a nose as red as blood, probably because of the secret drinking
Tuesday, 9 September 2008 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtIn the Department of The Malice Of Inanimate Objects, my alarm clock hates me. Despite being set for 7am, it woke me up this morning at 1am, 2am and 5am, at which point I muzzily turned it off and trusted to luck that I'd wake up sometime before lunch. Investigation when slightly more awake reveals that the minute hand is apparently dragging the alarm hand around with it on a more or less random basis. Things To Do This Evening: buy new alarm clock. Oh, and go back to the gym. The gentle protrusion of my stomach is beginning to depress me.
Today's random linkery, in the Department Of Severely Postmodern Fairy Tales (an important and vociferous department in my personal Kafka-esque bureaucracy): An Old-Fashioned Unicorn's Guide To Courtship. Sarah Rees Brennan is perhaps better known to anyone who reads this blog as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mistful - she writes very funny HP fanfic and an even more amusing blog, and has just landed a contract for her original Y.A. fantasy series. This story is witty, irreverent and thoughtful; in my professional fairy-tale opinion, Tanith Lee juveniles and Patricia C. Wrede also ran. Also: "the Rapunzel category"? Absolutely true!
In keeping with this theme, favourite kiddie fairy-tales! I was going to rhapsodise about James Thurber's Thirteen Clocks, but that's probably cheating: if you lot don't share my undying devotion to the book after lounging around on this blog for more than about three seconds, there's no hope for you. Instead, A. A. Milne! No, not Winnie-the-Pooh. (My love for Winnie-the-Pooh didn't actually survive Dorothy Parker's response to The House At Pooh Corner1). Did you know that A. A. Milne wrote a satirical children's fairy tale called Once On A Time?2 This is particularly important in my memories because I read it precisely once, when I was about 11 and found it at a school friend's house (her parents were Rich, TM, and she had beautiful toys and books); thereafter I couldn't find it again, until about four years ago when it turned up in one of my second-hand haunts. It thus has the particular appeal of the long-term unattainable. It features the foolish and unnecessary war between the neighbouring kingdoms of Euralia and Barodia; also, the desperately well-meaning Princess Hyacinth, serving girls called Wiggs and Woggs, a prince with a rabbit's head, and the beautiful, fascinating, thoroughly evil and scheming Countess Belvane. The characters are all bona fide eccentrics, and the political message surprisingly biting. It's also a bit Princess-Brideish in that the narrator continually references the historical accounts of one Roger Scurvilegs, mostly to disagree with them violently. Another in my favourite category of "off-the-wall", I would say.
Today's random linkery, in the Department Of Severely Postmodern Fairy Tales (an important and vociferous department in my personal Kafka-esque bureaucracy): An Old-Fashioned Unicorn's Guide To Courtship. Sarah Rees Brennan is perhaps better known to anyone who reads this blog as
mistful - she writes very funny HP fanfic and an even more amusing blog, and has just landed a contract for her original Y.A. fantasy series. This story is witty, irreverent and thoughtful; in my professional fairy-tale opinion, Tanith Lee juveniles and Patricia C. Wrede also ran. Also: "the Rapunzel category"? Absolutely true!In keeping with this theme, favourite kiddie fairy-tales! I was going to rhapsodise about James Thurber's Thirteen Clocks, but that's probably cheating: if you lot don't share my undying devotion to the book after lounging around on this blog for more than about three seconds, there's no hope for you. Instead, A. A. Milne! No, not Winnie-the-Pooh. (My love for Winnie-the-Pooh didn't actually survive Dorothy Parker's response to The House At Pooh Corner1). Did you know that A. A. Milne wrote a satirical children's fairy tale called Once On A Time?2 This is particularly important in my memories because I read it precisely once, when I was about 11 and found it at a school friend's house (her parents were Rich, TM, and she had beautiful toys and books); thereafter I couldn't find it again, until about four years ago when it turned up in one of my second-hand haunts. It thus has the particular appeal of the long-term unattainable. It features the foolish and unnecessary war between the neighbouring kingdoms of Euralia and Barodia; also, the desperately well-meaning Princess Hyacinth, serving girls called Wiggs and Woggs, a prince with a rabbit's head, and the beautiful, fascinating, thoroughly evil and scheming Countess Belvane. The characters are all bona fide eccentrics, and the political message surprisingly biting. It's also a bit Princess-Brideish in that the narrator continually references the historical accounts of one Roger Scurvilegs, mostly to disagree with them violently. Another in my favourite category of "off-the-wall", I would say.1 "Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up!"
2 Good lord. I'm a bit shaken to discover that putting "a.a. milne once on a time" into Google gives a hit for a scholarly article entitled "Twelve short tandem repeat loci Y chromosome haplotypes" in the top three. They ain't making fairy-tale lit like they used to, is all I can say. Or, presumably, short tandem repeat loci Y chromosome haplotypes.
