fuck jane eyre, where is my dinner

Sep 05, 2011 18:43

So here's a thing that's tiresome - when people rather gauchely feel the need to point out something that everyone else has been hinting around. There are different levels of this, so if everyone has been hinting very heavily and someone brightly and ironically just smashes it out of the park then it's a fair cop, because everyone ELSE was being ( Read more... )

rant, growl, films, hate, secret 12 year old boy, seriously i have no life, ramble

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apiphile September 5 2011, 19:34:49 UTC
Yeah, similarly.

No worries, though, because it's not like you're saying "here is why I defense defense defense" - I mean, I can't be doing with an eReader - even though it would be lighter and more efficient and maybe even stop me from turning my flat into a book-lined coffin - because I would break it, lose it, or having access to 50,000 books at once would result in me never finishing reading any of them. ALSO like Amy I enjoy writing in books and underlining things for later, which is not yet possible on the Kindle etc. BUT there is also a lot to recommend them. OTHER PEOPLE CAN SPEND THEIR MONEY HOWEVER THEY LIKE.

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howifall September 5 2011, 19:42:26 UTC
Is it bad that my response to old-book-smell-ew is "let's buy new books! :DD" ?

Reading (and pretty much agreeing to) your points i gotta say i suspect the only reason i enjoyed Jane Eyre was that she wasn't swooning all over the place, being emo about cheating on her husband, or being teenager in love about her much younger lover that had only seduced her to get ahead in life... Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert i still hate all of yous!

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apiphile September 5 2011, 19:55:31 UTC
Aww, do you not like the smell? It smells of vanilla!

Man, I am glad we didn't get dragged through Flaubert etc at school, although I will say that the majority of British writers seemed to be obsessed with virtue...

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howifall September 5 2011, 20:12:33 UTC
You know the weird thing, given how books are different over here (like we don't do hardbacks), i have a feeling old French books prolly smell different. Because really, it's never been vanilla for me... Also the sponginess, yellowness of the paper doesn't help.

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apiphile September 5 2011, 20:13:28 UTC
That's weird, because it's supposedly something in the wood pulp itself...

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tsuki_no_bara September 5 2011, 19:45:12 UTC
i don't remember if i liked jane eyre or not when i read it - i suspect not, mostly based on the fact that i HATED wuthering heights - i didn't like any of the characters, i didn't like the nested-story conceit (you know - "i heard this from my neighbor who heard it from her cousin who heard it from her friend who lived down the road from heathcliff" and eventually you drill down thru all the narrative layers and get to the actual story), and 19th century gothic romances aren't a genre i particularly enjoy. too overblown and melodramatic and purple. which jane eyre was, with a lot of angst for its own sake and an excess of bad shit happening to the heroine. i did like the movie, tho. i like mia wasikowska and jamie bell, and overblown melodramatic movies don't annoy me nearly as much as overblown melodramatic novels. i can always ignore the story and admire the scenery. :D ( ... )

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apiphile September 5 2011, 20:02:46 UTC
Yeah, Mia Wasikowska is pretty in a very willowy way which isn't strictly for my pants but which is lovely to look at, which makes the whole Plain Jane thing all the less believable. And I want Rochester to fall down ALL the stairs.

I know! But there's this whole weird subset who think that any preference is demonstrating ingrained prejudices, and that you cannot possibly like SOME of a genre and not ALL of it, and that any dislike you may have for something Traditionally Feminine is demonstrative of misogyny. Which I guess... makes me a misogynist for not liking kids?

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puzzled_anwen September 6 2011, 08:59:31 UTC
you cannot possibly like SOME of a genre and not ALL of it [...] makes me a misogynist for not liking kids?Ha, I am totally a misogynist but an inconsistent one, then, because I like my kid (thankfully...) and about three other kids, and babies are nice when they are happy, but basically, children? UGH. Went to see Arietty with Alex P the other day and it slowly dawned on us that... 11am showing... of a kids' film... in the summer hols... OH SHIT. Alex made vaguely apologetic noises at me for voicing this sentiment, to which my response was, funnily enough, I am not exactly keen on other people's children either. (Though actually the worst of it [aside from a minute or three when some whingy four year old was trying to convince his mother to leave the film and she was refusing, ffs*] was some stupid dad about six rows back who presumably thought he was whispering his occasional explanations of things his kid didn't understand ( ... )

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apiphile September 6 2011, 12:08:45 UTC
Oh I'm sure there's something you are for not liking other people's kinds but I thought that was normal, you're only instinctively meant to preserve YOUR genes...

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puzzled_anwen September 5 2011, 21:43:22 UTC
Oh, the thing with going 'IT IS FUNNY/CLEVER/ETC BECAUSE' thing drives me nuts, most often on FB where someone I know has made some sort of status update and someone else I know (or me) e.g. posts the first half of a film quote or a lyric or whatever as a jokey response and then someone I don't know (and thus can't really go I KNOW, I THINK EVERYONE GOT THAT...) chimes in with "...the bit that you left off because it was obvious!" Which I also feel massively petty about being annoyed by this because it is usually something exactly that trivial (I can't think of an actual example, of course, so am basically just talking shit now) but just, argh. (And yes, there is definitely an undercurrent of 'oh god, that is the sort of shit I might do and then I would look like a twat like they do')

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apiphile September 5 2011, 21:54:41 UTC
MY FEELINGS ARE EXACTLY THIS.

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krytella September 6 2011, 08:07:41 UTC
I don't hate Jane Eyre as much as I do Wuthering Heights. That's about all I have to say for it.

I think that what I like in a romantic story was permanently warped by the amount of woman-written fantasy I read as a teen. The romantic subplots in books written by men never appealed to me a bit. I blame Anne McCaffrey, Mercedes Lackey, Tamora Pierce, and Patricia C. Wrede for imprinting me on teen woman/older man pairings. That's not at all what I'm drawn to in slash, rarely in fanfic at all, but it definitely affected my real love life for a while.

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apiphile September 6 2011, 12:31:03 UTC
I'd agree on that. It is less hateful than Love Between Two Vile Human Beings, On A Moor but ... that's not a great deal to recommend it.

I think I took completely the wrong stuff away from the Pern books as a teenager - or possibly the right stuff - which just amounted to "I want a dragon", and the first romantic plots I ended up really noticing were PZB's terrible gay vampire romances. 18-year-old me had very bad taste.

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