I just knew it existed.

So far, I've watched Season Two, Three, and half of Season Four of the new Doctor Who. And I like it. It's funny. If it wasn't for the incredible manic energy of David Tennant as the Doctor, and the whole travelling in time and space bit, this would look awful similar to a monster of the week show. It does, actually, look awfully similar to a monster of the week show, but the energy - lots of running - the writing - good dialogue! funny jokes! - and the different sets make it seriously entertaining.

You know what I like, though? I like that the main female characters have families and strong relationships apart from the Doctor. I like that their families look like real people, and are written as real people, with individual screwed-up bits and weirdnesses.

It makes next to no sense. It's utterly riduculous. And Rose did not make half as strong an impression on me as a character as Martha or Donna: Martha is made of win, but Donna is made of funny. I have met women like Donna. (And like Rose's mum, who also made an impression.)

And it's played for laughs, and I'm not sure I always like the gender politics, and the universe of humanity could stand a bit more diversity, but seriously, the standard of acting? Is really high.

Thing is, though, it's showing me something that American-made television almost never does. The characters in Doctor Who look and act like real people - oh, exaggerated, and your one who played Rose and Freema Agyeman and Catherine Tate are certainly more beautiful than most people, but their families? Other incidental characters? They look like people or types of people I could recognise.

Also, all the running. That's a hero I can get behind. One who knows when to run. And which direction.

Donna Noble: "A giant wasp. And we're chasing it?"

The Doctor: "That's right. Come on!"

---

Right. Filing.

The problem of "Merlin" is not that it mangles Arthurian myth: many retellings have taken liberties as great. The problem is not that its plots are predictable, for television is frequently predictable; nor is the problem that its language and register are jarringly anachronistic: this is fantasy, after all, and not very tightly historically located fantasy at that.

No, the problem of "Merlin" is that it is lazy. It is lazy in its treatment of knighthood and courtly behaviour, and it is lazy in its treatment of women. It is especially lazy in its treatment of women. Morgana and Gwen are cyphers, blank pages whose motivations and desires are opaque to non-existent. They are not active players: occasionally they show a spark of agency, just enough for you to see how little the role is challenging the actor; but mostly they are tokens, existing to be rescued, or competed for, in the context of the homosocial world of Uther's court and the Arthur-Merlin focus. There are no strong, active women in Uther's court: the only women whose agency has impact on the story are the "evil" witches (who I actually find quite sympathetic. Nimue could even be likeable, if she wasn't such a cypher).

(It's telling, too, I think, that the only non-pale characters of note are Morgana's maid, and the blacksmith. Lazy. Why not let the court physician be a foreigner? A Moor, even, and use the medieval stereotype/fascination with Arab medicine. But I forget: all Arabs are terrorists, right? At least on most TV. Certainly they aren't sensible fatherly old men.)

So much for the problems. A half-minute's thought could come up with half a dozen ways to make it more complex and more interesting. (Personally, I think it would have been interesting if instead of being simply Uther's ward, Morgana was also a noble hostage of some kind. Because then even a half-decent writer could insert some emotional complexity.)

And Gwen. It seems all dramatic presentations of Guinevere are doomed to blandness. For gods' sakes, in the romantic tradition the women committed treason for the sake of love. With Arthur's best friend. How can you screw that up? But it seems you can.

Which is not to say I don't like "Merlin". I do. The actors have energy and comic timing and convey a sense that they are having incredible fun. (And Richard Wilson as Gaius can do more with a look than many actors can with a paragraph.) I find it ridiculously entertaining, and I would have fallen head-over-heels in love with it at age ten or twelve.

But that doesn't mean I'm blind to its faults. Which are glaring, and disappointing many.

(Of course, I still want to watch the rest of it.)

Third week of term. Sickness defeated. IM client intermittently functional. 0.75% of assessed work for the year delivered. Unexercised since last Monday.

Still running to stay in place, so I guess that's status = normal.

Since last week I managed about half of what work I'd scheduled to do, due to being exhausted by a plague, this week I have a whole lot of seminar reading, an essay, and most of a presentation to get done. (It might be two essays, no presentation. We'll see.)

On the flipside, I spent most of the weekend sacked out watching Andromeda. (It turns out that the library - the book library - loans DVDs now, too. This is a shocking and dangerous state of affairs, particularly when it loans ones that I might actually like.) An SF tv series with reasonably decent acting, snark, decent dialogue, and random explosions. Farscape or BSG it ain't, but it probably has a leg up on early Stargate.

(The SFX are fairly ridiculous, but hey, snark will make up for that any day.)

---

Unpleasant news: stupid government wants to reintroduce college fees starting next year. Not being part of a household that meets the income cut-off (one hundred and twenty thousand euro per annum) this isn't likely to affect me, much - but, damnit, it's the principle of the thing. Government saves, maybe, two or three million euro per year. But since graduates pay something on the order of half again as much tax as non-graduates, and about the only thing that can attract investment to this country is our stack of B.A.s and B.Sc.s... I suspect it is a matter of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

(I mean, even if you earn one hundred and twenty thousand euro p.a., it's not going to be easy to find nine thousand euro p.a. per dependent in university. Not that I'm going to weep for those kind of people, or anything - a 60K p.a. paycheck is about as rich as my wildest dreams.)

Today, I had approximately three hours of black despair and suicidal ideations. Not fun.

(Combination of imposter syndrome and financial worries. Joys, I say unto you. Joys.)

(And, you know, it's quite strange to realise that there's a hidden, deep-rooted part of you that really believes you don't deserve to be liked.)

---

Yesterday's achievements:

Greek, thirty minutes. Latin, six sentences. Pronunciation. 1.5 chapters of the Ehrman book.

Running: about a mile in vile, vile, heavy rain.

---

I've not even read two chapters, and already I really don't like Ehrman's The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings.

It's not the first book I've read that was specifically written as an introductory textbook to a subject. It is, however, the first one I've read since secondary school that took the gently gently, let's not scare the young peoples by expecting them to think too much too fast approach to imparting knowledge.

Considering that last year, I had the novel experience of not one but two half-year classes that demanded rapid familiarisation with the methods and intentions of both the literary/textual and the social-historical approaches to analysis (the course on prophecy in Israel was seriously about getting thrown in the deep end to sink or swim, and the course on apocalyptic, magic, and mysticism in the Second Temple period wasn't all that much less so, what with Ezekial and Enoch and Jubilees and Qum'ran and the four extra weeks on mysticism within the later rabbinic tradition) and another, year-long, course on Israel/Judah's responses to empire which depended in large part upon using the tools of literary-historical, redactional, and socio-historical criticism, I'm not happy with a book that seems to think it has to take me by the hand or lead me around by the nose. It seems, quite frankly, a book more aimed at the needs of a secondary school audience than the demands of a university one.

(And it occurs to me to wonder if this a result of its subject matter, or if introductory college textbooks from the US are all this gently-gently. Horrifying thought.)

Fortunately, it's not my book. The lecturer who's offering the course on early Christian writings next year loaned it to me, so I'll read the recommended chapters and try to control my irritation.

---

Rented Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles last night, and watched all nine episodes.

I don't care that their guns seem to appear by magic. This is Lena Headey and Summer Glau, people. Kicking arse and taking names. Apart from the fact that they're both fairly superb actors (I don't hold The Brothers Grimm against Headey, and her performance in 300 impressed the hell out of me), they're both impressively authentic in terms of the physicality of their roles: it's fairly clear that both Headey and Glau know not only how to punch, but how to move.

The supporting performances are also of impressive caliber, and some sharp plotting, pretty decent dialogue, and a willingness to offer a certain amount of ambiguity more than make up for its minor flaws.

Of course, my only exposure to the Terminator franchise heretofore was the first film, and I have to say, this? Much more impressive than that.

I'm really glad to see it's going to have a second season.

---

And, also:

Happy birthday, raecarson.

Books 159-160, Fiction 150-151:

150. A Companion to Wolves, Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette.

Wow.

I will say this again: wow.

There is so much in this book I don't know where to begin. matociquala's books - especially her fantasy - always leave me lost for breath and lacking words. truepenny isn't far behind. What they've done together...

It's as sharp and as icy and as brutal as the Norse mythos in which it feels so very firmly rooted. It's a coming of age novel, but not in the usual way. It's a novel about losing innocence and finding something more. It's violent, and bloody, and very, very, compassionately human.

Read this book.

Seriously.

151. Black Sun Rising, C.S. Friedman.

Dense, complex, thinky book that straddles the line between science fiction and fantasy and does it well. It's the first book of a trilogy, and I'm certainly tempted to read the next, though I found Black Sun Rising to be somewhat fatiguing in its density.

But. Maybe I should read some of these other books first? The ones that have been sitting on my shelf for months and months...

---

Okay, having watched the first two episodes of the original Mission: Impossible, I may be developing a fondness. Despite the utter, utter ridiculousness of the acting, plot, and setting (Russian prisons do not have giant windows! The Soviet Union might have been sprawlingly corrupt, inefficient, and in certain aspects even evil, but individuals were not all incompetent, evil or stupid!), and certain cultural artefacts that do not please, I fear I am... interested. Perhaps even compelled.

I have the weakness for the caper and the ticking clock.

---

It's autumn at last. No wonder I keep wanting to curl up and hibernate.

Okay. That week-and-a-half was a complete wash. No energy, no exercise, no writing: only books, DVDs, and really bad eating habits.

Some months I hate being female.

Also? Hate this weather. Hate it with a very great hatred. Rain is nice. Warmth is nice. Humidity? Man, this is not a freaking rainforest around here. Let up a little. I'd really like to see the sun again sometime soon.

So, we begin again. Starting Monday July 16, I aim to write between 1200 and 1500 words per day for the subsequent 70 days, gym three days in seven, and karate twice a week. Plan?

Plan.

I can do ten weeks. Then I go back to college, anyway, and I get a whole new set of requirements to wreck my head over.

No foreign holidays for me this year. And no domestic ones, either. Next summer, though? Next summer, I'm going to Greece if I have to kill someone to get there.

So, books.

There were, ah. Rather a lot of them.

Books 101-108, Fiction 96-103.

96. Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water.

I could say a lot about this book. I could talk about themes and painful, dense emotion, and fraught inevitability; I could wax lyrical over the depth of characterisation and prose dense and clear and refracted like heavy Waterford crystal. I could talk about Whiskey and the Devil and the Dragon Prince, and the way Matthew comes across to me as the flawed yet somehow perfect gentle knight, and how the weight of all the things left unsaid adds richness to the rest. I could talk about Lucifer and the nameless poet and the archangel, and the way this book seems to be about living with the worst results of one's best intentions, pride and brokenness and making the best of bad bargains.

But I won't.

It's a dense book. And marvellous with it.

97. Scott Lynch, Red Seas Under Red Skies.

Another dense book, though not nearly as dense as W&W. Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen are running a caper in the city of Tal Verrar when complications ensue. There follow deceptions, feats of derring-do, and piracy upon the high seas. Also interesting new characters, twists, turns and did I mention the deceptions and the derring-do?

Great fun.

98. Chaz Brenchley, Bridge of Dreams.

It is my month, it seems, for dense books. I recall reading desperance's Tower of the King's Daughter when I was - twelve? I think, maybe thirteen - in all likelihood too young to enjoyed a dense, measured book as it deserves. The prose is fluid, the pace, as I said, measured, and if it seems to me that the book ended where another author might have chosen to begin it, well, it makes for a pleasant change of pace.

It's more than pleasant to see a little Near Eastern cultural influence in the worldbuilding, too.


99. John M. Ford, The Dragon Waiting.

My month, as I said, for dense books. And I will freely confess I hardly understood everything that was going on here, but I enjoyed the ride, nonetheless.

If I knew a little more about the period in question, I might have understood it better. But very interesting and enjoyable, despite some of my confusion.

100. Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Justice.

I arrive with some relief at a less complex and dense book, though this is still both dense and complex. (In case anyone's wondering, I like dense and complex.) It follows on from the events of Kushiel's Scion. Imriel, the son of Terre d'Ange's most infamous traitor, starts an impossible love affair with the Dauphine Sidonie, gets married to an Alban princess, mixed up in foreign magics and then, eventually, comes to understand Kushiel's justice. Or something like that.

Carey's work has something of the air of travelogue, but it's romance in the old sense of the word. And really, amazingly good.

101. Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Legacy.

Not a dense book, and not, perhaps, Bujold's best. But it has her characteristic grace and excellence, and even Bujold on an off day is still more than well worth the read.

102. Kelley Armstrong, Exit Strategy.

Armstrong veers sideways from her usual fare of werewolves, witches and ghosts in this one. It's a thriller-cum-murder-mystery involving Mafia hitmen (and women) who have to track down a former hitman turned serial killer before he puts all their livelihoods in jeopardy. It's fast-paced, entertaining, and well-done. I think it might even be a halfway original twist on the well-trodden serial-killer path.

Fun.

103. Julie Fortune, Stargate SG-1: Sacrifice Moon.

After all the lovely dense books, I needed a little bit of fluff. And, well. Sacrifice Moon doesn't have many bad points, if one's even halfway fond of the Stargate franchise. Well-written, characteristic characterisation, and generally good stuff.

#

Well, that's that in the way of books. I've also watched most of Stargate SG-1 seasons 5 and 6, and come to the conclusion that they did their best work in seasons 2 and 3. There is so much I'd do differently, given that basis to work on.

I'm also near the end of Farscape season 4. Farscape, unlike Stargate, is being doled out in carefully metered doses. Because it's good, that's why. And when it's gone, it's gone.

I have four episodes left. And the miniseries, but I was impatient and watched that long before Amazon shipped me season 4.

Rygel is still the most hilarious and yet three-dimensional character I've ever seen.

...at least, not until it's over.

The zombie apocalypse completely passed me by. It appears that all the good stuff was being posted to LJ well after I'd packed it in for the night. It's odd, you know, to realise that if anything big really did happen across the Atlantic, the odds are good that it'd be well and truly over before I ever heard of it, due to me not watching the television at all except at gunpoint, and checking the BBC website only every month or so unless I'm actually looking for something in particular.

This headline amused me no end, though, when I checked the Beeb today.

#

Blustery day today. Wet, windy. Pretty miserable to be out and about in, actually. So of course, I biked to the supermarket twice and walked down a third time (catfood!), thus making more trips to get shopping today than I have in the last three days.

Good news for the get-myself-back-in-fitness project, at least.

#

Writing isn't going so great. I have the 'I suck' malady, and with the laptop out of service and AWOL, I'm finding the desktop really uncomfortable to write at for any length of time. I may need to adjust the keyboard shelf and get one of those ergonomic wrist-rest thingies. I've been writing by hand, and accumulated probably 2.6K in the last four days, but now I need to type it up.

I miss my laptop.

#

So in the last five or six weeks, I've watched the first three seasons of Farscape and the first three seasons of Stargate SG-1, more TV than I've consumed in the last six months. And I've been having regular, vivid, in-colour-with-narrative dreams.

(Last night's one, for example, had an overthrown king, an untrustworthy counselor or two, a small band of companions, a menace from tunnels beneath the earth, labyrinthine citadels, night attacks in a harbour, an exodus, and death-or-glory stands. In freakin' Technicolour. With a narrative that actually made a certain amount of sense. Strange, no?)

These phenomena may not be unconnected. I should probably conduct further experiments, don't you think?