![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trundling along
Friday, 4 February 2005 02:24 pmDammit, I hate this hot weather. I'm all lethargic and potentially headachy. I can feel one lurking, waiting to happen. Of course, this could also have a lot to do with the fact that I'm wading through exceedingly dense and technical semiotic theory as applied to folkloric narrative. Definite headache material, exacerbated by the fact that I'm not sure it's relevant to what I'm trying to do, and it's irritating me to be forced to read it. Bother.
By way of light relief, I read the first book of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Interesting YA Gothic, really, in the classic sense of gothic - villains, crumbling mansions, plotting Wicked Uncles. Nice line in wit and ironic distance, in terms of its narrative voice (damn all this theory). It's a new technique on me, to present young readers with nasty, real horrors - death, the loss of parents, corruption, neglect - while almost, but not quite, pretending that they're not horrors through this strange removal of tone. The nastiness undercuts itself deliberately, by overstatement with a sort of regretful implacability. I wish I knew more kids, I have no idea how this profoundly divided kind of voice would work on them. To me, it has an eye on adult irony while being just a little condescending to the Little Folk. While I am wholly behind the idea of violently inculcating literacy in unsuspecting youth, the writer's tendency to use slightly complex vocabulary and then explain the meaning of the word in context was charming and amusing for the first three instances, and then just annoying. Possibly my favourite part of the whole thing: the dedication. "To Beatrice - darling, dearest, dead." Says it all, really.
Ah, well. Postmodernism beckons (bletch). On with the motley.
By way of light relief, I read the first book of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Interesting YA Gothic, really, in the classic sense of gothic - villains, crumbling mansions, plotting Wicked Uncles. Nice line in wit and ironic distance, in terms of its narrative voice (damn all this theory). It's a new technique on me, to present young readers with nasty, real horrors - death, the loss of parents, corruption, neglect - while almost, but not quite, pretending that they're not horrors through this strange removal of tone. The nastiness undercuts itself deliberately, by overstatement with a sort of regretful implacability. I wish I knew more kids, I have no idea how this profoundly divided kind of voice would work on them. To me, it has an eye on adult irony while being just a little condescending to the Little Folk. While I am wholly behind the idea of violently inculcating literacy in unsuspecting youth, the writer's tendency to use slightly complex vocabulary and then explain the meaning of the word in context was charming and amusing for the first three instances, and then just annoying. Possibly my favourite part of the whole thing: the dedication. "To Beatrice - darling, dearest, dead." Says it all, really.
Ah, well. Postmodernism beckons (bletch). On with the motley.
