geekery, selkies, and the giant present list of doom
I was actually joking when I commented on
ressie_noldo's Happy 2007 entry (dratted Indians, getting to the new year before us), but then I ended up having a go at it, so, um, I welcomed in 2007 in probably-predictable Banui style: sitting at the computer writing ballad-fic (yes, ballad-fic, it's for 'The House Carpenter'/'D(a)emon Lover', if you're interested, because it's one of my very favourite ballads and one I've had a very long relationship with; also, ballad-fic, unlike, say, Potter-fic, has a possibility of maybe making me money someday, except hardly anyone wants weird short stories, I reckon) and listening to Deb Talan, with the Black Death and my pocket Eliot (which is currently in the stage of Falling To Bits, held together with a hairband) beside me. Hopefully this bodes well for the upcoming year. Like, maybe someone will discover an Eliot epic in the vein of 'Prufrock' that never got published. And I will write fic about it. And maybe go on to write about my other very favourite Child ballad, 'The Grey Selchie'. And eat--well, ack, that doesn't bode well for my weight-loss hopes. (I say hopes, not plans. Plans and I do not go together well.)
Speaking of selchies, the family and I watched The Secret of Roan Inish last night--before midnight; after midnight we were engaged in some very, very trippy early cartoons (some of them kind of reminded me of Terry Gilliam's animated bits in Monty Python's Flying Circus, except his stuff was better, and it wasn't supposed to, somehow, make sense, which meant that you weren't terribly, terribly afraid that everyone involved wasn't also heavily involved in, say, opium)--um, anyway, it's a very good film, and I really loved it, but the main point of talking about it is because it reignited my interest in the selchie legend, which I've always been fond of on account of being very intimately in love with Solas' eerie version of 'The Grey Selchie' since the age of twelve. Also, Jane Yolen's retelling in The Book of Ballads is rather good. What I'm saying is...actually, I don't know what the real point of this is. Selchies are nifty, and I want to write about them. Which sounds really shallow when you put it like that--the really interesting thing about the selchie tales, I suppose, is all of the motivations and reactions which are typically left out. Would a selchie-wife really love the husband who held her in thrall, and if so, how and why? What about someone attempting to gain control over a selchie for nefarious reasons? What sort of fellow would marry a seal-woman he knew nothing about, and what would village gossip say? What about the children of a selchie? I mean, really, what about them? It's all very fascinating, I think. (And, maybe this is completely out there, but are there any traditional ballads with vampires in? Not that I would want to incorporate one into a current project, mind. I would never do that.)
So, remember yonks ago when I sai dsomething about getting stuff for Christmas and not talking about it until I had pictures? Well, I've got pictures now, so I'm talking about it. Funny, all of the stuff took up so much room in the car, but after all the boxes were unwrapped, almost all of my presents fit into one rather small cardboard box. (Not a complaint. The best presents are most often smallish.)
Right: Christmas morning, my mother broke the unspoken seven-thirty rule, but this was because, she being pregnant and not being able to sleep in most normal positions, was sleeping on the couch, and Heidi woke her up with screams of jubilee after recieving e. coli in her stocking, which woke me up, and it was barely seven-o'-clock. Honestly. (I was awake around five or sixish, too, but that was because I had a splitting headache and had to get up in order to take Tylenol. Which actually worked, for once. Usually nothing weaker than Excedrin will do anything. I didn't peek at the stockings. I really didn't. Please believe me. Okay, and I didn't sleep well that night at all, partially from excitement, partially from onset of headache, and partially from Kitten Romping In Room, which was funny, or would've been if I hadn't wanted to sleep, drat it. Sometimes he got snuggley, which involved curling very close to me and resting his head on my neck, which was really adorable. But then he was off, trying to kill some poor hairband that never did any harm to anyone.) So, I got up nearly half an hour early, and opened the stocking, and fun was had. I mean, look at this. How could this not be fun?
That is me and my darling plushie Black Death. Mum got one for each of us--Heidi got e. coli and Timmy got flesh-eating disease--and Heidi was so elated that she woke up Mum and then ran up to wake up Dad with the cry 'MOMMY GAVE ME E. COLI!!!' to which the poor sleep-deprived man replied (so I hear, I was asleep or mostly at the time), 'Congratulations', and rolled over. Er, and excuse the general dementedness of the above photograph: one, it was meant to be slightly demented (what sort of young lass of sound health and mind would embrace the Plague lovingly?), two, it was taken with the flash, and three, I had just woken up. Which means I look really weird, and that photo actually tones it down a bit.
Here's some other stocking loot, replicated after the fact, because. It's missing a few key items--a bag of chocolate covered pretzels, some Reese's peanut butter cups with caramel, and a rather large triple chocolate Kit Kat--but, as those did not survive the day after Christmas (which we refer to as 'Christmas Adam', in concordance with 'Christmas Eve', nevermind that we stole it from another family), that can be excused. Yes, that's a real starfish--Dad's contribution. I must use it in photography; I love starfish. There are also fantastically loud toesocks (the blue bits are even sparkly!), because I asked for them, and stockings, and candles (yay!) and a votive holder and earrings shaped like wings (I also pointed these out to Mum), and a cat-raiding-the-fishbowl paperweight (also from Dad), and black sporks. Which Mum got out of her Taco Bell meal and regifted, and I am totally thrilled. They currently reside on my desk, along with one old spork from KFC. My Christmas pyjamas are also there, as well as my new bathrobe. Pyjamas are another one of our Christmas traditions, especially as we usually need them. Currently, most of my pyjamas are either ugly, not warm enough, spotted with bloodstains, or otherwise at the end of their clothy little lives. You can see them better in the other photo with the Black Death, though. Sort of.
And here is the other stuff. Timmy got me a lovely set of nesting boxes (they appear to be handmade, and I don't know what I'll put in them yet--I am madly obsessed with pretty containers--but I love them), and Heidi got me another box, and the thing on top is a Willow Tree angel from my grandmother, who, oddly enough, was not aware that I and my mother completely adore Willow Tree. There are also some necklaces from Heidi, and a pair of silver earrings which I forgot to put in the photograph, and two large candles (cinnamon and peppermint scented), also from Heidi, which I also forgot to put in the picture. The big black thing at the back is something I wanted very much and didn't really expect to get--a starter set of Magnetic Poetry! It's got a handy little magnet board thingummy so I don't have to use the fridge (which is all the way downstairs, you know) and can keep it cosily on my desk (even if I hate said desk). My cousin Sean and I had a grand time tearing the magnet pieces apart and seeing what words there were--galoshes was a favourite. My brother, of course, was thrilled by the fact that the word 'butt' was included and has not yet shut up about it. Oy, almost-teenage boys. (I don't know why it's in there, actually. Butt and poetry do not precisely mix. That is, I suppose they could, but I wouldn't want to read the product.)
At the very back--not counting the bookshelf with two of my boxes on it (one's actually full of papers, so shush) and my guitar--is a splendid large bag Mum found for me, which closely approaches the sort of bag I want rather a lot--satchel, really. I mainly go for that buckle on the front: it does look rather professional, doesn't it? Unfortunately, the only matches I've been able to find so far were fancy real-leather things that were in the seventy dollar range. Um, eek? So, Mum got this, 'to do for now', as the tag said--it's a bit too large, which means I am apt to cram far too much into it, and hasn't got a shoulder strap, and it hasn't got any pockets, so my pens and lipstick and spare change jangle about with the books and notebooks and wallet, but it is considerably nicer-looking than the hulking black thing I was lugging about and I heart it.
One of the last things I opened was something I absolutely didn't expect anyone to buy for me, and was therefore even more thrilled to get: The Oxford Book of American Poetry, which was, last summer, where I really fell in love with William Carol Williams and Wallace Stevens. It's brimming with poetry, and looks very magnificent on my bookshelf-on-the-desk beside the equally hefty World Poetry. Eeee. My grandmother went flipping through it looking for Emily Dickinson, which had me a bit worried because, er, a lot of modern poetry is not something my grandmother would like, um, at all (also, she was surprised to hear from my cousin studying at college that a great deal of Emily Dickinson's poems are about death), and I was worried she'd come across one of the less pleasant poems and be completely scandalised. (She's more of the 'I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree' sort, although, according to Aunt Amy, she studied The Waste Land in school. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this. My grandmother and T.S. Eliot do not compute. *laughs*)
The other book from my father was The Book of Ballads, which he set me on in the first place as he found it at Borders a year and a half ago and we were both very interested. It also enabled me to gloat to my brother, 'I got a comic book and you didn't!', because I...well, did. The Book of Ballads is a collection of generally well-known ballads (my favourites 'Daemon Lover' and 'The Grey Selchie', as well as 'Barbara Allen', 'Tam Lin', 'Thomas the Rhymer', 'Twa Corbies', and several others), retold by noted fantasy authors such as Neil Gaiman and Jane Yolen and quite a lot of people I am unfamiliar with, and illustrated in graphic novel form by Charles Vess. It is splendid. It also has a fantastic foreword which has me writing a new library list, and a glossary listing various musicians who have done versions of the included ballads. They mentioned Solas and Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention, which made me very happy. Oddly enough, as popular as it is, I do not think I own any versions of 'Barbara Allen' and was not very familiar with it until I read the book. I need to hunt one down. And we have a Steeleye Span version of 'Thomas the Rhymer', but it's on tape, and I don't remember having listened to it since I was six or seven. Fairport Convention does a killer 'Tam Lin', though, and Steeleye Span's 'Twa Corbies' is deliciously scary. Tim O'Brien's 'Demon Lover' with Karan Casey is my favourite, but Nickel Creek's 'The House Carpenter' is also very wonderful, and I heard one from Mick McAuley on the radio a long time ago that impressed me as being quite good. Blimey, I'm really obsessed with that song. A lot of the other ballads I had only passing acquaintances with, and I need to get copies of them, because...I'm anal like that, I reckon.
midenianscholar got me The Sleep of Stone by Louise Cooper (and of course I don't mind that it's a library copy, darling; I buy old library books myself when I can get them), which I just finished a few days ago, and it is quite lovely and rather bittersweet--and the names appear to be Welsh or Welshesque, which makes me happy. Also included was an interesting newspaper she must have found someplace. :D
From
lady_moriel, I recieved a wing necklace, which I forgot to put in the large photograph as I was wearing it at at the time, a Library of Congress notebook, a make-your-own-quill kit (with ink mixture, which is marvellous, because we had a quill once--it is now battered horribly--and never used it because we never got round to making ink; also, we have an inkwell shaped like George Washington, which is, I suppose, useful, but I'd prefer for it to be brown and romantic-looking), and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through The Ages, which--yay, because I wanted to read them rather a lot but my little library hasn't got them. Also, ostensibly from 'a conspirator', but Mum told me, a bookworm plushie, and the Emily of New Moon trilogy (!!!). (By the by, the third book hasn't come yet, still; you may want to have words with whomever you purchased it from.)
Lastly, I think, there are two rather nice sets of earrings from my...step-grandmother, I suppose. My grandfather's wife. I call her Nana Barb, but I'm not entirely certain how to refer to her. Anyway, she got my tastes spot on, and I was very pleased. This pair of handmade and very bohemian earrings were not at all what I expected from a grandmother. Yay. Also, gold earrings from Pier 1 Imports, which I also love, despite my general dislike of gold (it's too flashy, usually; I far prefer silver). I adore Pier 1, too, although I can't usually afford to shop there. Would like to furnish my future dorm with stuff from there, actually. Heh.
Well, yikes. Why am I suddenly realising that no-one is going to read this straight-through?