Freckles & Doubt

This morning I dedicate myself to the cause of literary perversity in various guises. In the Department of Artistic Prose-Mangling, the Bulwer-Lyttons are out. The Bulwer-Lyttons always make me strangely happy. I am torn between several of this year's gems, but I think my favourite is probably the following:

Watching Felicia walk into the bar was like watching two fat Rottweilers in yellow spandex and spike heels that had treed a scrawny bleach blond cat at the top of a skinny flagpole that for some reason had decided to sprout casaba melons.

This shares with my second favourite, the one about the dirigible, the peculiar quality of intangible near-miss - you could change no more than one or two key words or subtly rearrange the sentence structure to make it perfectly acceptable as the opening line to a deeply successful contemporary smart-arse comic novel. I also like the unplaced additional submission from the winner: "Planet KWS-1968 loomed on the horizon like the punchline to a really bad joke." You could use that, absolutely unmodified, as the perfectly acceptable opening line to a deeply successful contemporary smart-arse sf novel. I blush for the state of my genre.

Further on the perverse literary front, the Evil Landlord is renovating his study (a wholly overdue process, I have to say. It has carpets formed of a sort of peaty substance, and ant-nests in the roof. Which is, may I add, still painted with faint gold stars inexpertly daubed by the previous tenants, who were earnestly Artistic without actual benefit of Art). The process has entailed throwing out incredible quantities of junk (cue me cheering), and incidentally emptied a bookshelf, which I have promptly snagged and filled with my DVD collection. I am faintly aghast at the actual size of said collection. Two and a half shelves. Complete Buffy, Angel and X-Files, and more sf B-movies and junky superhero flicks than you could shake a zappy ray gun at.

But, she says meaningfully, the process has also enabled me to reshuffle my actual bookshelves, revealing some disconcerting gaps which are tragically aligned with the disconcerting gaps in my memory as to the borrowers of said books. Right, you reprobates - at least you Capetonian ones. Who the hell has the following books out of my library? please confess and return forthwith. I undoubtedly lent them to you in full possession of my senses, but have subsequently lost all recollection.

China Mieville, Iron Council
Sergei Lukyanenko, Night Watch (big trade paperback)
Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

I have to say, you lot have taste, but I'd still like my books back.

Furthermore, would anyone like copies of the following? I seem to have spares, owing mostly to a tendency to acquire duplicates second-hand because I think they are good and should be promulgated to non-owners.

Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues
Barry Hughart, Bridge of Birds
Robin McKinley, The Door in the Hedge (collection of fairy tales)

Finally: is it just me, or is Groin the Dwarf peculiarly compelling?

Lordy. Epic grump this morning: yesterday's endless stream of obliviously disorganised students radiating annoyed entitlement had generated a fizzing, homicidal rage which seems to have carried through the night. I woke up at 5am with a pained yelp as my calves cramped, and drove up to campus swearing a blue streak at almost anything foolish enough to cross my path. (Traffic! pedestrians! infelicitous billboards! sudden flurries of leaves!)

Then Making Light did an open poetry challenge thread, including an array of vintage and lovely puns as well as well-scanned, witty verse from the site's scarily literate commenters, and the git of figgling, no, wait, fit of giggling has cured me, even if only temporarily until the first student idiot tries something.

I have to say, Orson Scott Card's latest homophobic rant hasn't helped the grump any. I've always been a bit ambivalent about his writing, but this kind of thing is giving me a strong disinclination ever to read him again.

Last night I dreamed I was trying to do a gym routine, in an unfamiliar and slightly down-at-heel gym where the attendants were slowly taking away the machines and locking them up in a back room, inexorably reducing my options and eventually bringing the routine to a grinding halt. As they did this a a horde of small children waving balloons poured into the room from the other end. Extremely frustrating. I think my subconscious is guilt-tripping me about my conspicuous lack of gym activity for the last two months. I say to my subconscious, deal! I'll go back when I've overcome the latest dose of post-glandular languidity. Sigh.

This, courtesy of Neil Gaiman's not inconsiderable nose for the weird, is amazing. Bizarre and 19th-century and random, but amazing. Lose yourself. Wonder. It shifts and morphs when you mouse-over and click. (There's an explanation here, but it's actually contra-indicated.) Also, it has owls.

And this man does exquisite things to language. Why have I never read him before? Cruel universe.

Oddness. I've just received a phone call which sounded like nothing so much as a series of bad sf sound effects for a spaceship docking: clunks, scrapes, rumbling noises, spacesuit respiration and the hiss of airlocks. I think someone's cell phone may be dialing me accidentally, possibly while watching The Right Stuff. Check it isn't you :>.

There has been Much Work this weekend: 8 hours on Saturday and a good 5 yesterday, and I am beginning to throw around terms like formalism, structuralism and post-structuralism with a certain degree of authority, although it's probably a bit of a front. I rewarded myself with a spot of random browsing this morning, productive of the following interesting tidbits:

• For my surprisingly large number of Polish friends (i.e. >1): Henry Jenkins talks about Polish fantasy and post-socialist angst. In particular, The Witcher is apparently Polish trans-media fantasy that sounds really interesting.
• I am becoming increasingly enamoured of The Language Log, not only because it offers a head-on assault on linguistic myths, bad writing and evil misrepresentations of science, but because its writers are incisive, witty and often hysterically funny. This morning I got a bit lost in the byways of "X language has no word for Y" mythologies, starting with a lovely rebuttal of the old chestnut about the Eskimos' millions of word for snow. (They don't. They have about the same number of root words for snow-related concepts, but a really nifty and complex language structure which allows them to accumulate almost infinite modifiers onto the root word. They thus have pretty much infinite words for snow).
• Courtesy of Bowleserised, an obligatory Bah! Humbug! moment: Scared of Santa. Tiny tots terrified of weird old men in beards! Down with Christmas! The therapy bills aren't worth it!

Must go and search the house briefly for more bits of dead thing, my mother greeted the new day this morning by picking up a random bit of mess from the floor only to discover that it was an unidentified bit of bird innard, courtesy of an as yet unidentified cat dismembering some small, unfortunate bird all over the house. There's a wing in the Evil Landlord's study, and no doubt other little lovesome packages elsewhere. Fortunately my mother is a trained medical technician and is completely unphased by sudden tactile liver contact before her first cup of tea.

Then I shall work. Work worky work work work.

Actually, bits of it are ok, but large tracts of it make me want to convert to something sensible, like orang-utans.

It is a fearful and wonderful thing, to be an English academic in a time of terrorist bombings: the opportunities for linguistic analysis would make your toes curl (unless you're starmadeshadow, in which case there's no knowing what they'll do). I am fascinated by the extent to which responses to the London bombings have divided themselves into two camps, which are in ongoing and dynamic tension as they try to colonise the opposition: the sensible/rational/measured response versus the deliberate attempt to emotionalise. People like Blair and certain media sites are doing their damndest to turn this into a black/white, us/them process: big on words like "horror", "terror", "atrocity", very low on actual logic. The bus didn't blow up, it was "ripped apart". This isn't an attack on London's people or transport system, it's an "attack on values and lifestyles". Sensationalism scares me, not only because it whips up extreme emotional responses, but because it suggests that those are the terms in which the majority of people actually want to respond. The rational voices suggesting that this could have been a lot worse, and that maybe we should wait for evidence before jumping to conclusions about the nature of the perpetrators, are a minority, and they're not the ones in charge. Politics these days seems to be interchangeable with mass media - you have to say what sells. I hate it.

Today was an annoying day. Last night's game was lack-lustre and is giving me crises of confidence about my ability to DM, or at least to bludgeon my brain into something like wakeful energy during games. The belated discovery that today is the deadline for tax returns didn't help; of all the things I hate about being a Grown-Up, tax returns are about the third worst. It is also one of the many ramifications of Sod's Law that this morning should have seen me bitten suddenly with inspiration re this thrice-dratted Tolkien paper, since I almost immediately had to stop chasing up fascinating ramifications of fan culture in order to wrestle with numbers and bureaucratic language. (You try making sense out of tax certificates when two-thirds of your brain wants to be wandering Middle-Earth in analytic mode.) The total non-appearance of a vital tax certificate didn't help, but, in a bizarre twist of hitherto unsuspected efficiency, the medical aid company provided me with an online copy in about two and a half minutes flat. I think I'm still faintly stunned. I was able to post the wretched thing about five minutes before the post was collected from the box, having exchanged furtive and guilt-ridden grins with two other people in the photocopy shop as we all frantically copied forms and certificates. Inefficiency, the great human commonality.

Just think. If we were an orang-utan civilisation, we probably wouldn't have to fill in tax returns. Bananas don't generate that much paperwork.