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angels and demons
Friday, 1 December 2006 10:21 amHey! Who let that December in here? Darned bouncers ought to know better. Now it's chased away November with me having done only a fraction of the work I intended. Doom, apocalypse and woe. On the other hand, my Star Wars calendar has cute Luke shots for December. He looks much better in black.
More literary wittering. I still haven't read The Da Vinci Code, mostly out of cussedness1, but also because I picked it up in a bookstore once and was so horrified by the incompetent mutated journalese of the opening sentence that concerned clerks had to pry the book loose from my rigid fingers, sit me down and feed me brandy before I'd stop screaming2. Now, courtesy of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pumeza, a rigorous, academic and beautifully rude dissection of Dan Brown's grammatical and stylistic iniquities, by a bunch of university linguistics experts called The Language Log. "Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better." Make sure you read all the links on the bottom of the page, the bit about mixed metaphors and animal imagery is hysterical. The review of Digital Fortress, here, also contains the marvellous slapdown: "In short, to call this novel formulaic is an insult to the beauty and diversity of formulae." Hee.
This week I also discovered Spaced, which jo&stv have been bugging me to watch for months. Am hooked. I lay on the sofa for an entire evening watching the first series uninterrupted, and laughing like a loon. It's intelligent, lateral, wry, genre-conscious, unabashedly geeky and inventively filmed, and also makes me wonder whether stv (a) is Simon Pegg, (b) has modelled himself entirely on Simon Pegg, or (c) is a truly bizarre example of parallel evolution. I'm also slightly horrified that I caught so many of the pop culture references, which are geeky to the max and brand me irrevocably as a sf/fantasy-reading, roleplaying, computer-gaming, comic-fondling, pervy Brit-fancier beyond any hope of redemption. Have resolved only to ever watch British TV in future, a determination I confidently expect to fizzle the next time I jones for Buffy, i.e. next week3. Concerned friends might avert this by bringing on Season 2 of Spaced.
Oh, yes. Still no mole, although a fresh outbreak of molehill in the garden suggests it may have tunnelled through the floor and escaped back into the wilds. Let's hope.
More literary wittering. I still haven't read The Da Vinci Code, mostly out of cussedness1, but also because I picked it up in a bookstore once and was so horrified by the incompetent mutated journalese of the opening sentence that concerned clerks had to pry the book loose from my rigid fingers, sit me down and feed me brandy before I'd stop screaming2. Now, courtesy of
pumeza, a rigorous, academic and beautifully rude dissection of Dan Brown's grammatical and stylistic iniquities, by a bunch of university linguistics experts called The Language Log. "Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better." Make sure you read all the links on the bottom of the page, the bit about mixed metaphors and animal imagery is hysterical. The review of Digital Fortress, here, also contains the marvellous slapdown: "In short, to call this novel formulaic is an insult to the beauty and diversity of formulae." Hee. This week I also discovered Spaced, which jo&stv have been bugging me to watch for months. Am hooked. I lay on the sofa for an entire evening watching the first series uninterrupted, and laughing like a loon. It's intelligent, lateral, wry, genre-conscious, unabashedly geeky and inventively filmed, and also makes me wonder whether stv (a) is Simon Pegg, (b) has modelled himself entirely on Simon Pegg, or (c) is a truly bizarre example of parallel evolution. I'm also slightly horrified that I caught so many of the pop culture references, which are geeky to the max and brand me irrevocably as a sf/fantasy-reading, roleplaying, computer-gaming, comic-fondling, pervy Brit-fancier beyond any hope of redemption. Have resolved only to ever watch British TV in future, a determination I confidently expect to fizzle the next time I jones for Buffy, i.e. next week3. Concerned friends might avert this by bringing on Season 2 of Spaced.
Oh, yes. Still no mole, although a fresh outbreak of molehill in the garden suggests it may have tunnelled through the floor and escaped back into the wilds. Let's hope.
- 1 In the same way that I still haven't seen Titanic. After a certain point, hype is simply annoying and counter-productive, at least to those who consider bloody-mindedness a cardinal virtue. Which raises an interesting question, actually. My nominations for the Seven Cardinal Virtues: bloody-mindedness, wit, laterality, empathy, sensuality, open-mindedness and intellectual suspicion. Any other nominees?
2 I may be exaggerating a little here.
3 Or until the promised evil pirated copies of Heroes materialise, causing me untold glee. Book club, so about cultural exchange.
