Freckles & Doubt

I seem destined never to get far in a meme, which is possibly a good thing... wytchfynder initially pointed me to the Random Question Meme, which randomly generates a bunch of questions about one's friends list which one can then answer with suitable verve and wit. I'm a little terrified. The first question I got was:

What would happen if you were to date wytchfynder?
God. Screams, explosions, innocent bystanders running for the exits... I suspect the best place from which to view the results would be the next universe.

But I persevered, and the next one was:
Is pinkthulhu a pansy or a wuss?
at which point I decided that the damned thing was not only unpleasantly personal in its questions, but darned well rigged. An impression, may I add, not at all reduced by a question further down:

strawberryfrog is in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. What now?
Good grief, random generator. Nothing happens, of course. Life goes on. Strawberryfrog lives perpetually in a maze of twisty passages, it's his preferred mode of mental functioning.

So I gave up. Meme, schmeme.

In other news, my Falkenstein game have rescued their dwarf, managing not to blow up the Zeppelin in the process, which is good, because while a dwarf could survive the fire, I doubt he'd survive the concussion. The hob, left back home, had to cope with a cascading ferret plague from the Mysterious Inter-dimensional Trunk in the attic, totally ruining its (the hob's) evening of tartan sock-darning. I seem to have incautiously given the party their own unmarked four-horse carriage, and a Universal Key that magically opens pretty much any lock. I confidently expect mayhem to result. Then again, mayhem always results. As I pointed out this evening, it doesn't really much matter what action I describe or statement I make about the game, it'll pretty much inevitably disintegrate immediately into anarchic arguing.

I love my players. They do all the work.

Rubble update: the Army of Reconstruction have created a large slab of concrete, during which process they spread their large pile of gravel merrily around, causing the automatic gate to hit a stone and leap off its track when I tried to close it. The Evil Landlord is away this weekend, which mean I'm the one who has to water the bloody slab daily to set the concrete, which is low and horrible, given that I'd rather be putting the water on the (desecrated) garden. These are trying times.

It is a dark and stormy night and the rain falling on the typewriter keys writes a story in German about a great-aunt who went to a symposium on narrative and got eaten in the forest by a metabear.

Encyclopedia entries are fun! Probably not for the whole family, but they're making for one very happy academic. I've just spent two days reading everything I can lay my hands on by Ursula Le Guin, who is a very cool lady, and far more relevant to fairy tale/folklore than I actually thought at first. Fortunately, my nice editor is being very flexible about word counts. Also, apart from the general all-round ironic appeal of the above quote, Le Guin's kiddies' books are wonderful. *makes mental note to acquire some while in what Neil gleefully calls the Auntie Jess mode, necessitated by the high number of babies per square inch in my approximate vicinity*. In somewhat astounding news, last night's v. enjoyable dinner with her parents revealed that I really enjoy holding Kathleen, who at three weeks is rife with analytic possibility (what do those odd expressions mean? is she actually focusing on my face, or on some strange baby-realm adjacent to the real world?). Baby As Text: A New Paradigm.

Rubble update: temporary abatement of nuisance. (I keep wanting to write "subtly hairy"). The absence of the Army of Reconstruction during the weekend has been a great relief, although I keep finding horrible things they've done to the garden (broken branches on the hibiscus, and their bloody portaloo right outside my bathroom window). In true military fashion, the purpose of the exercise is apparently to dig careful holes and then fill them in again. The pile of sand from the foundation excavation and the evil hibiscus-eating pile of stones have been joined by a pile of other, presumably more desirable sand, dumped by truck outside the main gate (Evil Landlord now also has to park outside). The garden is now a locus of rubble, clutter and general shambles, which is giving me serious psychological twitches.

(Things You Might Not Know About Me, #5: I hate clutter. Hate it, hate it, hate it. Bric-a-brac - meaningless objects of ornamentation and no actual purpose - inspires me with a mad desire to take potshots with a shotgun or something. No-one is allowed to give me any more owls for my owl collection, unless they're functional, dammit!)

I got memed! I have Arrived, blog-wise. I was pinged by evil scroobious, naturally, who is a veteran of my literature seminars, so I suppose it's inevitable. I warn you, though, I shall cheat, and in some cases treat a whole series as a book. Rules, so boring.

The Number Of Books I Own. Good lord, now I'm going to have to count them. *pauses to fortify self with tea and toast*. Actually, probably a good idea to count them, anyway, for purposes of insurance, in case the Evil Landlord and I ever decide to burn the house down...

Okay. Fantasy/sf collection: just under a thousand. Fairy-tales and criticism: 200 or so. Plus the stuff in my office on campus, another 300 or so. Medieval history: almost 100. Detective fiction: 250ish. Mainstream novels, i.e. not sf/fantasy, around 500. Oh, and the PG Wodehouse in the living room: another 50ish. What's that? In total, I must own around 2500 books. Pshaw. Paltry. (If I count cookbooks, actually, that's another 100 or so).

The Last Books I Bought. Lemony Snicket, number 8, The Hostile Hospital, which, incidentally, is probably the best so far. Advance payment on the new Harry Potter. A. S. Byatt, The Little Black Book of Stories. Wait, I've just put in an Amazon order, so I suppose absolutely the most recent books I have bought (but not the last by a very long way) are The Sun, the Moon and the Stars (Steven Brust), The Family Trade and Singularity Sky (Charles Stross), and Distraction (Bruce Sterling).

The Last Book I Read: redundant question, on this blog, which mostly seems to be cultural criticism. As you know if you've been reading, it was Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, Haruki Murakami. Or, if you want to count graphic novels as books, the first four in the Fables series. (I don't count all the Dick Francis. That's not reading, it's distraction).

Five Books That Mean A Lot: like scroobious, I meep plaintively, "Only five?", but, unlike her, proceed to cheat.

• JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings; simple and obvious, but true. I read this first in the car travelling down from Zim to a holiday on the Wild Coast. I was 12. It completely overwhelmed and possessed me, despite the fact that I actually didn't understand a lot of it. I have re-read it an average of annually ever since, including sharp frequency spikes in my first year at UCT, when I was miserably and horrendously homesick and re-read it three times, following the action on photocopies of the maps. (Probably the first time I actually worked out what was happening in a tactical sense). I also re-read it four times over the three years during which the movies came out. This book, she says with calm understatement, means a lot to me.
  
• James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks. Not for nothing are my cats called Todal and Golux. I deeply rejoice that I possess a first edition, which used to belong to my grandfather, who introduced me not only to Thurber, but to Tolkien and to sf in general. Look what he started. Any other Thurber fairy tales are also much-loved, especially The White Deer, but Clocks is my favourite.
  
• A. S. Byatt, Possession. And, in fact, the fairy tales in The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye and Elementals (the story "Cold" has huge resonance for me). Her writing is an endless delight because it's so layered, complex and evocative of other texts. Also, Possession both articulated and validated my very profound enjoyment of romance structures; it can't be that guilty a pleasure if a Booker prizewinner also does it.
  
• Sheri S. Tepper. Everything by Sheri S. Tepper. (This is where I cheat). I can't actually select one favourite above all the others. Her novels are important to me because they express feminism and ecology wossnames which are really important to me. She also has a highly acute awareness of story/narrative/structure. In fact, she pushes most of my buttons. Clever lady.
  
• Charles Dickens, Bleak House. I adore Dickens generally, and re-read them all frequently, but for some reason Bleak House has always been my favourite. I can't even say why.

Five is a ridiculous number. Left out of the above are a bunch of really important writers and books, including Jane Austen, Dorothy Parker, Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising series, and all of Terry Pratchett. I reject that five. I spit upon it!

Looking back over that list, it's interesting that I've managed to bring three of them into my PhD, and one into my Masters thesis. Cause-and-effect wise, it's not that they're important to me because I've worked critically with them; it's that I've chosen to work critically with them because they're important to me. I possibly have the world's coolest job.

One Book I Wish I Could Burn: scroobious pipped me on the Stephen Donaldson one, so I shall have to think of something else. Probably George Eliot's Middlemarch, a book for which I have a largely inexplicable, deeply passionate loathing. Or Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being, although that antipathy is simply about circumstances of reading. Actually, thinking about it, I wouldn't actually want to burn either of the above; let's say a suspended torching, effective as soon as anyone tries to make me read either one again. I'm not generally big with the book-burning. I suspect that, given another year or two, I may be advocating it for JK Rowling and all her works, however...

You’ve been pinged. So I have. Now pinging... oooh (surveys blogdom with eye of connoisseur). d@vid, you're pinged. Stv (comovedy), so are you, because I don't know much about your reading taste other than Murakami ;>. Thak, you're pinged; stick it in a comment, if you don't want nameless hordes* rushing over to your blog.

* this is clearly a hopeless exaggeration. Dammit, scroobious, you've infected me with footnotes!