![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a good day
Thursday, 12 January 2006 11:41 pmAnother month's worth of encyclopedia entries have trundled bravely off into the void, this time all within deadline, none of this shuffling around fobbing off the long-suffering editor with most of them, and the last one or two coming tomorrow, promise, which is what I've tended to do in previous months. They all have arrived within a day or so of deadline, which apparently puts me well up the ladder in the Academic Efficiency Hall of Fame, but this month was a perfect score. The topics were also fun: not only Tim Burton and my perennial favourite A.S. Byatt, but this morning I allowed myself the crowning satisfaction of a concise, only slightly vitriolic 500-word dissmissal of Harry Potter. Hopefully my comments on the boy wonder's pseudo-fairy-tale aspects are lyrical and insightful enough that the bits with teeth slide on by under the editorial gaze.
As a reward to self for writing five and a half thousand words in four days, I stocked up on Lindt 70% and hied me forth to see Wallace and Grommit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit this afternoon. Lovely little movie: I do like my career, it allows me all sorts of self-indulgent movie-watching under the guise of, "Well, animation is one of my academic interests, you know." Which it is, but basically I like Wallace and Grommit because it's British, idyllic and darned cute, not just because it's beautifully animated. Were-Rabbit has given my my favourite mental image of the new year, which is that of a field full of floppy, dopey-eyed, rather dim-looking bunnies all beating their chests and howling at the moon. The film is also (a) a perfectly gorgeous, affectionate and very knowing parody of both King Kong and any Hammer horror movie involving monsters, village mobs and the castle on the hill, and (b) loaded to the gunwales with bad puns and the most marvellously obscene double-entendres. I devoutly hope that my demented snickers at inappropriate moments will scar for life the wretched child who was sitting to my right, since she had, for some reason, her left arm plunged into a large plastic bag, which she rustled almost continually from the moment the actual film started. With any luck the frenzied frustration at knowing that various dirty jokes passed straight over her head will eat gradually away at her already negligible mind until she's old enough to work out what I was snorting at, by which stage she'll be a gibbering wreck. Heh.
This evening was book club, as usual pleasantly wine-soaked, argumentative and filled with tottering piles of interesting tomes. This month I firmly established myself in the minds of fellow Tea Readers as The Person Who Doesn't Like Present Tense, mostly by dint of being fairly vocal about the degree to which I dislike present tense. Particularly first-person present. With very few exceptions, I feel it tends to be the purview of the Pretentious Modern Novel Which Takes Itself Too Seriously, and which purports to immerse the hapless reader in the Now, the Personal Instant, the Tedious Moment or the Basic Authorial Misunderstanding of Grammar. So done. (Exceptions include anything about time travel, anything fast-moving and cyberpunky, anything by Neal Stephenson). I also confessed my current Secret Shame, which is that I still haven't finished reading China Mieville's Iron Council, an excellent work of deeply political fantasy. I can only say that the reading experience is somewhat like placing Karl Marx, Mervyn Peake and Joseph Conrad in a blender, giving the lot a whirl with a couple of tots of good hallucinogenic, and imbibing the result through a straw, preferably one designed by Escher, so I feel I have some excuse for my lack of moral fibre. Resolution for the month, I will finish the bloody book or perish in the attempt, mostly because I also borrowed Robin McKinley's Sunshine, and desperately want to re-read it in order to confirm my initial impression of it, which is that it's possibly the only actually good vampire novel ever written.
This weekend appears to be wall-to-wall DVD watching at various venues, so I should probably stock up on sleep. There's a beautiful full moon out there, which means I probably won't. Ah, well.
As a reward to self for writing five and a half thousand words in four days, I stocked up on Lindt 70% and hied me forth to see Wallace and Grommit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit this afternoon. Lovely little movie: I do like my career, it allows me all sorts of self-indulgent movie-watching under the guise of, "Well, animation is one of my academic interests, you know." Which it is, but basically I like Wallace and Grommit because it's British, idyllic and darned cute, not just because it's beautifully animated. Were-Rabbit has given my my favourite mental image of the new year, which is that of a field full of floppy, dopey-eyed, rather dim-looking bunnies all beating their chests and howling at the moon. The film is also (a) a perfectly gorgeous, affectionate and very knowing parody of both King Kong and any Hammer horror movie involving monsters, village mobs and the castle on the hill, and (b) loaded to the gunwales with bad puns and the most marvellously obscene double-entendres. I devoutly hope that my demented snickers at inappropriate moments will scar for life the wretched child who was sitting to my right, since she had, for some reason, her left arm plunged into a large plastic bag, which she rustled almost continually from the moment the actual film started. With any luck the frenzied frustration at knowing that various dirty jokes passed straight over her head will eat gradually away at her already negligible mind until she's old enough to work out what I was snorting at, by which stage she'll be a gibbering wreck. Heh.
This evening was book club, as usual pleasantly wine-soaked, argumentative and filled with tottering piles of interesting tomes. This month I firmly established myself in the minds of fellow Tea Readers as The Person Who Doesn't Like Present Tense, mostly by dint of being fairly vocal about the degree to which I dislike present tense. Particularly first-person present. With very few exceptions, I feel it tends to be the purview of the Pretentious Modern Novel Which Takes Itself Too Seriously, and which purports to immerse the hapless reader in the Now, the Personal Instant, the Tedious Moment or the Basic Authorial Misunderstanding of Grammar. So done. (Exceptions include anything about time travel, anything fast-moving and cyberpunky, anything by Neal Stephenson). I also confessed my current Secret Shame, which is that I still haven't finished reading China Mieville's Iron Council, an excellent work of deeply political fantasy. I can only say that the reading experience is somewhat like placing Karl Marx, Mervyn Peake and Joseph Conrad in a blender, giving the lot a whirl with a couple of tots of good hallucinogenic, and imbibing the result through a straw, preferably one designed by Escher, so I feel I have some excuse for my lack of moral fibre. Resolution for the month, I will finish the bloody book or perish in the attempt, mostly because I also borrowed Robin McKinley's Sunshine, and desperately want to re-read it in order to confirm my initial impression of it, which is that it's possibly the only actually good vampire novel ever written.
This weekend appears to be wall-to-wall DVD watching at various venues, so I should probably stock up on sleep. There's a beautiful full moon out there, which means I probably won't. Ah, well.
