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lunasarielEDIT: Apologies for the weird font thing towards the end! LJ doesn't like me at the moment.
OK, so, classes! If my final few days of vacation were pleasantly busy, the past two have been nuts. Well, yesterday was nuts, anyway. There's been some adjustment, and I'm now currently taking Irish Literature 1800-Present (so no more deliciously weird myths, but hopefully some Yeats and Wilde), Celtic Romanticism (I'm still a bit fuzzy on whether "Romanticism" refers to the era or the process of idealization here), History of Literature in English Part B (it looks like we'll be getting into Austen and the Romantics! Squee!), and History of the Novel (we're reading both Moll Flanders and Persuasion, so I guess it balances out).
Tuesday was busy, as the first day of instruction always is. The way my schedule was then, I had only one class, ENGL 125A ( History of the Novel). The room the class is in is set up very strangely, in a kind of trapezoidal amphitheater, and the springs on the seats are so stiff that my feet don't even touch the ground if I stretch. The acoustics aren't great, but it also doesn't help that the professor has very little charisma. I remember reading something from Harry Potter about how Professors McGonnagal and Snape could hold a class entirely still and silent with just their eyes, and I've had professors like that, but there was none of that here. The poor lady is obviously trying, she really is. It's clear that she loves her subject matter, and loves teaching at Cal, but something's just not clicking. I hope this impression fades with time; god knows I've been wrong before. Another thing in this class' favor, and this is definitely a geek bonus, there's someone in it actually called Tenzing (or possibly Tenzin; like I said, the acoustics aren't great). His last name wasn't Tharkay, and I wasn't close enough to get a good look at him, but I squeed a little all the same. The professor has said that she'd like to make this a discussion-based class, and I think I might die of fangirly glee if he turns out to be snarky and at least able to do a decent British accent.
Aside from that one class, I watched the final episode of Sherlock s2, ran a couple of errands, and just generally puttered around for the rest of the day. Our RA called a floor meeting to welcome everyone back, and while I don't think I'll ever be crazy about my floormates, they're, on the whole, a good bunch of people. We got a couple of bulletins for the new semester, but these basically amounted to reminding us not to make noise after quiet hours, sleep in the lounge, leave trash around, etc. The Roomie seems to be morally opposed to floor meetings, and definitely doesn't like any of our floormates, so I told the RA she had gone to bed early and conveyed the news.
Yesterday was...awkward. My schedule (as it was then; more on this in a mo') had me going to class from 10-12, 1-2, and 4-5:30. Most of my Weds classes take place in far-off buildings, so I couldn't quite justify using the time between classes to run back to my dorm, eat, etc., but the breaks were too long for me to just go to my next class and get there early. I spent those breaks getting reacquainted with the Morrison Reading Room, still one of my favorite spots on campus. This was nice, and all, but turned out to be poor time management on my part, as it turns out I could have used all this downtime to take care of some online class-wrangling that I had to rush and do that evening, when I was already tired.
My first class of the day, ENGL 45B (History of Lit in English), was fun. The instructor, Puckett, has a lot of energy, and managed to get us to laugh at his lateness, which had originally kind of annoyed me. He also made a Game of Thrones joke while talking about 18th century politics, which further endeared him to me. I'm really excited about a lot of the reading we have to do for this class; despite the fact that the reader is literally thicker than all three readers I had last semester put together, we'll be covering my favorite period in British literary history. Burns and Blake and Wordsworth, oh my! We'll also be getting Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, the aforementioned Austen, Brontë, and Ben Franklin. There's also some stuff that I'm less excited about (Swift, Melville, and Whitman), but hey, I can slog through obscure early-18th century satire with the best of 'em!
My second class of the day, CELTIC 146A (Medieval Welsh), I'm afraid I had to drop. It sounds interesting, but it looks like it's going to be mostly grammar-focused, and I absolutely suck at learning languages, especially non-Romance, non-Germanic, medieval, hybrid languages, so I could either put in a metric ton of work and have at least a shot at a decent grade, or just take something else. And I don't just mean that I suck at learning languages, but being in that class was physically draining. There's pleasantly interesting, which at least keeps you from falling asleep; there's gratifyingly challenging, which makes you proud to earn your A; and then there's "I didn't even understand half the English words you just used, let alone the Welsh ones," which is what I had there. I'll be taking 20 units this semester, almost twice what I had in the fall, so I don't think I'll have the time or energy to put in the requisite hours, so I switched to CELTIC 139 (Irish Literature 1800-Present), which I'll get to in a moment.
My last official class of the day was CELTIC 171, which promises to be amazing. One of the reasons I'm sad to be leaving 146A is the professor, Klar, who's retiring after this semester, so she's just saying the hell with it and just having fun for now. She's got over 30 years teaching Celtic Studies (back before there was even a Celtic Studies major!), which means that she's got some great stories, which she's not at all adverse to sharing. She also, obviously, knows her subject backward and forward, and has experience in conveying that knowledge to a class. In addition, one of her favorite sayings (which I've dubbed Klarisms, and of which there are many) is, "Celtic Studies majors have ready-made friends," in reference to the fact that the department is so small, and I'm seeing a lot of familiar faces from last semester's Celtic Mythology turning up here, too. I certainly hope that this won't be as torturous as last semester, when I sat right behind a group of people who were always having fantastically geeky conversations that I wanted badly to join in on, but couldn't. There are only about 18 people in 171, though, so I find myself speaking up a bit more. Of course, I do tend to be more talkative at the beginning of the semester, before I've had a chance to well and truly put my foot in my mouth, but we'll see how that goes.
By the time I got out of 171, it was dark, and I'd decided to switch 146A for 139, but the first meeting of the long-awaited Chernin Program was also that night, and I still had 30 pages of reading for ENGL 125A to do, so I had to hightail it home. I tried to switch classes, but the add/drop system at Cal is set up so that certain changes can only be made at certain times, and I couldn't do what I needed to until later that evening. Going back to my dorm wasn't a complete waste, though, as I made some decent inroads on the reading (a critical analysis on womens' roles in the birth of the novel), before I had to go *back* to campus for the meeting. The Chernin Program is a mentorship/community-building program, designed for English majors, but open to all. I disdained to take it last semester, but I ended up really kicking myself for that decision. I didn't make any lasting friends and spent most of my time complaining about how lonely and bored I was, while an acquaintance of mine who had joined the program was always busy doing things like going on sponsored trips to the de Young and touring Cal's Rare Books collection, and I never saw him alone. The program is also run by my old ENGL 45A professor, Nolan, who I had a lot of fun with last semester. Last night's meeting was basically to hand out the pins (every year, the Chernin Program hands out pins with quotes about writing/reading/studying literature by famous authors to the participants), give us an introduction to the program and the syllabus (apparently, it actually counts towards the English major!), and introduce us to our mentors. There was a whole crowd of people waiting to introduce themselves, so I only got to say hi to mine, Lynn, for a few seconds.
By that time I was definitely ready to go home, hurry through the rest of my reading, and get some sleep. Of course, when I went to go sign up for CELTIC 139, the schedule said (I thought, anyway) that it ran from 8-11 AM, which kind of made me whimper a bit, since it was already 10:30, I was exhausted, and I couldn't think of going to bed for at least another hour. Oddly, though, everywhere else I checked 139's information had it running from 11-12:30 PM, so I didn't quite know what to do. I was adding late, so I definitely didn't want to miss the class by sleeping through it, but I really, *really* didn't want to get up at 6:30 AM to make an 8:00 class. I emailed the professor, got no response (as expected, I must say. Until we actually do replace teachers with human-like androids, expecting them to respond to emails at 10:30 on a Wednesday night is a bit silly), and decided to be safe and drag myself out of bed for the 8:00 class, just in case.
Of course, it turns out that it *was* from 11-12:30, not 8-11, so I sat in the library, got caught up on all the Interwebz stuff that I didn't have time to do yesterday, and quietly berated myself for the fact that I could have slept an extra four hours. Of course, the professor emailed me at 10:00, reminding me that 8-11 was the final time, and 11-12:30 was the class time, as is clearly printed on the class schedule, so basically I introduced myself to him by failing at basic literacy. Yeah, don't think I'm going to be getting a letter of recommendation from him. XD
The class itself was fun, though! I recognized a few more Celtic Studies people (it really is a tiny major), and although I was playing catch-up, I was able to follow along fairly well. The professor, Melia, is best described (lovingly!) as a "curmudgeon." He wears suspenders and a fedora/pork-pie hat (I forget the difference) and actually harrumphs, which is kind of endearing. He also has a fairly obvious "damn kids with their smartphones and their Facebook and their loud music" and something of a superiority complex (if that's the right word), which is less endearing. The subject matter is really interesting, though, and much more comprehensible than medieval Welsh, so I think I'm going to enjoy this class. It also helps that, unexpectedly, a lot of Celtic Mythology stuff applies. Characters like Medb and Cú Chulainn turn up, although pretty badly romanticized, quite a bit, and a lot of the geography and pseudo-history has turned out to be pretty useful in terms of contextualizing this and that.
So all in all, my classes are looking to be challenging, but fun. Right now I'm looking forward to a bit of a challenge, but after a few weeks of all this, I'm probably going to crawl out, whimpering, from under an avalanche of reading and papers, look back on this, and laugh the shaky, bitter laugh of the shell-shocked veteran looking back on her naivité.
Sadly, after getting back in the swing of things for about a week, my reading has fallen off again. I made a sincere effort to finish Mistborn, which I'm already about 5/6 done with, but A) my interest in it has severely waned, and B) everything else I'm reading is more pressing/interesting. I've got Tolkien, of course. I was actually reading along more or less chronologically, which was kind of a cool feeling, but I think I'm a week or two behind now, as they're trying to figure out the riddle on the Doors of Durin right now, and I think I remember TOR.N noting that Gandalf falls with the Balrog on Jan. 15th after a four-day journey. So, yeah, I don't know whether I'll be catching up anytime soon, but it was fun while it lasted.
I finished Lords and Ladies without quite meaning to, as I find myself doing pretty often with Terry Pratchett, and it was fun as always. One of my favorite collective side characters is/are the Ogg clan (btw, I came across a reference to a "Nannie Ogg" in a Yeats collection that I read for CELTIC 171! Squee!), from Shawn ("Oooaaaww, Mum!"), to Jason ("Sing it, you bastards!"), to the many nameless, faceless daughters-in-law. The transplanting of various city-bread Discworld regulars, like Casanunda and the wizards, to Lancre was varying degrees of hilarious (I especially loved Casanunda's disastrous attempt to seduce Nanny with food), but that got me a-thinkin', and although I'm sure I'm not the first one to mention it, I'd love to see Sam Vimes up there, or somewhere similarly wild. We saw Granny Weatherwax in the city in Maskerade, and, okay, Sam got at least mildly countrified in Snuff, but I'd like to see how he'd react to somewhere truly out of his knowledge (Jingo and certain parts of The Fifth Elephant notwithstanding). The universe might implode from concentrated awesomeness if he and Granny Weatherwax ever met properly, but I'm sure PTerry would do it justice.
The Mysteries of Udolpho continues to be deliciously silly and melodramatic, although the heroine's habitual hysterics (ain't alliteration awesome?) are beginning to wear on me a bit. Also, it's very much a product of its time, in that servants are considered nearly sub-human, and certainly borderline-idiotic. This sometimes has the effect of making Emily (the heroine), whose compassion and sensitivity can't go a single page without being praised at length, sound like a hypocrite at best, and a horrible person at worst. For example, she only thinks to mention that her maidservant is trapped in a "haunted" room, last heard going insane with fear and slowly starving to death, only after demanding fruit, wine, and gossipy news for herself. She is also extremely disdainful of said maidservant's grief over her boyfriend's supposed death...while being almost superhumanly understanding and compassionate towards her bitchy aunt, who broke her (Emily's) engagement with the man she loved, and tried to force her to marry against her will. Speaking of values dissonance, said aunt is roundly chastised by the narrator for steadfastly refusing to sign over her property to her BLATANTLY EVIL husband, while attempting to hold on to one's own property and resist an abusive husband would be seen as laudable today. I can really imagine Jane having a conniption over the generally spineless behavior of the women in this novel, and Catherine geinuinely not getting it. Speaking of which, yes, I am still getting some damn fine amusement out of imagining the Temeraire gang MST3King Udolpho. I've actually made some progress on The Fic (now affectionately termed Godzilla, A) out of respect for GRRM's Kong and B) because of the fact that this tiny, innocuous idea for a fairly cracky fic got into some radoioactive ooze or something, and now it's stomping all over the Tokyo that is my mind, all bloated and huge, demanding that I insert all this srs bznz relationship stuff and subplots and character development, and I don't quite have the heart to call in the nuclear strike that would be a beta to whip it into shape and trim off the fat, which I'm sure there's *a lot* of. At least, not yet. I really do plan on getting a beta sometime, but I'd like to have something approaching a finished draft, even if it does turn out to be ungodly long/meandering and unexpectedly emotional), but very little actual funny stuff. We'll actually be doing what looks like a fairly in-depth study of the Gothic novel in ENGL 45B (I think; it could be 125A instead), so I might just hold off until then. Of course, "hold off until then" is the "I think we should see other people" of writing, so I would like to get this finished sometime soon. Hmm, decisions, decisions...
The last book I'm working on now (well, I'm also technically reading Maskerade, as it's on my pile o' books, but I haven't exactly started it yet) is Jhereg, out of the omnibus loaned to me by hamsterwoman (whose LJ username I can't seem to include, as it deletes all the text after it. Sorry!)and after a slooow start, I'm getting really into it. I'm still having some trouble wrapping my head around some of the stuff inherent to the 'verse, such as the whole reincarnation thing, the whole undead thing, and what, exactly, a teckla is. Yeah, I'm sure there's a wiki, but after accidentally spoiling myself for a few fairly major plot developments in Temeraire ("Wait, Jane is Admiral now? And Laurence gets exiled for what?"), I'm trying to stay entirely clear of the fandom until spoilers are no longer an issue. The first two things I mentioned, reincarnation and undeath, seem to be looking to become fairly central elements to the plot, so I've been working especially hard on getting a handle on them.rampage investigation, including the first-hand look at chaos magic and why it is a very, very bad idea. Since somewhere around Vlad's first visit to Morrolan, things have really picked up, and while all the reincarnations and switching Houses and millennia-long plots can get tangled up into a big ball o' confusion at times, Vlad seems as lost as I am, so at least there's someone around to explain things. The heist-style structure keeps things interestingly Inception-like, and since I think I'm reaching the conclusion, I'm looking forward to the Big Reveal, whatever it may be. (Assuming, of course, that Vlad being the reincarnated Whatshisname that blew up Dragaera [or possibly assassinated the guy who blew up Dragaera? Or worked with the guy who blew up Dragaera? Both? IDK] isn't the Big Reveal in and of itself.)
OK, so, classes! If my final few days of vacation were pleasantly busy, the past two have been nuts. Well, yesterday was nuts, anyway. There's been some adjustment, and I'm now currently taking Irish Literature 1800-Present (so no more deliciously weird myths, but hopefully some Yeats and Wilde), Celtic Romanticism (I'm still a bit fuzzy on whether "Romanticism" refers to the era or the process of idealization here), History of Literature in English Part B (it looks like we'll be getting into Austen and the Romantics! Squee!), and History of the Novel (we're reading both Moll Flanders and Persuasion, so I guess it balances out).
Tuesday was busy, as the first day of instruction always is. The way my schedule was then, I had only one class, ENGL 125A ( History of the Novel). The room the class is in is set up very strangely, in a kind of trapezoidal amphitheater, and the springs on the seats are so stiff that my feet don't even touch the ground if I stretch. The acoustics aren't great, but it also doesn't help that the professor has very little charisma. I remember reading something from Harry Potter about how Professors McGonnagal and Snape could hold a class entirely still and silent with just their eyes, and I've had professors like that, but there was none of that here. The poor lady is obviously trying, she really is. It's clear that she loves her subject matter, and loves teaching at Cal, but something's just not clicking. I hope this impression fades with time; god knows I've been wrong before. Another thing in this class' favor, and this is definitely a geek bonus, there's someone in it actually called Tenzing (or possibly Tenzin; like I said, the acoustics aren't great). His last name wasn't Tharkay, and I wasn't close enough to get a good look at him, but I squeed a little all the same. The professor has said that she'd like to make this a discussion-based class, and I think I might die of fangirly glee if he turns out to be snarky and at least able to do a decent British accent.
Aside from that one class, I watched the final episode of Sherlock s2, ran a couple of errands, and just generally puttered around for the rest of the day. Our RA called a floor meeting to welcome everyone back, and while I don't think I'll ever be crazy about my floormates, they're, on the whole, a good bunch of people. We got a couple of bulletins for the new semester, but these basically amounted to reminding us not to make noise after quiet hours, sleep in the lounge, leave trash around, etc. The Roomie seems to be morally opposed to floor meetings, and definitely doesn't like any of our floormates, so I told the RA she had gone to bed early and conveyed the news.
Yesterday was...awkward. My schedule (as it was then; more on this in a mo') had me going to class from 10-12, 1-2, and 4-5:30. Most of my Weds classes take place in far-off buildings, so I couldn't quite justify using the time between classes to run back to my dorm, eat, etc., but the breaks were too long for me to just go to my next class and get there early. I spent those breaks getting reacquainted with the Morrison Reading Room, still one of my favorite spots on campus. This was nice, and all, but turned out to be poor time management on my part, as it turns out I could have used all this downtime to take care of some online class-wrangling that I had to rush and do that evening, when I was already tired.
My first class of the day, ENGL 45B (History of Lit in English), was fun. The instructor, Puckett, has a lot of energy, and managed to get us to laugh at his lateness, which had originally kind of annoyed me. He also made a Game of Thrones joke while talking about 18th century politics, which further endeared him to me. I'm really excited about a lot of the reading we have to do for this class; despite the fact that the reader is literally thicker than all three readers I had last semester put together, we'll be covering my favorite period in British literary history. Burns and Blake and Wordsworth, oh my! We'll also be getting Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, the aforementioned Austen, Brontë, and Ben Franklin. There's also some stuff that I'm less excited about (Swift, Melville, and Whitman), but hey, I can slog through obscure early-18th century satire with the best of 'em!
My second class of the day, CELTIC 146A (Medieval Welsh), I'm afraid I had to drop. It sounds interesting, but it looks like it's going to be mostly grammar-focused, and I absolutely suck at learning languages, especially non-Romance, non-Germanic, medieval, hybrid languages, so I could either put in a metric ton of work and have at least a shot at a decent grade, or just take something else. And I don't just mean that I suck at learning languages, but being in that class was physically draining. There's pleasantly interesting, which at least keeps you from falling asleep; there's gratifyingly challenging, which makes you proud to earn your A; and then there's "I didn't even understand half the English words you just used, let alone the Welsh ones," which is what I had there. I'll be taking 20 units this semester, almost twice what I had in the fall, so I don't think I'll have the time or energy to put in the requisite hours, so I switched to CELTIC 139 (Irish Literature 1800-Present), which I'll get to in a moment.
My last official class of the day was CELTIC 171, which promises to be amazing. One of the reasons I'm sad to be leaving 146A is the professor, Klar, who's retiring after this semester, so she's just saying the hell with it and just having fun for now. She's got over 30 years teaching Celtic Studies (back before there was even a Celtic Studies major!), which means that she's got some great stories, which she's not at all adverse to sharing. She also, obviously, knows her subject backward and forward, and has experience in conveying that knowledge to a class. In addition, one of her favorite sayings (which I've dubbed Klarisms, and of which there are many) is, "Celtic Studies majors have ready-made friends," in reference to the fact that the department is so small, and I'm seeing a lot of familiar faces from last semester's Celtic Mythology turning up here, too. I certainly hope that this won't be as torturous as last semester, when I sat right behind a group of people who were always having fantastically geeky conversations that I wanted badly to join in on, but couldn't. There are only about 18 people in 171, though, so I find myself speaking up a bit more. Of course, I do tend to be more talkative at the beginning of the semester, before I've had a chance to well and truly put my foot in my mouth, but we'll see how that goes.
By the time I got out of 171, it was dark, and I'd decided to switch 146A for 139, but the first meeting of the long-awaited Chernin Program was also that night, and I still had 30 pages of reading for ENGL 125A to do, so I had to hightail it home. I tried to switch classes, but the add/drop system at Cal is set up so that certain changes can only be made at certain times, and I couldn't do what I needed to until later that evening. Going back to my dorm wasn't a complete waste, though, as I made some decent inroads on the reading (a critical analysis on womens' roles in the birth of the novel), before I had to go *back* to campus for the meeting. The Chernin Program is a mentorship/community-building program, designed for English majors, but open to all. I disdained to take it last semester, but I ended up really kicking myself for that decision. I didn't make any lasting friends and spent most of my time complaining about how lonely and bored I was, while an acquaintance of mine who had joined the program was always busy doing things like going on sponsored trips to the de Young and touring Cal's Rare Books collection, and I never saw him alone. The program is also run by my old ENGL 45A professor, Nolan, who I had a lot of fun with last semester. Last night's meeting was basically to hand out the pins (every year, the Chernin Program hands out pins with quotes about writing/reading/studying literature by famous authors to the participants), give us an introduction to the program and the syllabus (apparently, it actually counts towards the English major!), and introduce us to our mentors. There was a whole crowd of people waiting to introduce themselves, so I only got to say hi to mine, Lynn, for a few seconds.
By that time I was definitely ready to go home, hurry through the rest of my reading, and get some sleep. Of course, when I went to go sign up for CELTIC 139, the schedule said (I thought, anyway) that it ran from 8-11 AM, which kind of made me whimper a bit, since it was already 10:30, I was exhausted, and I couldn't think of going to bed for at least another hour. Oddly, though, everywhere else I checked 139's information had it running from 11-12:30 PM, so I didn't quite know what to do. I was adding late, so I definitely didn't want to miss the class by sleeping through it, but I really, *really* didn't want to get up at 6:30 AM to make an 8:00 class. I emailed the professor, got no response (as expected, I must say. Until we actually do replace teachers with human-like androids, expecting them to respond to emails at 10:30 on a Wednesday night is a bit silly), and decided to be safe and drag myself out of bed for the 8:00 class, just in case.
Of course, it turns out that it *was* from 11-12:30, not 8-11, so I sat in the library, got caught up on all the Interwebz stuff that I didn't have time to do yesterday, and quietly berated myself for the fact that I could have slept an extra four hours. Of course, the professor emailed me at 10:00, reminding me that 8-11 was the final time, and 11-12:30 was the class time, as is clearly printed on the class schedule, so basically I introduced myself to him by failing at basic literacy. Yeah, don't think I'm going to be getting a letter of recommendation from him. XD
The class itself was fun, though! I recognized a few more Celtic Studies people (it really is a tiny major), and although I was playing catch-up, I was able to follow along fairly well. The professor, Melia, is best described (lovingly!) as a "curmudgeon." He wears suspenders and a fedora/pork-pie hat (I forget the difference) and actually harrumphs, which is kind of endearing. He also has a fairly obvious "damn kids with their smartphones and their Facebook and their loud music" and something of a superiority complex (if that's the right word), which is less endearing. The subject matter is really interesting, though, and much more comprehensible than medieval Welsh, so I think I'm going to enjoy this class. It also helps that, unexpectedly, a lot of Celtic Mythology stuff applies. Characters like Medb and Cú Chulainn turn up, although pretty badly romanticized, quite a bit, and a lot of the geography and pseudo-history has turned out to be pretty useful in terms of contextualizing this and that.
So all in all, my classes are looking to be challenging, but fun. Right now I'm looking forward to a bit of a challenge, but after a few weeks of all this, I'm probably going to crawl out, whimpering, from under an avalanche of reading and papers, look back on this, and laugh the shaky, bitter laugh of the shell-shocked veteran looking back on her naivité.
Sadly, after getting back in the swing of things for about a week, my reading has fallen off again. I made a sincere effort to finish Mistborn, which I'm already about 5/6 done with, but A) my interest in it has severely waned, and B) everything else I'm reading is more pressing/interesting. I've got Tolkien, of course. I was actually reading along more or less chronologically, which was kind of a cool feeling, but I think I'm a week or two behind now, as they're trying to figure out the riddle on the Doors of Durin right now, and I think I remember TOR.N noting that Gandalf falls with the Balrog on Jan. 15th after a four-day journey. So, yeah, I don't know whether I'll be catching up anytime soon, but it was fun while it lasted.
I finished Lords and Ladies without quite meaning to, as I find myself doing pretty often with Terry Pratchett, and it was fun as always. One of my favorite collective side characters is/are the Ogg clan (btw, I came across a reference to a "Nannie Ogg" in a Yeats collection that I read for CELTIC 171! Squee!), from Shawn ("Oooaaaww, Mum!"), to Jason ("Sing it, you bastards!"), to the many nameless, faceless daughters-in-law. The transplanting of various city-bread Discworld regulars, like Casanunda and the wizards, to Lancre was varying degrees of hilarious (I especially loved Casanunda's disastrous attempt to seduce Nanny with food), but that got me a-thinkin', and although I'm sure I'm not the first one to mention it, I'd love to see Sam Vimes up there, or somewhere similarly wild. We saw Granny Weatherwax in the city in Maskerade, and, okay, Sam got at least mildly countrified in Snuff, but I'd like to see how he'd react to somewhere truly out of his knowledge (Jingo and certain parts of The Fifth Elephant notwithstanding). The universe might implode from concentrated awesomeness if he and Granny Weatherwax ever met properly, but I'm sure PTerry would do it justice.
The Mysteries of Udolpho continues to be deliciously silly and melodramatic, although the heroine's habitual hysterics (ain't alliteration awesome?) are beginning to wear on me a bit. Also, it's very much a product of its time, in that servants are considered nearly sub-human, and certainly borderline-idiotic. This sometimes has the effect of making Emily (the heroine), whose compassion and sensitivity can't go a single page without being praised at length, sound like a hypocrite at best, and a horrible person at worst. For example, she only thinks to mention that her maidservant is trapped in a "haunted" room, last heard going insane with fear and slowly starving to death, only after demanding fruit, wine, and gossipy news for herself. She is also extremely disdainful of said maidservant's grief over her boyfriend's supposed death...while being almost superhumanly understanding and compassionate towards her bitchy aunt, who broke her (Emily's) engagement with the man she loved, and tried to force her to marry against her will. Speaking of values dissonance, said aunt is roundly chastised by the narrator for steadfastly refusing to sign over her property to her BLATANTLY EVIL husband, while attempting to hold on to one's own property and resist an abusive husband would be seen as laudable today. I can really imagine Jane having a conniption over the generally spineless behavior of the women in this novel, and Catherine geinuinely not getting it. Speaking of which, yes, I am still getting some damn fine amusement out of imagining the Temeraire gang MST3King Udolpho. I've actually made some progress on The Fic (now affectionately termed Godzilla, A) out of respect for GRRM's Kong and B) because of the fact that this tiny, innocuous idea for a fairly cracky fic got into some radoioactive ooze or something, and now it's stomping all over the Tokyo that is my mind, all bloated and huge, demanding that I insert all this srs bznz relationship stuff and subplots and character development, and I don't quite have the heart to call in the nuclear strike that would be a beta to whip it into shape and trim off the fat, which I'm sure there's *a lot* of. At least, not yet. I really do plan on getting a beta sometime, but I'd like to have something approaching a finished draft, even if it does turn out to be ungodly long/meandering and unexpectedly emotional), but very little actual funny stuff. We'll actually be doing what looks like a fairly in-depth study of the Gothic novel in ENGL 45B (I think; it could be 125A instead), so I might just hold off until then. Of course, "hold off until then" is the "I think we should see other people" of writing, so I would like to get this finished sometime soon. Hmm, decisions, decisions...
The last book I'm working on now (well, I'm also technically reading Maskerade, as it's on my pile o' books, but I haven't exactly started it yet) is Jhereg, out of the omnibus loaned to me by hamsterwoman (whose LJ username I can't seem to include, as it deletes all the text after it. Sorry!)and after a slooow start, I'm getting really into it. I'm still having some trouble wrapping my head around some of the stuff inherent to the 'verse, such as the whole reincarnation thing, the whole undead thing, and what, exactly, a teckla is. Yeah, I'm sure there's a wiki, but after accidentally spoiling myself for a few fairly major plot developments in Temeraire ("Wait, Jane is Admiral now? And Laurence gets exiled for what?"), I'm trying to stay entirely clear of the fandom until spoilers are no longer an issue. The first two things I mentioned, reincarnation and undeath, seem to be looking to become fairly central elements to the plot, so I've been working especially hard on getting a handle on them.
Actually, I think I'm explaining this wrong. It's not precisely the reincarnation/undeath thing that I'm having a problem with, but the fact that, apparently, all the main characters are descendants/reincarnations of a bunch of famous people that I've never heard of before, from a place that I don't know much about (a map would be really helpful here), who did a lot of stuff, mostly to each other, and it all has all these dire repercussions in the present. Actually, that's another thing: the time scale. I'm just having trouble wrapping my head around the fact that, for some of these guys, ten thousand years isn't considered that big a deal. I mean, Tolkien's Elves are immortal and all, but ten thousand years before the War of the Ring was sometime in the early First Age, I think, perhaps even before, and there are only a handful of beings left who were there, and all of those very definitely show their age, albeit not in a traditional sense. I guess I just can't see geeky Morrolan, or giggly Aliera, as being tens of thousands of years old. Of course, these are all problems I had my first time through The Silmarillion, so I have high hopes of getting used to it.
Now that I've bitched about the bad stuff, time to praise the good stuff! I know like I sound like I'm moaning a lot, but I really do like more than I dislike. The two most important elements, the plot and the characters, are great, which keeps me reading through the confusion. I don't think I've met a character I dislike (except for possibly Cawti, who doesn't seem to really do anything except cook for Vlad), and I can't wait to learn more about them. This goes double for Sethra, because I really want to find out more about how her undeath works. She's obviously still sentient and...not falling apart, I guess, and nobody seems especially freaked-out about it, but how did she die (permanently) in the first place? Why couldn't she be revivified? Who undead-ified her? Why? How does it work? Can she still feel physical sensations? Does she have any side effects or unnatural hungers as a result? Unlike the frustrating lack of knowledge I mentioned above, this is the good kind of curiosity. It keeps me turning the pages, always hoping to find out more, but never actually disappointed if I don't.
No strong contenders for favorites yet, although I'm still enjoying the hypercompetent Kragar. He's another one of those pleasantly curiosity-inducing characters: I'm starting to suspect that his ability to sneak up on Vlad is some sort of magical ability, because I really can't see a skilled assassin like Vlad being so unobservant, even in his sanctum, to completely fail to notice a person sitting right in front of him for minutes on end, and more than once at that. I'd love it if this ability of Kragar's becomes a Chekov's Gun type of plot point later, but it's probably not going to happen.
I'm still having some trouble trying to suss out Loiosh, though, and I have a feeling that's going to come in handy later. Basically, so far, he's had two modes: "snarky," and "snarky and protective." I'm not getting that sense that I got from, say, Laurence and Temeraire, that they're vitally important to each other on an emotional level as well as a physical/professional one, even though the terms of their original bond indicated something much closer to a Pern-like soulbond than the more mundane bonds of Temeraire.
With such strong characters, the plot has really gotten interesting. I actually got pretty worked up about Morrolan's murder and the subsequent
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Date: 2012-01-20 07:51 am (UTC)Not in Tan Hall by any chance? (Also, LOL at the potential ~Tharkay in your class XD)
He also made a Game of Thrones joke while talking about 18th century politics, which further endeared him to me.
That is pretty awesome! (Also, ASOIAF fandom has clearly arrived, if that sort of thing is going on in English classes :)
(btw, I came across a reference to a "Nannie Ogg" in a Yeats collection that I read for CELTIC 171! Squee!),
Heee!
Glad to hear that the "Temeraire gang reading Gothic books" idea is still alive and well! Looking forward to reading it when it's ready!
(Dragaera would't fit, so that gets a separate comment :)
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Date: 2012-01-20 07:51 am (UTC)There is a wiki (Lyorn Records), but staying clear of fandom should not be a problem in this case -- I've yet to find a fandom, really, after a year plus of searching. Well, there's a mailing list, an honest to goodness mailing list, but, you know.
Some of the "what the hell is he talking about?" is just how Brust does worldbuilding (which I like, but am sure is not to everybody's taste; to me it's a feature, but I can see it being a bug to other readers). Most of the animals, for example, are never explicitly described or defined (but a teckla is a ~mouse). The reincarnation thing... is tougher. I'm not sure how much extraneous explanation you want, so feel free to skip these next two paragraphs, but I love talking about this stuff, so:
Sethra Lavode is really the only Time Abyss character, being some hundreds thousands of years old, and not undead for most of them. But Sethra is special. Aliera and Morrolan are "only" about 500 years old (this is somewhat complicated in Aliera's case by events that are explored in more detail in Taltos). They are considered fairly young, and the normal Dragaeran lifespan seems to be about 3000. Generally I sort of default to the same age metrics as Tolkien's Elves for what's young/mature/adult and just shrug helplessly at Sethra.
Reincarnation... OK. So the Dragaerans have a belief in reincarnation, where those who died in some honorable fashion or lived a good life are taken over to Deathgate (more on that in Taltos, too) to, basically, have a shot at reincarnation. But it's mostly a matter of faith, and the only person who talks about reincarnation as fact is Aliera. The historical backstory that she alludes to in her conversation with Vlad (which is explained in bits and pieces, but I forget where) is that Kieron the Conqueror, one of the founders of the Dragaeran empire, had a sister and a brother. Aliera is supposedly a reincarnation of the sister (about whom not much is known, unless she is the same person as another historical character, as some fan speculation suggests). According to Aliera, Vlad is the reincarnation of Dolivar, Kieron's brother who went off and founded the Jhereg. (The guy who blew up Dragaera -- hee! -- is actually a different guy: Adron, who is Kieron's direct descendant, and Aliera's actual father.)
There is an incredibly detailed timeline that is an invaluable resource -- even after reading the books a couple of times I didn't really have certain intervals or sequences straight until reading through the timeline -- but, of course, it's chock full of spoilers, so if you're trying to avoid them, I would hold off on looking there.
The confusion is sort of attendant on a lot of these books, but, as you said, Vlad is usually confused and trying to figure things our right along with the reader, so at least you have company.
Basically, so far, he's had two modes: "snarky," and "snarky and protective." I'm not getting that sense that I got from, say, Laurence and Temeraire, that they're vitally important to each other on an emotional level as well as a physical/professional one
Snarky and protective is about right. I think the key difference with Laurence and Temeraire is that their relationship follows a different, well, model. Taltos (which is my favorite book; the fact that I keep mentioning it might not be a coincidence :P) has some of that background as well, so I probably should shut up and let you come to conclusions for yourself :)
location: My own, personal flying castle
:DDDD
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Date: 2012-01-20 10:14 pm (UTC)Wow, old-school! I'm on a LotR mailing list that's trying to get some life back in it for its 10-year anniversary, and a little while ago I found a Sherlock Holmes mailing list that I actually had to leave because it was too busy! I know, shocker.
a teckla is a ~mouse
For some reason, I was imagining it as a kind of chicken. Oops! XD
The confusion is sort of attendant on a lot of these books, but, as you said, Vlad is usually confused and trying to figure things our right along with the reader
Good to know! Audience surrogate-esque characters having the plot/backstory explained to them is hard to do right, but I think Brust really knows what he's doing here, because I never felt talked-down-to, or like the information was shoehorned in, when Aliera was explaining the reincarantion thing to Vlad.
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Date: 2012-01-20 10:07 pm (UTC)Nope, Donner. Although the Shakespeare class that I had to drop out of last semester was in Tan!
Also, ASOIAF fandom has clearly arrived, if that sort of thing is going on in English classes :)
The best part was, almost the entire class laughed, and I mean actually laughed, instead of the usual nervous, polite titter that accompanies teachers' jokes, so it appears that the fandom is spreading!
(EDIT: Sorry, had to delete and re-post, due to derpage.)