the land is all too shallow, it is painted on the sky

[lauzeta]

I've decided that I'm enjoying the water advisory, for much the same reasons as I enjoy power outages. Temporary hardship makes things strange and new (Verfremdung!), and the fact of having to think about something as simple as drawing water is deeply satisfying to me

Comments

[ennazu]

I don't like it quite as much as I like power outages, I find it more annoying and less fun. I think, though, that it did contribute to slightly less people coming into the restaurant yesterday, we probably made more money because no one wanted to chance it with the water and bought the guaranteed-turbidity-free orange juice instead.

[lauzeta]

I'm sure the annoyance will kick in any day now, but for the moment I'm still intrigued and delighted. (I'm also in an odd kind of headspace lately. That might have something to do with it.)

[kurrs]

Liminal is such an awesome word.

Less than a week to Macbeth. Excitement.

[lauzeta]

Isn't it? I learned it in first year, ENGL 121, two days after limen, liminis, threshold, cropped up on my Latin vocab list.

Serendipity is also an awesome word. :D

Macbeth!

[hipsunderhands]

Totally useless information: Horace Walpole, who wrote The Castle of Otranto and basically brought in the Gothic Revival style of architecture, invented the word "serendipity." Yup. (I did a presentation on Walpole a few weeks ago.)

[lauzeta]

Seriously? That is the most awesome piece of useless information ever!

[imaginaryfriend]

I first fell in love with the footnote when I read The City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer, and Strange and Norrell have perhaps convinced me that the footnote is the single most delightful device in fantastic literature.

[lauzeta]

Ooh, this may be something I need to read. There are also excellent footnotes in Good Omens, if you haven't run across that yet, and a book called Ibid which is composed entirely of footnotes, and which I own but have not yet read.

[imaginaryfriend]

mmm! I think Good Omens was so shockingly entertaining everywhere that the footnotes seemed less important (and were, most of the time, shorter than those in the other works being discussed). That Ibid sounds really neat!

to expound upon the use of the footnote in the The City of Saints and Madmen, the third story in the novel is written as a travel brochure about the founding of the city where the stories take place, as told by an old historian who asserts (in the footnotes) that he was woken out of bed in the middle of the night to write the book. And so there's this horribly, bloody, terrifying story about the founding of the city going on annotated by his footnotes, in which this historian becomes alive: we learn of his likes, dislikes, academic quarrels, past loves... it is one of the singularly most amazing pieces I have ever read. I would happily loan it to you if you did not live about half a world away, as I only purchase books so that I might lend them out.

[lauzeta]

I'm with you on Good Omens, actually; I mentioned it because it is awesome and has footnotes, which is reason enough, I think.

Yeah. I, um, need to read that now, I think. Library request, here I come. ;D