"Rowling is the new Dickens!!!"
* omg, there are A MILLION BUGS in my study, and they all like the back of my shirt, apparently.
* i've been renovating the chook pen - lots of post-hole digging and putting up masses of wire and excavating debris. i'll post a pic when i'm done, i'm feeling quite proud of it.
* books -
A Game of Thrones - George RR Martin: wow, after initially being put off by the length and the desire to avoid high-fantasy for a while, i was glad i gave this a go. page-turning and brilliant. i liked that it avoided some of the pitfalls of most fantasy, and focussed instead on the machinations of the royal personages - a bit like an episode of the Tudors or something; the politics involved set your head whirling, and really make the whole venture move. i'm up for the sequel now, if i have a spare few days to get carried away...
Ruby in the Smoke - Phillip Pullman: this guy never fails to amaze me. he has such a succinct, rich voice, and can put a sentence together that contains a lot of info without making the prose too turgid - i'm full of admiration. like His Dark Materials, you get the sense here of a writer who's spent a lot of time absorbing 'classic' literature and has the thorough grounding of a renaissance education, and can now write in a lucid, erudite way while still making it accessible (for a YA genre audience, in this case). plus, the female protagonists aren't obnoxiously perfect. big tick.
Short Stories Vol. 2 - Somerset Maugham: haven't completed this yet (s'stories = license for me to pick up and put down at will, rather like poetry, and the more convenient for that), but i'm intrigued by the way Maugham allows his stories to develop in a kind of unstructured way - i don't get much sense of crafting for readerly response with these ones, they're more like scenes unfolding, sometimes with the occasional twist at the end but more often with a kind of obvious denouement that brings things to their natural conclusion... it's different to the recent input i've had about story-craft, where you aim to tweak the plot and inject interest/conflict etc to keep the reader hooked. maybe it's just the period style, or maybe it's something unique to maugham...i'm not sure yet. maybe it's about just writing for the hell of it - and enjoying the process of putting the details together/reading the result. i'm enjoying it, it's surprising me.
Eclipse - Stephenie Meyer: i recently read a review of the last film, that said something like 'with a massive pop-culture movement like this, sometimes the simplest explanations are the best: everyone loves a cheesy romance story'. these are certaily books i pick up when i'm feeling tired, or sentimental, or just want to 'switch-off'. and it struck me again how much stuff you can get out of this, on closer examination - as in, i could go on all day about how the plot is really about a modern couple trying to overcome all the obstacles in the way of their old-fashioned romance (and i'm talking really old-fashioned: like pre-nineteenth century...) or is it that 50's style romance we're talking about here? there's loads of clues - the way Bella is going to 'lose her humanity' after marriage (hey, just like they way women gave up their jobs after the wedding), the inevitable love triangle (very Doris Day), even the way Edward is almost a caricature of the classic 'Prince Charming' trope - rich, handsome, sworn to love/defend her forever...(not exclusive to the 50's, but it was pumped very convincingly - probably for the last time - at that particular point in cultural history). there's lots to be said for the idea that the very multiplicity of meanings available in the "Twilight" series is one of the keys to it's success. hey, i'm all for it. and if i ever want to sit on the couch and really veg, this is the ticket.
* finally, had a long discussion (let's not call it an argument) about the classics - as in, the classics VS the Classics. so what's c/Classic to you? when you think of classics, do you think Bronte, Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens, Wilde, Chaucer...or do you go for the Real Classics, like Homer, Virgil, Horace, Catallus?
my inital response being something in the order of 'omg, how bloody middle-class are you??!' didn't seem to make much of a dent in the discussion...and when i introduced China Mieville's (bloody socialists!) idea-who's-time-has-come, about perhaps we need to turn the whole literary canon (i almost wrote Conan, then - you know who's side i'm on) from its current 'ladder' position to right over on its side...thus making 'literature' and 'classics' and 'Classics' into merely another type of genre...well, you can imagine how the conversation went. much gnashing of teeth.
okay, so perhaps i haven't had Phil Pullman's 'renaissance' education, and i'm excusing myself for not having read more than a smattering of things i like to pride myself are within my ouevre, as a writer (i'm thinking of Jasper Fforde's Hundred Most Boring Books Ever Written, here), but jesus, are we working on making High Culture even more inaccessible now? and let's not even go into things like...oh, you know what like. the conversation descends into me going 'yes, but...' and 'yes, but...' - it's like talking to a fundamentalist christian. it makes me want to run through the streets, screaming "Rowling is the new Dickens!!!", and you can imagine how that would go down...
ahem.
okay, signing off now.
* i've been renovating the chook pen - lots of post-hole digging and putting up masses of wire and excavating debris. i'll post a pic when i'm done, i'm feeling quite proud of it.
* books -
A Game of Thrones - George RR Martin: wow, after initially being put off by the length and the desire to avoid high-fantasy for a while, i was glad i gave this a go. page-turning and brilliant. i liked that it avoided some of the pitfalls of most fantasy, and focussed instead on the machinations of the royal personages - a bit like an episode of the Tudors or something; the politics involved set your head whirling, and really make the whole venture move. i'm up for the sequel now, if i have a spare few days to get carried away...
Ruby in the Smoke - Phillip Pullman: this guy never fails to amaze me. he has such a succinct, rich voice, and can put a sentence together that contains a lot of info without making the prose too turgid - i'm full of admiration. like His Dark Materials, you get the sense here of a writer who's spent a lot of time absorbing 'classic' literature and has the thorough grounding of a renaissance education, and can now write in a lucid, erudite way while still making it accessible (for a YA genre audience, in this case). plus, the female protagonists aren't obnoxiously perfect. big tick.
Short Stories Vol. 2 - Somerset Maugham: haven't completed this yet (s'stories = license for me to pick up and put down at will, rather like poetry, and the more convenient for that), but i'm intrigued by the way Maugham allows his stories to develop in a kind of unstructured way - i don't get much sense of crafting for readerly response with these ones, they're more like scenes unfolding, sometimes with the occasional twist at the end but more often with a kind of obvious denouement that brings things to their natural conclusion... it's different to the recent input i've had about story-craft, where you aim to tweak the plot and inject interest/conflict etc to keep the reader hooked. maybe it's just the period style, or maybe it's something unique to maugham...i'm not sure yet. maybe it's about just writing for the hell of it - and enjoying the process of putting the details together/reading the result. i'm enjoying it, it's surprising me.
Eclipse - Stephenie Meyer: i recently read a review of the last film, that said something like 'with a massive pop-culture movement like this, sometimes the simplest explanations are the best: everyone loves a cheesy romance story'. these are certaily books i pick up when i'm feeling tired, or sentimental, or just want to 'switch-off'. and it struck me again how much stuff you can get out of this, on closer examination - as in, i could go on all day about how the plot is really about a modern couple trying to overcome all the obstacles in the way of their old-fashioned romance (and i'm talking really old-fashioned: like pre-nineteenth century...) or is it that 50's style romance we're talking about here? there's loads of clues - the way Bella is going to 'lose her humanity' after marriage (hey, just like they way women gave up their jobs after the wedding), the inevitable love triangle (very Doris Day), even the way Edward is almost a caricature of the classic 'Prince Charming' trope - rich, handsome, sworn to love/defend her forever...(not exclusive to the 50's, but it was pumped very convincingly - probably for the last time - at that particular point in cultural history). there's lots to be said for the idea that the very multiplicity of meanings available in the "Twilight" series is one of the keys to it's success. hey, i'm all for it. and if i ever want to sit on the couch and really veg, this is the ticket.
* finally, had a long discussion (let's not call it an argument) about the classics - as in, the classics VS the Classics. so what's c/Classic to you? when you think of classics, do you think Bronte, Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens, Wilde, Chaucer...or do you go for the Real Classics, like Homer, Virgil, Horace, Catallus?
my inital response being something in the order of 'omg, how bloody middle-class are you??!' didn't seem to make much of a dent in the discussion...and when i introduced China Mieville's (bloody socialists!) idea-who's-time-has-come, about perhaps we need to turn the whole literary canon (i almost wrote Conan, then - you know who's side i'm on) from its current 'ladder' position to right over on its side...thus making 'literature' and 'classics' and 'Classics' into merely another type of genre...well, you can imagine how the conversation went. much gnashing of teeth.
okay, so perhaps i haven't had Phil Pullman's 'renaissance' education, and i'm excusing myself for not having read more than a smattering of things i like to pride myself are within my ouevre, as a writer (i'm thinking of Jasper Fforde's Hundred Most Boring Books Ever Written, here), but jesus, are we working on making High Culture even more inaccessible now? and let's not even go into things like...oh, you know what like. the conversation descends into me going 'yes, but...' and 'yes, but...' - it's like talking to a fundamentalist christian. it makes me want to run through the streets, screaming "Rowling is the new Dickens!!!", and you can imagine how that would go down...
ahem.
okay, signing off now.