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( Is Lymond acting like a childish brat in Game of Kings? )

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I finished The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope. I’m not sure how this ended up on my reading list, but it must’ve been recommended by a Lymond fan–I feel fairly certain that the author must’ve been one as well. It reads like the Lymond Chronicles remixed with the Scottish ballad the Tam Lin.

The main characters are too similar to Philippa and Lymond for it to be coincidence, but it’s done very well and I didn’t feel that it was derivate in a bad way. It was written well and incorporated its various influences into a compelling and imaginative whole.

( spoilers for The Perilous Gard and the Lymond Chronicles )

This is technically a childrens' book, but it was complex and interesting enough that I'd say it works just as well for adults. I definitely recommend it, and I think it would make a great gift for a kid as well.

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One of the benefits of jumping back into a book after a break of a couple months is that while diving back in you notice juxtapositions that you might have skimmed over before.

These three in particular just struck me:

( spoilers for The Disorderly Knights )

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* Hey, I’ve got two Dreamwidth invite codes. Nifty. Who wants one?

( * a feminist complaint about the new Star Trek movie, with mild spoilers )

* Lots of Writercon stuff happening!

• Our official t-shirts (awesomely designed by contest winner Savannah Teague) are now on sale.


• We're going to open workshop sign-ups on Thursday at noon EST--watch the website and LJ comm for details.


• If you're attending the con, we want you to sign up to run a fan led event!


• If you're interested in selling something in our dealer room you can sign up as a vendor.


• We've posted interviews so that you can learn all about our fantastic guests.


• And more news is coming soon!

Are you coming to Writercon? Yes, I'm asking YOU. If you're involved in fanfic in any way--reader, writer, feedbacker, beta, comm mod, ficathon organizer--Writercon is for you. Think about attending--you can find out more info at Writercon.com or writercon or just ask me and I'd be glad to answer any questions you may have.

* Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) is awesome. It reminds me of the 80s music I listened to in high school. Which makes sense as it was released in ... 1980. Wow, man, it's like everything in my life is running in one big circle! *is a dork*

* I've been spending a lot of time reading Twitter. YEAH I DON'T KNOW, OKAY. It's addictive, though: behind the scenes snippets from Rachel Maddow, extra jokes from Stephen Colbert, a daily stream of adorkable geekery from Bowie's son Duncan Jones, fan wank from Trent Reznor, and of course all the latest NYC vegan news from SuperVegan... plus little life updates from various friends, past and present, RL and fannish. And I can read it all on my phone!

( * Doctor Who finale SPOILERS )

* Picked up The Disorderly Knights to continue my re-read. I think what stopped me for a couple months there was that it was coming up on what is, to me, the most traumatizing character death of the series. But I got past it. (*sniffle*)

And, wow, glad I'm continuing, because I just hit a couple of my favorite lines of the entire series:

"I would give you my soul in a blackberry pie; and a knife to cut it with."
(p. 331, and I don't want to spoil which character says it)

( and a longer scene, with mild spoilers for The Disorderly Knights )

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* Come to SuperVegan’s 3rd birthday party! It’s tomorrow (Thursday) at ’sNice Brooklyn, with an afterparty at Lucky 13 bar. We will have free cake and beer. Details here.

* Apparently there’s going to be a Lymond-focused Dorothy Dunnett fan gathering in France in autumn 2010. Um, that sounds awesome. I need more details, obviously, but there’s plenty of time to save money and make plans. Maybe I can get my mom to go with me and split the costs now that I’ve hooked her on Dunnett. *hopes* (Also, 10zlaine, you seriously need to read the Lymond Chronicles so that we can do some Dunnett-related traveling someday! Look, audio books!)

* Marilyn Manson has an absinthe called “Mansinthe.” I tried to say “Mansinthe” aloud and couldn’t get it out without choking on laughter.

* A David Bowie/Mick Ronson picspam. I’ll be in my bunk.

( I'm reading a creepy sensationalist Bowie bio and feeling annoyed at it )

* Album-wise, I've gotten up to Lodger. It's okay; I like "Look Back in Anger." Nothing after Station to Station has grabbed my interest the way the Ziggy-era stuff immediately did, though. I like Low intellectually and I think "Heroes" is a great song. But Station to Station is the last album that enthralled me on an emotional level. (The first is Hunky Dory, although bits of The Man Who Sold the World are amazing, and I like "Cygnet Committee" and "Space Oddity" from his 1969 album).

* I like how my interest in Bowie has led to a deeper understanding of the culture of rock music--the way concepts I always took for granted like "authenticity" and "selling out" grow from a particular ideology. Rock music was always an avenue for me to question the world around me, but I think it's also important for me to question it--many of its underpinnings are far more conservative than I'd considered.

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I was thinking how weird it is that I went from obsession with Dorothy Dunnett’s historical fiction series The Lymond Chronicles to obsession with the music of David Bowie. They seem so different. Then I thought:

They both come from Britain around the 60s/70s and concern a central figure who is charismatic, frequently androgynous, (questionably) bisexual, a social “outsider,” and whose core concerns center around identity, worldly success, and the struggle for human connection.

Both works are dripping with ambiguity and complexity; both make frequent use of allusion; both focus often on the dark side of human nature (suicide and insanity); both are concerned with music, art, and decadence; both revolve around the construction of identity and the question of “true” self (construction of differing identities to appeal to a particular audience and achieve a particular goal, the difficulty distinguishing between performance and reality, whether what you do changes who you are).

I think the biggest difference is that Bowie (I’m thinking particularly Ziggy) is postmodern, ironic, self-aware, very much of the 1970s, whereas the Lymond Chronicles are pretty rooted in the philosophy and style of the historical era they describe.

Must think further on this. Possibly completely insane.

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I’m so out of it today. I was up until 3am last night watching The Man Who Fell to Earth, and before that I was at my friend Eva’s birthday party at V-Spot, where they had unlimited mimosas for $10. Me and my friend Anne’s boyfriend Nemo were competing who could get their per-mimosa cost lowest; I got to $2.50 (four drinks), he got to $1.66 (six drinks), but he cheated because he was sneakily sharing his with Anne. Then we went back to Anne and Nemo’s place to hang out in the back yard and eat cake and drink more mimosas. Basically there was a lot of drinking. And cake!

SuperVegan got linked from the NY Times City Blog. It’s always cool when that happens.

On Saturday I cooked enough to last (hopefully) the whole week: rice and beans, maple-cinnamon cream of wheat, scrambled tofu, vegetable uppama (an Indian dish from that weird Vegan Cooking for One book). I was going to make this really good Asian noodle dish with coconut milk, but I forgot to buy fresh ginger.

We had a long Writercon phone meeting on Saturday night, and then around 11pm I remembered that there was a new Doctor Who episode. Oh yeah, that.

( spoilers for this episode and spec for the future )

My mom has started Checkmate. I'm skimming along so that I can answer her questions as she goes. I'm really glad I got her the book of translations--I think Checkmate is the hardest to understand without them. I'm really excited that she's nearing the end and that we'll be able to discuss the entire series soon. I like Checkmate a lot better in retrospect, based on how excited I am to get to talk about all the passages that she's reading. Really the only book in the series that doesn't inspire joy is The Ringed Castle--it's definitely my least favorite overall. Although even it is growing on me over time, as they all seem to.

Oh yeah, and I watched The Man Who Fell to Earth last night. I liked it! Which is weird because I didn't expect to like it at all. It's strange and surreal and definitely has a lot of annoying aspects (the awful female characters for one) but it's also eerie and atmospheric and very interesting. And, okay, David Bowie is just so pretty to look at throughout. So, so, so pretty.

( embarrassing fangirlishness about David Bowie )

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http://rusty-halo.com/wordpress/?p=2794

I haven’t been posting much, because I’ve been stressed out and busy and tired, and who wants to hear about that?

I have, however, accumulated a couple of mildly interesting (I hope) things to post about.

( the Watchmen movie )

* Then the next night, jaydk and I saw Coraline. Proof that you don't need to be "edgy" to make a good movie: it was far better than Watchmen. Smart, funny, well-written, beautifully filmed--the 3D was absolutely lovely. The story was creative and intriguing and eerie, and the lead character was clever and brave. Why do childrens' stories do such a superior job of portraying three-dimensional female characters? Is it just that we've been culturally conditioned to be unable to fathom a post-pubescent female in a way that doesn't put her sexuality front and center?

* I'm seeing a lot of talk about Doctor Who finale casting spoilers. As far as I can tell, they're from a tabloid that regularly makes shit up, so why is anyone taking them seriously? Am I missing something? (This is a genuine question. Is there any reason to believe them? I don't want to get excited about something that's completely fabricated.)

* I'm reading Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin's book about Lincoln and his cabinet. It's really interesting and I'm enjoying it, but I wish she'd stop spelling out what the reader is "supposed" to think. I can make up my own mind about what these guys did and why they did it; I don't need the author inserting her own explanation that so-and-so was arrogant and ambitious on every page. Still, it's mostly good. After being so absorbed in the 2008 election, it's fascinating to see how American politics worked 150 years ago.

* And I'm still in the middle of The Disorderly Knights. I'm going to finish it and then take a break from the Lymond series, since it's been less than six months since I re-read Pawn in Frankincense. Speaking of which, my mom just finished it and is in awe. In retrospect, I think Pawn is the best written and most moving book of the series.

( the Moonlight TV series )

Also, maybe it's just that I don't watch modern American TV anymore, but ... what is with the women? As in, they are all exactly the same: tiny, emaciated, sharp-featured, and young. No matter what character they're playing--boss, geek girl, random vampire--they are all pulled from such an incredibly narrow archetype of "woman" that it's just completely absurd. Watching a show like this, you'd never even imagine that women exist on planet Earth larger than a size four, older than thirty-five, and without those sharp facial angles that Hollywood defines as "beautiful." At least the men are allowed to have some diversity of age, size, and facial features, depending on the character they're playing, but every single woman first has to fit into this absurdly narrow definition of "attractive" before anything else is taken into account.

This is why I can barely watch American TV anymore. Once you step away from it for a while, you come back and suddenly it's like being hit over the head by how ridiculous it is. This narrow bunch of nearly-identical Hollywood model types plays pretty much every female character and the majority of male characters. Sure, an occasional talent pops through, but it's painfully obvious that these people are cast almost entirely for their looks with no regard for skill. You end up with a bunch of interchangeable Barbies and Kens running around posing as every variety of adult human being. How am I supposed to take any of it seriously?

* But speaking of American TV that doesn't suck, I have become completely addicted to The Rachel Maddow Show. It passes the Bechdel Test every night! Real women talk to each other about real issues! With none of the insipid concessions to what "women" are supposed to care about--no celebrity gossip, no plastic surgery, no cooking and baking, no fashion bullshit, just women as real individual human beings, with their own perspectives, who care about the world around them. (This shouldn't be such a shock and a rarity!) And Rachel is brilliant, witty, funny, sweet, and adorable beyond words. I know she's not perfect and I do disagree with her sometimes, but I always love watching her. She makes me wish Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert would do less joking and more news--after I watch her show, I feel like I'm not getting enough content from them. (Don't worry, I still love them. Jon Stewart's smackdown of Jim Cramer was a thing of beauty.)

* Oh, and I'm still listening to David Bowie. Ziggy Stardust remains my favorite, but I've added Hunky Dory, Aladdin Sane, and Diamond Dogs to the lineup and am enjoying them all. I tried to listen to Scary Monsters on the advice of my friend Jason, but aside from "Ashes to Ashes" it just totally didn't work for me. I don't understand what happened to Bowie in the 80s. It's like he went from brilliant and hot and amazing to ... just ... so boring and annoying and straight. Maybe I'll understand it better if I take each album chronologically. Or it could just be the Bowie draws from the zeitgeist of the decade, and the 80s was ... well, the 80s.

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I am about halfway through The Disorderly Knights for the third time, and wanted to write down a lot of the thoughts that are running through my head before I forget them.

( spoilers for The Lymond Chronicles )

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I bought another copy of The Disorderly Knights because the pages are falling out of my original.

I think the third read is the charm with these books. It’s like everything comes into focus and I suddenly understand and appreciate everything that’s happening. The first read is just about figuring out what the hell is going on, the second is figuring out what the themes and subtext and underlying meanings are, and the third read is putting it all together to make a wonderful brilliant whole.

( major spoiler for Queen's Play )

So, The Disorderly Knights. I'm only 66 pages in and already wanting to blog about it. I really need to hook up with one of these Dunnett re-reading groups so that I'll have more people to discuss this with!

( spoilers for The Disorderly Knights, and why Gabriel is like Bernie Madoff )

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Children of God was worse than The Sparrow. Sheesh.

( spoilers for Mary Doria Russell's Children of God )

I'm glad I got it out of the way before Gallifrey One so that I could bring along The Disorderly Knights, though. More on that soon. >:)

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I finished my third read of Queen’s Play, and have started on Mary Doria Russell’s Children of God, sequel to The Sparrow. (I know, I didn’t like The Sparrow to begin with, but my friend Cat wants to see what I think of the sequel, and I’m hoping that if I read it, she’ll feel obligated to read The Game of Kings in return [without stopping a third of the way through because it’s “written weird”], and then I’ll have someone in real life to talk about it with! I was all excited that my mom read it, but as usual my mom thinks it’s insane to talk about something you’ve read [or watched, or listened to] so that turned out to have been pointless.)

Anyway, Queen’s Play. I want to do another, kind of definitive re-read of the Lymond series, while taking notes on great lines and interesting bits, and looking up every quote and reference that I don’t recognize. But in the meantime, here’s my brief thoughts on Queen’s Play, take three.

( SPOILERS )

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I’ve been babbling incessantly about the Lymond Chronicles lately, and I know a lot of my flist has no idea what I’m talking about, so if you’re interested, here is an explanation of why the Lymond Chronicles are awesome and why you should totally read them.

(I’ll most likely get back to Doctor Who eventually, but in the meantime, I’m off in Lymond-world right now and my brain only has room for one all-consuming obsession at a time.)

( Why the Lymond Chronicles are awesome (spoilers ahoy, but only vague ones since this is written for Lymond virgins) )

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mrv3000 ran the Doctor through the Mary Sue Litmus Test and the results were highly amusing. (I suppose we should start calling him Doctor Sue.)

( I couldn't resist doing the same for Francis Crawford of Lymond... )

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( very mild spoilers for Philip Glenister's horrific new show Demons )

( why The Legend of Billie Jean is awesome )

( I just watched the first season of Queer as Folk US because Brian Kinney reminds me of Francis Crawford of Lymond )

( and I'm reading Queen's Play again )

Oh yeah and in Bowie world, I've thoroughly exhausted Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory, don't particularly like The Man Who Sold the World (except the title track) or Aladdin Sane, and am currently giving Diamond Dogs its chance. Did I mention that I went to see that all-girl Bowie cover band and it sucked? So sad. :(

I've been drinking wine as I wrote this--has it gotten less coherent as it's gone on? Apologies for rambling.

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These responses are totally dripping with SPOILERS so please click carefully!

( Highlander )

( Doctor Who )

( Buffy the Vampire Slayer )

( The Lymond Chronicles )

( A Song of Ice and Fire )

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So I was all set to read the sequel to The Sparrow, but my brain is in Lymond mode, so I re-read The Game of Kings a third time instead.

( spoilers for the Lymond Chronicles )

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I finished my re-read of the Lymond Chronicles last night. (I am really looking forward to going to bed early tonight and not reading anything–my eyes need a break!)

I’m trying to resolve my feelings about Checkmate and the end of the series, because they’re very, very mixed.

( spoilers for the Lymond Chronicles )

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Wow. Apparently lots of stuff happens in the world when you spend two weeks devouring the Lymond Chronicles and ignoring everything else.

My boss told me that they’d announced the new Doctor as I walked into work today. My immediate thought was “I can’t wait to read Fandom Wank.” It’s not disappointing.

(I’m surprised, actually. I expected to have to grudgingly give Moffat his due for choosing Patterson Joseph. Instead I’m LOLing at him for choosing some random kid who looks like the mutated offspring of David Tennant and Robert Pattinson.)

I owe email and comment responses to people. I’m sorry. I really haven’t been at my computer for two weeks–I updated the last two times from Indiana via my magical phone.

Oh! And I have to say–THANK YOU kita0610 FOR THE LOVELY CARD AND DAVID TENNANT CALENDAR! And thank you netweight for the incredibly sweet card! My internet friends are the best. :)

Now I’m going to ramble more about the Lymond Chronicles, because that’s all I spent my winter vacation thinking about. I finished Pawn in Frankincense and The Ringed Castle and am now partway into Checkmate.

( spoilers for the Lymond Chronicles )

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I’m halfway through Pawn in Frankincense and thinking….

( spoilers for Dorothy Dunnett's Pawn in Frankincense and a spoilery reference to the Doctor Who episode Journey's End )

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