I hunt for haddock's eyes among the heather bright

[freckles_and_doubt]

The upsy-downsy continues. Annoying day, score as follows:

• Number of post offices visited: 4
• Number of post offices declining to offer service I need: 4
• Number of extra miles walked to circumnavigate building operations in Claremont: approximately 5 millyun.
• New handbags bought: 1
• New Pratchetts bought: 1 (officially a consolation for the failure of job offer)
• Henna sachets applied to hair: 4
• Number of pages completed in new tax returns: 2 (which is all of them. The new tax returns are ridiculously simple and possibly represent a fiendish ploy on the part of the government to attract high-earning immigrants).
• Number of frantic phone calls fielded from third-year students suffering hand-in angst: 3
• Number of honours dissertations marked: 0
• Sinus headaches endured: 1, but the bastard has been going all day.
• Number of grains of rice donated on Free Rice: 950. The opinions of institutions of higher learning in this peninsula notwithstanding, my score wibbles around between 48 and 50. I feel smug. Also, more vocabulary-rich.

While on the subject of irritation, I have to have a little rant here. Indulge me. Typing "Stephanie Meyer" into Google will produce any number of pages on which bookstores, reviewers and readers rave in maddened approbation of her recent young adult vampire fantasy series, which starts with Twilight. The friend who lent me the first two books likewise makes approving noises. I spent the weekend reading aforementioned novels. In my fairly unhumble opinion, they're dreadful. The reviewers throw around words like "exquisite", but I find the writing style flat, dead and weighed down with extraneous detail. The plot is hackneyed, a sort of teen vampire school romance thing; the vampires themselves have moments of interest, but are basically a concatenation of clichés - graceful, deadly, sexy, tormented. The human characters aren't. Human, that is: they're cardboard. The basic idea has some possibilities, which led me to madly read through both books in the desperate hope she might, at some point, actually do justice to the idea, but I can't see it.

What am I missing? Am I that embittered an old academic? I had to go and re-read McKinley's Sunshine just to get the taste out of my mouth, which had its inevitable effect of giving me a serious baking yen, so the jo&stv got malva pudding on Sunday night. Which reminds me, the remnants are still in the 'fridge. If I go and eat them now, I can feed an anti-inflammatory to Sid the Sinus Headache, which may shut him up for a while. Plan.

Last Night I Dreamed: a crumbling country estate at which I was staying, in an outside room with a door which wouldn't close properly. I was amazed to discover that an ex-fling of mine was doing woodwork for a weird experimental movie with Elijah Wood: unfortunately the strange experimental format (lots of writing on bits of wood assembled into three-dimensional constructions) meant that the film was abandoned before it was finished. (I briefly met Elijah Wood - he had a really limp handshake). Travelling away from the estate, it became apparent that someone or something had been going through the countryside killing people, including the owner of another estate, who had become a giant ghost jellyfish. Then the director of the weird experimental movie suddenly wanted me to take part in another film, in which I had to wear a long red dress.

I solemnly swear I am not on drugs.

Comments

letter

[soafre.livejournal.com]

hellow,excuse me for my bad english,but i decide write letter to someboby in South africa.I never travel out of my country,but my desire is visiting any exotic contry such as SAR.My real name is Fyodor.I'm from kursk,may be you lissen about submarine with such name.I want to know about your country,let's write letters each other

i forget

[soafre.livejournal.com]

on any case my e-mail: para_do_xxx@mail.ru

Your dear pen-friends :P

[first-fallen.livejournal.com]

Soon he'll start asking for pictures of your feet...

Re: Your dear pen-friends :P

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

aaaaargh!

You would have to bring that up, wouldn't you.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

He looks nice, what could possuibly go wrong?

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

You lot are a fat lot of help. Sigh.

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

I agree he looks nice. And the mention of submarines is pretty tantalising. Get bumpy or wythchfynder or another of our militarily knowledgeable friends to feed you some submarine info and dazzle him with your insight.

[schedule5.livejournal.com]

I reckon bumpy should vet the guys lj page. It's in some angular language....

Aaand... nice theme :)

Free Rice

[pumeza.livejournal.com]

Aaargh!! How horribly, evilly compelling.. I got up to somewhere around 1050 grains of rice, frantically trying to stabilise my score beyond 47, before I pulled loose. Shudder.

Is it just me, or is this a new theme?

Re: Free Rice

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

It's pretty much everywhere - I've had three completely disconnected people recommend it. And, yes, horribly compelling. I think I'd donated 1200 grains when I stopped last night :>.

Oooh, this new theme's commenting system is much faster, it doesn't reload the entire page. Score.

Re: Free Rice

[(Anonymous)]

Wimps. I got up to 3000+

Heeeelp

awful authors

[(Anonymous)]

i really hate it when authors do that. while not having read the books in question, i have had similar experiences. you read a book that has a very cool idea behind it, but then go through several books that completely fail to put the idea to good use. there should be some sort of way to find out before reading

dystopia

Re: awful authors

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

One of the ways to find out before reading is to trawl internet reviews, which is really my problem with this example: so many people seem to think the books are brilliant, and I honestly can't see it. Sigh.

[veratiny.livejournal.com]

I liked the idea too (in a sort of literary equivalent of slumming it)....but I think I might have been cured had I watched more Buffy.

I always wonder when I read books with a alright premise but poor execution if there is some author out there crying into their lentil soup and cursing the day they allowed themselves to be talked into the changes by pushy editor...

Still one hopes that it will guide young tweens into developing an appetite for the genre and thereafter consuming bigger and better things. I mean it has to be better than Huisgenoot!

Then again that is only a possibility if they haven't been blinded by vampires in the sun :-)

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

What with you and pumeza, I shall have to make a children's drawing userpic sometime soon. K has started drawing things and telling us what they are. Squiggle = dragon! Squiggle = cot! Squiggle = fish! I'll have to put a caption.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I don't think this is an editorial problem: the style is consistent, the flatness and over-detail is sustained throughout. But you're right, it's probably not a bad YA start - at least she writes grammatically!

[herne-kzn.livejournal.com]

:):):) Oh _bless_. Isn't it _nice_ to have new friends?

Ye gods I miss Malva pudding.
Curse your free rice score, I'm sometimes hitting 48 but generally staying at 46/47, *envy, envy*

Shiny newness of design - with books!

[maxbarners.livejournal.com]

Me like-ee.

Much better than that purple crushed velvet cravat thing.
;-)

[dragonroost.livejournal.com]

ooooooo!!!! new layout, cool =)

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I'm not 100% happy with it, the darned thing won't let me fiddle colours or text size without resorting to CSS, and CSS scares me like I'm a girly girl. But it's generally cool, and I'm glad it's meeting with approval :>.

[bend-gules.livejournal.com]

Curse you and your Free Rice link! Now I'm trapped at my desk, and doomed to throw myself at the screen in search of a higher score...