Freckles & Doubt

So, Parade's End! In utter defiance of my usual desperate fidelity to nothing but the fluffiest of genre tv, I am suddenly and inexplicably hooked on quality BBC renditions of period Modernist novels, with extra side helpings of war, tragedy and emotional distress. I dunno. Apparently I actually have the mental energy, which is probably not unrelated to my recent post on being (weird, go figure) un-depressed and even happy. Which, I am happy to say, is still the case.

My sudden interest in Parade's End is not just fangirling, although the link is Benedict Cumberbatch and I ended up watching it via the fan process - my Tumblr feed is still all about Sherlock, and if fan activity does anything, it introduces you not just to the investment of articulate fans in the central text, but in all the other texts they love, too. There's apparently only so much exposure to beautiful English countryside and Edwardian costume in lovingly-captured Tumblr gifs I can take before I have to damned well see the series.

And wow, is it beautiful. The production has a sort of glow about it, it's exquisitely conceived and shot, with an almost heightened reality to the period detail. That gives, I think, a slight sense of detachment from all of the mental cruelty and horrors of war with which the story is concerned - they are tragic and horrifying without actually being visceral, which is possibly also why I'm managing to enjoy it. But the visual spectacle is really only a context for the characters, from whom one doesn't detach at all. Wow, I invest in these people. All so interestingly flawed, groping unavailingly towards abstract ideals, so utterly shaped and entrapped by their social contexts, structures, expectations, morals. Their own desires so suppressed. Vivid, real, sad people, caught in a terrible sort of inevitability - not just war, although that flings it all into relief, but the shape of their everyday lives. The series is amazing, but now I really want to read the book.

And, let me tell you, it's deeply weird to find myself suddenly impelled to read the book, because my loathing for the Modernists is a pure and burning thing, and Ford Madox Ford is a maddened Modernist with all the bells and whistles. They've always struck me as arrogant sods with this whole thing of My Consciousness, Let Me Show You It. Generally, as a self-respecting genre theorist I have no damned interest at all in someone's naked consciousness, unfiltered by respectable genre functions or narrative conventions. A lot of this distaste is irrational and probably exists because I was badly savaged, in my impressionable undergrad, by a rampaging James Joyce - I never even tried Ulysses, Portrait of the Artist did for me all on its own in first-year English. At the time my high levels of nascent feminism and innate girly swot caused me independently to make valiant but unavailing attempts to read Virginia Woolf on the grounds that the Girl version of Modernism may be more palatable than the Boy, but oh lord. (Except Orlando. I love Orlando, it's a romp, albeit an angry romp, and it appeals to those bits of me that are into androgyny and shifted gender boundaries, which I am coming to the conclusion are rather a lot more of me than I'd realised).

But a sneaking sympathy has clearly crept up on me, because the Modernist framing of Ford's writing obviously influences the way the series is made, and I utterly adore the way the series is made. Apart from its deeply internal positioning and fascination with psychology, it's all allusion and implication, fragmented narrative, half-told stories, time-jumps, unexplained free associations - it makes you work, it doesn't explain, you have to construct it as you watch. I'm currently re-watching because I feel that I missed so much the first time round, and it's an immeasurably rich pleasure on a second viewing, when you can feel the operation of each instant in the arc of the whole. This is intelligent television based on an intelligent book, and thus, by gum, I'll prove myself intelligent by surviving Ford Madox Ford, or perish in the attempt.

I should also possibly record for posterity that, apart from an uncharacteristic inclination to give Modernism a second chance, watching Parade's End’s upper class Edwardianism, in which people perfectly unironically say things like “Ripping!” and “old boy”, has had the weird and possibly inevitable side-effect of mutating my already slightly indefinably pseudo-British accent inexorably towards ever more cut-glass Full English enunciation. (Like a Full English breakfast, only less hardening to the arteries). Especially, for some reason, when giving curriculum advice. I can't work out if the bell-like clarity is desirable or pretentious as hell, but given that my next Cunning Plan is to break out the BBC Bleak House I haven't got around to watching yet, the linguistic shenanigans are almost certainly going to amplify rather than receding. But it's my favourite Dickens, and Gillian Anderson doing Lady Deadlock is an act of inspired and genius casting such as the world has never seen, and apparently I now have the mental fortitude, so my immediate environment can just deal with the Britishness. So there.

Various wamblings in the comments of my last post have vouchsafed me an Insight, or possibly a Revelation, or at very least a Brainstorm. Which is to say, gawsh, but there are an awful lot of really rather attractive men prancing around contemporary popular culture under the sobriquet of Captain. Is this officially a Thing now? have we all succumbed to the appeal of militarism, or authority, or uniforms? Also, boots. Captains wear good boots. And, judging by the evidence, a lot of them wear good coats. ( I am cutting this to remove long strings of photos from innocent Friends feeds. )

Aargh. Builders on scaffolds are using drills and jackhammers to scrape plaster off the walls around my window. Other builders are re-plastering. Still others are scraping off my windows the solidified plaster detritus from yesterday's identical operation six feet higher up. The noise is of the indescribably penetrating and tooth-jarring order which is causing me to actively look forward to going to the dentist this afternoon. At least I'll be able to flee my office.

There being a tragic hiatus in my Veronica Mars watching (Seasons 2 & 3 arrive today, calloo, callay!) wolverine_nun lent me the first couple of seasons of Chuck, which she enjoyed and which I've been vaguely wanting to test-drive for a while. On the surface it seems right up my alley - fluffy, undemanding watching, with a reasonable degree of humour and self-reflexive irony, and the kind of thrillery/actiony format which also grooves my ploons. (I'm a sucker for car chases and explosions and OTT fight choreography and other icons of the mindless action genre). But it's not doing it for me, and I'm trying to work out why.

A lot of it is doing it for me. I like the premise, and the ridiculously tongue-in-cheek concept of the Intersect, with all its cheesy and unlikely images. I love the CIA/NSA rivalry, and Adam Baldwin in this role; I genuinely like Chuck himself, who is dopey and geeky and endearing, and hapless not quite to the point of irritation. I like Sarah, and I love the interactions between Chuck and his sister. I think, on mature reflection, that the series becomes literally unwatchable (as in, I get up and go out of the room for five minutes so it can play an excruciating scene through without me having to watch) around the character of Morgan. Hi, I'm Extemporanea. I Get All Protective Of Geeks.

This is nerd-humour, but I'm finding it nasty. Morgan is almost entirely without redeeming feature: his social ineptitude and rhino-hide insensitivity make him actively painful to watch. It's a one-dimensional, horribly stereotypical, rather sadistic portrayal: apparently his only function in the series is to make life difficult and embarrassing for Chuck. Morgan is The Hero's Cross To Bear: I'm on the sixth episode of the series, and in terms of his own good qualities, points of interest, elements with which the viewer can empathise, there's nothing. Chuck is a geeky stereotype that's actually well-rounded; Morgan's just a foil, and one you're encouraged to laugh at rather cruelly. I can't take it. It's poisoning the whole thing for me. Which is a pity, because I rather want to see how the whole ridiculous premise works out. It looks like fun, but fun I can't have. Bother.

Now I shall go to the dentist, braced for the nasty, expensive little noise which results when a dentist peers into your mouth and does the sharp intake of breath indicating that at some unspecified stage in the last few weeks a very expensive crown came randomly adrift and you accidentally swallowed it without noticing.

Woe! I was reclining peacefully on the sofa last night watching Eureka, and got a sudden yen to discover where I'd seen the geeky café chef before (answer: the Toyman on Smallville, this series seems to be stuffed with Smallville alumni), and when I tried to switch on Winona she imitated the action of the brick and refused to respond in any way at all. Plugging her into the mains makes absolutely no difference. The ON button simply doesn't do anything. Taking the battery out and putting it back in again also doesn't do anything. I have so little experience with laptopoid objects, I have no bloody idea what's going on. Is there a secret handshake or something similar of which I am blissfully unaware? Help!

I should also add that I'm really enjoying Eureka, which I cheerfully admit is not quality television, but which offers sufficient in quirk, zan, mad science and slightly off-the-wall moments and characters to keep me happy. It also, after a discussion with maxbarners revealed that he and smoczek hated it, vouchsafed me the sizzling insight that tastes in bad/cheesy television or movie are infinitely more personal and individual than those in the good versions. It's wierdly akin to Tolstoy's statement that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." High-quality cultural product has far more norms in common than low-quality: whether or not you buy into a cheesy series is about the particular and personal buttons that it presses, rather than any objective sense of its worth as an artefact. Which is fine by me. I'm defiantly enjoying Eureka, in pretty much the same way that I enjoy puppies and kittens and chocolate éclairs.

And, while we're mentioning the Russians, however tangentially, last night I dreamed that I was a small boy escaping an oppressive Russian regime with the assistance of friendly townsfolk, who put me on a train with my giant trunk. This turned out to have been filled, behind my back, with young men being smuggled out of the country, which I assisted by carefully covering them with my coat and wiring the trunk shut. Dream-history does not relate whether they escaped or not, but I don't think I was stopped or searched. Also, I'm tending to blame China Miéville.

As a by-product of the ongoing attempt by tngr_spacecadet and cohorts to inculcate me into Lotro, I watched the Doctor Who Christmas special the other night. (It was in the Briefcase of Doom, the which contains the two portable hard drives [for a slightly Heath Robinson value of "portable"] which contain the Lotro install, that it may not cripple my bandwidth allowance. For which relief, much thanks. Also, nested parentheses.)

Anyway. The Doctor Who Christmas special was a happy discovery. I've been slightly disappointed in the Stephen Moffat incarnation this last season, it's been a bit whiffly and more than somewhat prone to the Russell Davies brand of giant galloping emotional excess in clumsy symbol form. Certainly nothing as good as "Blink" or "The Girl in the Fireplace". Clearly producing a series causes inherent disintegration of the plot-fibre.

But I loved "A Christmas Carol". It's vintage 11th Doctor - he really is quite endearingly off-the-wall, both in content and delivery, and manages to be madly quirky and individual while maintaining continuity with Tennant's version. (Thus, incidentally, making me realise that there really wasn't much continuity between Ecclestone's version of the Doctor and Tennant's). It also demonstrates the happy-making fact that Moffat fundamentally gets not only time travel, which we knew, but A Christmas Carol itself. I am a pervy Dickens-fondler at the best of times, and have also spent chunks of the last eight years or so teaching A Christmas Carol to second-year lit students on an annual basis, and I have considerable investment in the novel and more than the usual quotient of opinions.

Moffat nailed it. What the Dickens ghost trope is, first and foremost, is a time machine. The supernatural element in the novel is a plot device which allows him not only to access past and future with vivid immediacy, but to compress a lifetime's worth of experience, insight and emotional change into one night. It's not realistic for Scrooge to reform instantly unless something non-realistic is driving it, and the Tardis is a beautiful replacement for the Spirits, the more so because time-hopping is allowed literally to change history and memory, not just insight into them. The ice-stored people are a lovely embodiment of theme, both Dickens's and Moffat's: emotional stasis, cold-heartedness, refusal to change. And the fish, while a mite mundane for my taste, are beautifully weird and occasionally enchanting.

This episode made me giggle frequently and cry at least once, although that last void where prohibited by viewer not actually being a hopelessly over-emotional dingbat. I am inclined to be sanguine about the new season, which is providing cool and interesting trailer images, notably the Doctor playing up to a Stetson.



I will also be inclined to write about it frequently, for as long as LJ holds up, which isn't much, at the moment. The tendency of its servers to exist in a supine condition is beginning to get my goat. Please note that this blog is currently mirrored on WordPress, at http://docinatrix.wordpress.com/, although with a fraction of its actual personality as I haven't been able to migrate the comments. If the urge to blog hits me while LJ is whups, fellover, I shall probably pop up over there instead, ultimately permanently if they don't bloody sort this out. Pshaw.

Gah. One of those days when I've boiled the kettle four times and still haven't managed to make the cup of tea. This is the time of year when I most hate my job: I am juggling four major and complicated organisational challenges, at least part of all of which involves students phoning me up and being plaintive. The Nibbled To Death By Hordes Of Mice quotient is very high. Also, insomnia last night doesn't help, while I lie awake remembering important things I haven't done. Just to add to the joy, the campus internet has decided to nominate today as one of meditation, which means there's a fractional delay on every letter I type. It's very annoying.

On the upside, the amazing people at Loot have apparently arm-wrestled the Evil Anti-Season-4 Smallville Cult into submission, because my copy has apparently been shipped. Owing to Smallville's tendency to finish its seasons on cheesy cliffhangers with practically everyone possibly dead or incarcerated in insane asylums, I'm more than usually twitchy at the lack of instant gratification. Also, I really miss Joss's tendency to damned well finish a season arc. It suggests an actual confidence in the return of his audience which the Cheap Shot Cliffhanger simply doesn't. Sigh. I am, nonetheless, rather looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with oodles of kryptonite, bucketloads of teen angst, the ongoing train smash that is Luthor family dynamics, and Clark Kent's cheekbones.

Now I shall go back to assessing the curricula of student appeal cases, wrangling OLs, fielding plaintive admissions emails and herding curriculum advisors into training. Much of the actual hard grind of finishing up handouts and websites and things for these projects is, alas, going to be done this weekend. I think my Evil Landlord's fell influence on the weekend work front is rotting my moral fibre.

The very first crush I ever had was on Superman, the Christopher Reeve version; going by the date of the movies, even with the characteristic Zimbabwean delay in releasing them, I must have been about twelve years old. It was a very childish crush. Whether as Superman in skin-tight primary colours or as Clark Kent with his goofy, farmboy dweebishness, Superman's a good guy, and thus ultimately unthreatening to a twelve-year-old's devotion. It's an uncomplicated good: of all the superheroes Superman must be the most clear-cut, his angsts alien and distant and human only at one remove. He's all the more a good guy because his powers are almost limitless, and he's bloody near indestructible; not for him the hard-won grittiness of Batman, or Spiderman's joyous exploration of every possible combination of swooping and string. Superman is possibly my favourite superhero because he's just so reassuring to watch, the epitome of strength modified by chivalrous restraint.

Fortunately, Smallville mostly seems to get all of the above. I cannot say this is great television, or even great teen television; watching it over the last couple of weeks has been a guilty pleasure very much akin to an ill-advised and dodgily enjoyable relationship with an extremely hot young man about twenty years my junior, motivated mostly by his cheekbones, slightly bone-headed sweetness and naively earnest desire to please. This series wants to be Buffy, with all of Buffy's use of the supernatural to explore teen angsts. It wants to be Buffy so bad it hurts, but alas, it simply doesn't have the brain. It is, nonetheless, extremely watchable, its best episodes kicking in at somewhere around the middling-solid of Buffy, and some of its narrative and mythological choices being interesting and creative.

The whole problem with Superman is that he's invulnerable and pretty much invincible, which doesn't offer a whole lot of potential for narrative tension. This, of course, is what kryptonite was made for, and one has to be struck by the way that the series weaves Clark Kent's inherent limitations into the fabric of life in Smallville: kryptonite arrived, in large quantities, in the same meteor shower that delivered the young superhero, and liberally peppered the Smallville landscape. From there, things simply fall into place with an audible click that's almost too pat: of course kryptonite crystals will be present at the moment of narrative climax, rendering Clark's powers moot, or in worst case scenarios turning him momentarily evil. (I hate red kryptonite in this series: it destroys everything I really enjoy about Superman, which is his Lawful Good-ness. Also, Tom Welling brings the pretty in large quantities, but his acting skills, at least this far, are not quite up to Evil!Clark, who really needs to be played by Damon Salvatore to be in any way compelling).

Apart from the eternal quadrille with kryptonite, the show so far revolves around two main tensions, Clark/Lana and Clark/Lex. The Lana thing is making me realise how good Joss is at this, in that Buffy's relationships were never this eternal electron-orbiting-a-nucleus thing, doomed never to touch. Buffy's relationships were mostly disastrous, but by gum she had them. Here, Clark's gosh-darned secrecy is a sort of repulsion field, always pushing Lana away with misunderstandings or secrets or save-the-world priorities which exclude her at the moment when you think they might actually stop being bone-headed teenagers and get it together. It's so inevitable you stop hoping after a while. As an exploration of the price of a superhero identity it's frequently poignant and insightful, particularly in the ramifications of secrecy out through the Kent family and Clark's friends, but in terms of narrative satisfaction, not so much. Of course, I'm only halfway through the second season, so they might still surprise me, but the pattern of eternal-foreplay-no-climax is beginning to wear on me.

On the other hand I'm really, really enjoying the Clark/Lex relationship. Lex is interestingly conflicted, and his beyond dysfunctional relationship with his father is a twelve-step how-to on creating supervillains. His complexity is beautifully set off against Clark's stubborn and slightly one-dimensional nice farmboy thing, but you still believe in their friendship. Again, the necessity for secrecy about Clark's powers is cleverly used to complicate the relationship, with a horrible inevitability which allows you to appreciate its necessity at the same time that you can watch it effectively destroying Lex's struggles towards light rather than dark, people rather than power. For a Lawful Good guy, it's ironic how Clark's interactions with Lex are an ongoing betrayal headed inevitably and horribly for disaster. It's also fascinating to watch the incestuous intertwining of Luthor and Kent fates in an unstable web of deceit and compromise and manipulation. (Is it just me? I really don't like the actor who plays Jonathan Kent. I don't believe he's a good guy).

The problem with Superman is that everyone knows the story. I'm impressed, actually, by how the writers of the series have used this to layer the interactions between the characters; it has something of a Greek tragedy's attitude to fate. The series is possibly most fun, however, in its throwaway nods to the mythology, its larding of the episodes with passing, deadpan references to men of steel and tights and secret identities and being from another planet. It's playful and, again, poignant, and makes me wish I'd actually read some Superman comics at some point. (Memo to self: hit Loot).

So, overall I suspect there are a good few seasons of Smallville in my future. There are moments when I wander out of the room in the middle of an episode in sheer frustration or embarrassment or irritation, but its pleasures are many. Why, yes, Smallville, you may take one of my favourite superhero mythologies and expand it for my viewing pleasure for ten seasons, with a modicum of insight and an attractive and largely likeable cast. Happy Christmas to you, too.

Random Sunday is random! I still have no brain, and am unequal to the task of composing any of my planned blog posts on (a) the manifest seductions of verbiage, (b) Tron, or (c) ex-Zimbabwean rootlessness, although they're marinating quietly in my back-brain and I'll get round to them eventually. Instead, I shall round up various items of a Literary or Cinematic Nature which have recently affected me, just because.

• The nice thing about randomly lending people books is that they randomly lend you books. tngr_spacecadet brought my Sookie Stackhouse collection back this morning, and incidentally dumped off a couple of supernatural Victorian novels, including Gail Carriger's Soulless, which I unrepentantly devoured this afternoon in default of marking the pile of Frankenstein class tests I should have been marking. (I currently do not love my job, so the weekends, are mine, goddammit, and work can bloody well wait). Soulless features some rather acutely-observed Victorian social comedy, a pleasingly strong-minded and matter-of-fact heroine, interesting world-building, unexpected Queen Victorias to the social situation, and rather enjoyable interludes of sweaty groping with werewolves in carriages and corsets and what have you. It's well written rather than being brilliantly written, but is often very funny and was bloody good fun to read. Recommended. Shall acquire my own copy forthwith, and any sequels.
  
  
• Justice has been done! China Miéville's The City and the City won the Hugo for Best Novel, unusually a tie (with Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, which didn't grab me as hard but which will make pumeza happy).
  
  
• Finally finished Season 5 of Doctor Who. I really, really like this Doctor. He doesn't inspire me with the girly heart-throbbings that the Tenth did, but he's becoming very interesting very fast. I am, however, faintly disappointed in Steven Moffat, who appears to have sacrificed his Blink-style elegance in favour of the kind of overblown grandiosity of concept favoured by Russell Davies. "The Lodger" was a lovely episode full of lovely people who almost but not quite distracted one from the gaping plot holes. The two-part finale made me very happy for its cunning Pandorica occupant, its Rory-redemption (and dammit, now I want a spinoff series covering his adventures over the last 2000 years) and for some actually intelligent use of time-travel, but the gathering of the Doctor's enemies was a generally pointless and self-indulgent concept which didn't give enough narrative pay-off to justify it. And the wedding scene was cute, but predictable and a bit flabby. I'm ... slightly miffed, actually. It's still all much better, plot-wise, than the previous Davies-seasons, but I had very high expectations of Steven Moffat, and he's turned out more of a Davies-disciple than I'm strictly happy with in my role as a pervy plot-fondler.
  
  
• The latest Microfiction bits are up. This month's theme: "Spanner". Mine here. I think in this one a week of academicating (or, possibly, reading Miéville) has unduly predisposed me to a dense and convoluted writing style, but it felt necessary. Also, the word limit killed me this time round. Will post the longer version as well, sometime, just for comparison, because I actually think it's better.
  
  
• The STNG episode which finally attacks homosexuality head-on, if somewhat laterally (and, yes, both together) made me very happy. (The one with poor Riker's doomed love affair with the androgyne). The Star Trek universe is so generally liberal, the lack of awareness of anything other than heterosexuality was beginning to be a serious gap and was narking my Proudly South African sensibilities. (Although it's also subtly annoying me that, while there are clearly women in leadership roles all over the show, since the departure of Tasha they're all very traditional nurturing female roles - doctor and counsellor. This is possibly why I'm really enjoying Ensign Ro's kick-butt spikiness).

As of tomorrow I'm taking notes in a two-day workshop, so will be generally un-available on Teh Internets unless I use Winona and manage to pirate a wireless connection to Seekritly Browse while I should be minute-taking. Wish me luck...

Friends hosted a distributed-cooking Christmas In July last night, which means I'm lolling around the house still incredibly full of snacks and soup and turkey and Jo's amazing roast potatoes and baked potato gratin with the cream content of a small herd of Ayrshires (Jo and potatoes, it's the love story of the century). I didn't have room for the trifle, but since I made it (my signature Black Forest trifle, i.e. with black cherries and chocolate ganache on account of how I spit upon this custard/peaches nonsense) there's still half a one in the 'fridge. I'm eyeing it speculatively for lunch. Hmmm.

Last night was interesting because of the way a lot of the chit-chat was integrated with blog posts. In our sadly geeky crowd various people's blogs become almost another character at the table: they contribute to the conversation, sparking discussions and subsequently weaving in and out of them. We inevitably got onto Star Trek because I've been watching and blogging a fair amount of it, and I ended up both explaining the Wesley Crusher Problem to diced_caret, and joining in a general excoriation of the writing in STNG Season 1.

This resulted in the best slightly drunken metaphor I've ever generated for the problem: those poor actors occasionally quite obviously approach their dialogue with the sort of dubious poke you'd give to a giant plate of something ethnic and unidentifiable you've just been served at a diplomatic function, and which is looking at you because it's full of eyeballs. As a result, they end up mouthing the more horrible bits of dialogue rather gingerly, with politely-concealed distaste. It's a pity, because the show actually has a very good cast (apart from some obviously ham guest stars), and they deserve to be given something better to say. It's also the basis of the Wesley Crusher problem - it's nothing to do with the unfortunate actor, the character's just really badly written, poor lad. So now I have a new insomnia cure: where before I used to lie awake at 3am whiling away the hours by designing lesson plans for Hogwarts Divination classes (I don't believe in divination, but anyone with half a brain for symbol analysis could do a better job than Sibyl), now I lie awake re-writing the most recently-watched STNG script to make the character and plot motivations actually, you know, make sense. It's really not that difficult.

I'm also interested in how far my sense of "OMG this is badly written!" is about writers who haven't yet hit their stride, and how much of it is simply about dated values for dialogue and acting. Even in the good episodes the beats seem slow to me, and the interchanges frequently stilted: is the same true of most TV from that time? As someone who's come to TV anachonistically, late and on DVD rather than in any contemporary sense, I really don't have the wherewithal for comparison. I darkly suspect, though, that Joss Whedon may have spoiled me.

On a completely unrelated note, this morning I stumbled across the deliriously happy concept of the Desert Bus video game, which made me giggle like a twit for several minutes. I am apparently a huge fan of ideas taken to their logical conclusion and beyond until surreality sets in.

Still a Bear of Very Little Brain, despite - or possibly because of - a week doing effectively nothing, except playing Plants vs. Zombies, watching Doctor Who, reading Iron Man graphic novels, re-reading my Sookie Stackhouse collection (hawt vampire sex! yay!) and reclining on the sofa fulfilling my god-designated role as Warm Cushiony Thing to an array of cats. I still feel short on sleep and as though someone's punched me in the neck repeatedly, but I'm back at work today, and haven't actually bitten anyone yet, so possibly there are cautious grounds for hope that I'll wake up one of these mornings and not actually want to go straight back to sleep for eight hours.

One of the other things I did manage to read was Holly Black's White Cat, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I know her mostly for her YA faerie series, Tithe et al, which are solid and slightly gritty pieces of YA urban fantasy but which don't really expand the boundaries of an increasingly crowded genre. White Cat is different in that it felt genuinely fresh. The novel assumes that magic is real, but that it's been outlawed; the contemporary setting does an interesting echo of Prohibition in that, logically enough, if magic is illegal then curse workers will, in fact, be controlled by organised crime. Lots of lovely plots, double-bluffs, truly nasty people, and a slightly sketchy but rather fun play with the eponymous fairy tale. Recommended.

In other news, first_fallen just lent me all seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which I started watching last night. So far I have concluded the following:

• It's very slow-paced, which works well for my fledgling knitting skills. Eight rows of Ravenclaw Scarf last night, about to embark on the colour change. However, the Evil Landlord urgently needs to replace the bulb in the light above my sofa, I can't see properly to knit and there's a clear and present danger I'll end up knitting a clockwork train owing to the gloom.
  
• Good lord, Wil Wheaton is ickle. And Wesley Crusher is not nearly as annoying as urban legend would have him. Also, about two-thirds of his blog suddenly makes sense.
  
• I have absolutely no tolerance for the Portentous Crashing Musical Score, which is all about Flagging! Important! Moments! And! Lots! Which! Aren't! Important! But! Which! Are! Flagged! Anyway!, causing me to mutter a lot and grind my teeth. I may have to acquire a wax doll of the composer, and prod it at vindictive intervals with my rosewood 3.5s.
  
• Most of the cast is kinda cute.