Friday, December 14, 2012

As I was having lunch in the cafeteria today, I was struck by the urge to pray. Now I know why.

In Defense of Hate Disguise

"It is worth remarking as an extremely fine touch in the picture of Bottom that his literary taste is almost everywhere concerned with sound rather than sense. He begins the rehearsal with a boisterous readiness, “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete.” “Odours, odours,” says Quince, in remonstrance, and the word is accepted in accordance with the cold and heavy rules which require an element of meaning in a poetical passage. But “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete”, Bottom’s version, is an immeasurably finer and more resonant line. The “i” which he inserts is an inspiration of metricism."
- G.K. Chesterton, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (essay)

I was always going to give my habitual heroine a minimum of two fellow-passengers on the Gua Gua, and to make them coworkers came naturally after that. The two of them have a simple job, to sell stuff, but it's not simple stuff that they're selling--it's the concentrated essence of the seasons, but it looks a lot like ice cream and, when you get right down to it, that's all it probably is.

I made one of the two a poet as an excuse to throw all sorts of little songs and jingles into the text. The other fellow was a bit more difficult, and I didn't have a name for him until he'd been around three chapters or so, with me growing more fond of him every minute. Then, on a whim, I stuck him with the unusual monicker of "Hate Disguise"--a name, as a bemused Renee puts it, which is "part English-dubbed anime villain and part sneeze."

It's a misnomer, of course. Hate, while not bereft of bitterness, is a sort of gruff, warm, mopey fellow. Any anger his soul may possess is turned inward--as Shakespeare worded it in As You Like It, "I will chide no breather in the world but myself, against whom I know most faults." So why go with Hate Disguise? Well, the name occurred to me and it just sounded right, I can't say it any way else. The meaning was entirely wrong for the character, but what if you didn't know the language? Then "Hate Disguise" would sound like a big, warm, generous name, a name for a man who smokes cigars and then feels guilty over it, not on account of his own lungs but because he's afraid that his friends Renee Rant and Donovan Din might get a dose of secondhand smoke. That kind of guy. I read a play by Clifford Bax, The Poetasters of Ispahan, where one of the titular lyricists is looking for a decent rhyme: "What though the sense be thin?" he says. "Sound is the soul of song." (I might add that the word "poetaster", which means nothing more than "bad poet", sounds fantastic; I'd crown myself with that word over a forest full of laurel wreaths.)

So in the story Hate has some kind of a normal name before Donovan Din the poet inflicts the flagrant "Hate Disguise" on him. It's a little comment about poetic thinking and how sometimes poets make the sounds matter more than the meaning. Still, I can't help but wonder uneasily how readers will react to him, since these days the word "hate" carries such a strong connotation that it can't be regarded as simple nonsense. All the time, we hear about "hate speech," "hate crime"--things that are supposed to crush and kill the spirits of our fellow men. And people will have a hard time trusting Hate, and how much you wanna bet that my editors (if I'm ever lucky enough to have such things) force me to change his name? I wouldn't exactly blame them, but I'd have a hard time prying the name from the identity. He just is Hate, and it can't be helped; don't hate on Hate Disguise. He surprised me by turning up in a chapter with the name attached to him, and ever since then, it's just been like that.

To me, that's the thing that fascinates about Hate--the fact that he keeps turning out not like I planned him to. He was going to be a madman. Then he was going to be a smooth talker, absurdly comfortable in his skin. Then he turned out to be a daydreamy, foggy sort with an inferiority complex. But I tried to make his tongue cease to be sharp, in order to better suit this characterization, and it never did. Like many a foggy daydreamer, he's every bit as clever as his friend of the sharp focus. And you know what? I shouldn't jinx the boy by writing all of this out as if it's finality. Because I'm going to bet you that Hate's just gonna keep on evolving. I'll stay the course, and we'll see what happens.

The lesson I take from this is that I shouldn't let Renee be static, either. She's a first-person narrator, and it's easy to obsess about consistency when you're writing from a single point of view, but the truth is that people aren't consistent and there's always new sides of them, and sometimes the sides conflict. I could have one person in a room and try to inform you, over the phone, who was with me, by throwing out only descriptive terms--and you'd think that I had a crowd in there. People can't be described in three words. People are crowds and should be treated as such.

One Ringo to Rule them All

One of those stories where I had to check the date to know it wasn't the April Fool's Day edition. John Lennon wanted to do a Lord of the Rings movie with the Beatles. Seriously.

I now have incredibly mixed feelings. I mean, I completely understand J.R.R. Tolkien's thinking--not wanting his artistic vision compromised by a couple of kids whom he probably considered the One Direction of his era. I would have felt the same way.

But at the same time, I don't think I'm ever going to fully forgive him for killing my chance to see Ringo Starr as Sam Gamgee. That's better than the casting in the Jackson movie.

Oh, well, at least we'll always have this. (As someone who has the scene they're doing memorized back to front, I must inform you that, contrary to what the uploader claims, George Harrison is not, in fact, cursing out some random audience member. He's actually saying "Look you," which, in Shakespearean English, is exactly the same as beginning a sentence with an impatient "Look..."

Edit: I totally should have entitled this post "Get Back, Frodo."

". . .and I've been working like a dog."

I don't write diary entries enough, or things of the sort. I've been looking at this comp assignment of mine up, down and sideways for three days now, and I can't seem to see a way to make it work.

Also, I admit, I take extended breaks to do research on The Beatles.

But what are The Beatles, really? I love their music, but that's not what's making me do all this research, because I honestly can't tell you, for instance, whether Ringo's an excellent drummer or not. (All I'm aware of is that he's my favorite, and that he would continue to be my favorite even if it turned out he didn't know which end of the drumstick to hold.) It's the drama that intrigues me; all the individual characteristics of everyone bristling against each other. Not just the Fab Four, but their wives, their managers; each a conflicting character study. I guess I'm just fascinated by plain old people.

So why don't I write about my own family more? That's the thing that's killing me. Because I don't want to be a transcriber. I did that, when I was younger; tried to write down conversations as they came. All I got were hurt fingers. Either I want to write down everything, or I shut down and I don't write anything at all. I should be more of an open book. Starting…now.

Anyway, yesterday Clair and I made some tea and watched A Hard Day's Night. Great movie, and fascinating because back then people had a completely different concept of the "vehicle for hot young stars" film. It's a comedy, and it's a British comedy, which means the humor is all slap and bite and disjointed bits of oddness. From what I've read about John Lennon, that sort of thing suited him just fine; he's utterly believable as the guy who responds to an older man's rebuke by leaning in and saying snidely, "Give us a kiss." I assume that the screenwriter was capitalizing on the Beatle's popularity with the younger generation by pitting them against their elders, among which he himself numbered one.This dynamic gets an interesting reversal in the film's rather vestigial plot, which sees Paul looking after his "grandfather"--a "clean"-looking old fellow with a sneer that could break glass, who defies his appearance by repeatedly running off to try and meet women.

Oddly enough, Paul McCartney--he of the charming face and the left-handed bass--puts up a minimal presence even under these circumstances, and the other three Beatles steal his show. John, always the character, is just as much at home dunking toy boats in a bathtub as he is sassing his elders (in the same scene, even), while George, the quiet one, manages to nearly equal John's sarcasm with a few well-placed eyebrows and some laconic use of Liverpool slang (what does he think of a new line of shirts they've asked him to advertise? "Grotty!")

But it's Ringo Starr who stands out for his portrayal as the sad-sack of the group, by turns embittered and resigned, with an abrupt laugh that serves him equally well as he a) makes a lame joke that his bandmates politely ignore and b) gets asked a standard "girlfriend" question by an interviewer (with the implication apparently being, "Girlfriend? Me?") Despite receiving--in a touch taken right from the band's real-life experience in America--more fanmail than the others, he refuses to believe that any of the screaming girls who pursue his buddies might harbor an interest in him. When a young lady in a train car beckons, he first looks dumbfounded and then gestures at George, as if to say, "Nah, you must be looking for him." It's interesting to see that the standard "Ringo as the expendable Beatle" joke isn't some recent development, but actually a carry-over from the band's early days, quite possibly originated by Ringo himself. It should be noted that the real-life Ringo, like his counterpart in the film, has been alternately encouraging and fighting against this perception for years.

However, these observations must be put to a halt, as I'm unfortunately not supposed to be writing an essay about Ringo Starr. I'm supposed to be writing about education, and I can't see my way around it.

In Defense of Knockoffs

Shortly after I posted my assessment of the show Elementary, Clair gave it a look and spent the rest of the day seething with righteous anger. Unlike me, she wasn't looking hard for something to like, and, also unlike me, she's a diehard fan of Sherlock. And truly, I admit, Elementary is forgettable even as ordinary crime shows go and bears little relationship to its supposed source material. If I watch the next episode, I'll do so with a tepid eye.

But I just have this weird, writerly fascination with knockoffs.

As an author, I forbid myself to write a knockoff. If I reach for something remotely similar to something else, this little voice inside me goes, "Uh-uh-uh, don't touch that dial." But I love looking at other people's. I wade through the darkest marshes of the fanfiction world. When I like something I take a look at every incarnation available.

Knockoff items, too, I love. I used to own a Winnie the Pooh notepad bearing the legend (all in lowercase, no punctuation), "felicity is possess your friendship i cant forget your lovely smile and beautiful eyes". Fairly certain Disney didn't sanction that one, but it's way superior, with that strange word "felicity", to all those misattributed Pooh quotes you see floating around. 

Maybe it's the word "knockoff" that I like. It's too bad I don't let myself write knockoffs. If I'd been on the writing staff of Elementary, I feel that I would have made magic.

Alicia in Terra Mirabili

As if the Lewis Carroll classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland were not strange enough already, I just found the whole thing translated into Latin. Carroll, a college professor at a time when Latin was a staple of schoolboy knowledge, would certainly have approved.

Like Alice encountering Jabberwocky for the first time, I don't completely understand it, but I'm charmed by what I do understand. In particular, the translator's take on "The Mouse's Tale" (you know, the poem shaped like a mouse's tail--"Fury said to a mouse / That he met in the house...") can only be explained by a stroke of genius. Besides the fact that the English rhyme is transformed into a flawless Roman jingle, the mouse's canine nemesis is re-christened Nero.

Behold an Israelite in whom there is no guile

I'm an innocent. In my online wanderings I used to find these essays all the time, and I guess I assumed, if I assumed anything, that some proud college student put them up for all to read. Only now am I finding out that they're free essays used for cheating. And, having been read the riot act in my composition class, I now believe that those who cheat are infinitely more innocent than I am. After every teacher has made you aware of the plagiarism checker at Turnitin.com, it seems almost a lovable quality in someone to cheat. Such a person cheerfully believes that he's the most trenchant force in his world, refusing to acknowledge that there are those who would inquire into his methods. If the world were made up only of cheating students and suspicious teachers, it would be a refreshing place.

Unfortunately, there are also people like me in the world, possessing neither suspicion nor villainy, and so the world plods the path to destruction. We're not so bad, we innocents, but we're doing murder on the balance.

Non poteram sine miraculo

Latin has made a Watson of me. I sit there, baffled, scrabbling over a sentence until I think I'll lose my mind. Then I turn the page for the translation and say, "How absurdly simple!"

Sometimes the most frustrating things are the ones that are right between your fingers, if only you could manage them.

[Edit: The title is bad Latin. It should be, "Non potero id facere sine miraculo." I think.]

Studeo, Studere

I must be a glutton for punishment. I'd be fine, I really would--relaxed and caught up and everything--if I hadn't decided to be a Classics major. As it is, we're freewheeling through Wheelock's at an alarming speed, and it's hard to study when you can't concentrate. I never can.

But it's interesting how studeo doesn't actually mean study. It means desire. The second meaning came about later. And I really do want this.

I just wish I could focus.

Autem ("however" in Latin, but looks like Autumn in English)

Today I received a suspicion--not a confirmation, but a suspicion--that my character Donovan Din has curly hair. I'd always assumed it was straight, but as a writer you have to keep your antennae up for stuff like that.

So I doodled him with wavy hair, but then he looked not enough like Beethoven and too much like my sister Clair's character Blitzen Coves. And if you were to know Blitzen Coves and Donovan Din, you'd know that they'd work just fine together on a rap collaboration, but on a personal basis not at all.

It being Friday the 13th, we had to read some of Something Wicked This Way Comes, which we began last year and never finished. I wish I was Ray Bradbury. I come close to crying sometimes that I'm not him. And then I thought I'd invented Autumn People when I tried to put them as antagonists in my story, but it turned out that not only had he invented Autumn People, but written them so much scarier than I could ever hope to do that it made me despair. Ye gods, Ray, you dearly-departed writers really rip my skies. And when I think, when we began Something Wicked you were safely on the other side of the grave. Funny how life is.

And with all this happening I have to study for midterms. Cruel world, in it? But with second winds and pumpkin-spice lattes (which are everywhere, Clair says, this time of year) and the shrug of shoulders and the side of Latin that I like (more language and fewer smudges) and the fever of presidential debates in the air and the idea that I might be able to write a little something for NaNoWriMo after all--who knows, maybe turn out some halfway decent Autumn people?--I think I'll make it after all.

Style and Shtick

Sometimes I wonder if my writing's getting too stylistic.

Having a voice is essential, of course, but there's a narcissism in style: saying something, then adjusting it as if you're trying to pick up on your own signal: "Nahh, I wouldn't write that. I'd write it much more cleverly than that."

That was the problem with Pearls Before Swine, which used to be one of my favorite comic strips. Part of its appeal was this rough-and-ready feeling that it had; the drawings were simple, not bad, not inconsistent, but nicely stick-figurey and slapdash. When the zebra ran through the first panel you felt as if the artist had just tossed him off to give him a head start and was drawing the crocodiles real quick to complete the chase scene in the next panel. When the rat, in mid-conversation, pulled out a frying pan and started hitting people with it, it felt almost like an actual impulse instead of the gag he'd been leading up to all along.

Then something terrible happened. The artist developed a style. And now the characters look poised and pretty and stiff as boards. He even applies shading to them, as if they need to be rounded out like plush toys. And when the rat hits people with stuff I wonder if his heart is really in it. It feels as if he's following a script.

I could learn a lesson from that. I'm way too stuck on the internal rhymes and the run-on sentences. Rhymey words are great, but I don't want them to be my shtick, or one day the style might crumble away like so much sugary coating, and I'll find there was nothing underneath it after all.

Disco, discere, didici

Veterans who had been in the form for terms said afterwards that there had been nothing to touch it, in their experience of the orator, since the glorious day when Dunster, that prince of raggers . . . had introduced three lively grass-snakes into the room during a Latin lesson. 

- P.G. Wodehouse, Mike and Psmith 

I'm taking a composition class at college, which feels like a waste of time to me. If there's one thing I truly believe I can do decently, it's slap a paper together. But there's a word the teacher likes to repeat, and I apply it here: kairos, the supreme moment. 

About one week into college, when I was walking around on the grounds, eyeing a metal statue, I realized something, which was that I no longer wished I'd saved the Psmith series for when I was a new student. It wouldn't have been the moment for it. 

I have a weird way of relating books to whatever I do, and I wanted, at college, to find a friend like Psmith. I spent the whole summer in happy daydreams of gaining the sort of companion who would help me toss interlopers out the back windows of studies. Granted, that type died with the English school, but there's always hope.

But the main reason I wanted a Psmith was that Psmith exists to ease a person into Sedleigh, and I was certain that my school would be a Sedleigh--pleasantly, decently dull. (I guess it is, though more on the pleasantly side at the moment. And if wearing loafers around the school grounds doesn't drive that home, nothing does, really.)

Scratch that. I thought the school would start out a Sedleigh and morph, as the nights lengthened, into that bank in Psmith in the City, just an endless drudgery and coldness. It never did. I like it still. Maybe I forgot that Mike, the main character, adjusts quite quickly to such settings, and it's only Psmith who turns his discontent into a disco and dances in it. (No, not really. Disco is deader than Psmith, but you know.)

So college, if you enjoy it, is not necessarily the time to be reading Psmith. I read it exactly when I should have read it, because the time to be reading Psmith is the spring and summer before, when you're anticipating college with a Mike-like groan, not super into the idea and worried it will cut into your cricket-playing time. Or, in my case, my reader time.

I feel almost like I'm violating a certain readerly privacy, writing this post. I love my Kindle, admittedly, and when mine broke again this past week I cradled it like Clara with her injured nutcracker, but I hate all this stuff with the Amazon company tracking your bookmarks and plastering your screen with ads. Used to be you'd duck behind a book and flip the pages if you wanted to go unseen, and now look at me, writing posts about what I read. I was going to do a series of posts detailing my short-lived love affair with the college library. I might even do it now, and have this be the first. 

But even if it isn't the moment for Psmith, and even if I should be putting him aside and studying, I find myself thinking of him and his antics in the middle of my classes and having to stifle a smile. He's the lively grass snakes in my Latin lesson.

"Elementary" pilot play-by-play

(My friend Kate told me to watch CBS's Elementary pilot and tell me what I thought. The pilot in question came under quite a bit of controversy before it even aired due to being an American knockoff of BBC's Sherlock, though Elementary's creators claim that they took their own direction in modernizing the sleuth. I pulled up the pilot via video search and typed a series of notes as I watched. Here are my first impressions.)

It starts out in the exact same way as Sherlock - someone's getting murdered, then cut to Watson starting a normal day. I guess there's not really much of another way to start out such a series, but still, it sticks out at you.

The "sober companion" angle is fine on its own, so why make Watson a woman?  Once you've changed both aspects, it ceases to seem like Sherlock Holmes. Besides that, the whole situation feels forced; I don't pretend to know much about sober companions, but the notion of a rather petite woman suddenly having to move in with a large, muscular, half-dressed druggie who just broke out of rehab is difficult to buy.

Joan seems, so far, to have no personality of her own; the straight man at her very flattest and paperiest. She doesn't seem even remotely surprised to be in such an odd situation. Holmes is just a bit too reminiscent of Cumberbatch's Sherlock to ignore, although he's balanced it out with a shred of that guy from Psych (unfocused eyes; wild, cheerful speech). They go to too much trouble to make him eccentric; though he abhors sex, he's decided for some reason that it's good for his brain and has been hiring prostitutes. The first scene between him and Joan was cliché to the max. Also, he shortens "sober companion" to just "companion", with a significance which feels like a big, dirty, unwelcome wink at the Whovian crossover audience from BBC.

Once again, Watson's watch becomes a smartphone, and Holmes is using it to find out dark family secrets--this time, it's about her dad's affair. Rather liked the Elementary take on the situation, but it's nonetheless stolen from Sherlock, and then it all gets subverted in a way that's supposed to be funny but just falls flat.

The investigation consists mostly of Holmes goofing around the place like Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor in new surroundings. The "finding the body with a marble" thing was, admittedly, clever and fun. I even enjoyed Holmes' reaction ("Sometimes I hate it when I'm right."). But the problem was, it didn't feel at all like a Sherlock Holmes reaction. It's as if they treat him like a separate character 80 percent of the time, then awkwardly shoehorn him into the Holmes role now and then so we'll remember who he's supposed to be ("I don't think. I observe. I deduce." He was barely coherent two seconds ago. Why so intelligent and terse all of a sudden?)

I liked the line "Did he also wear bigger hands when he strangled his wife?", and the way it was delivered; that feels more like the Holmes I know. (Echoes of that famous sarcasm from The Sign of the Four: "On which the dead man very considerately got up and locked the door on the inside.")

I loved Holmes keeping bees on the roof; very cool visual, and nice nod to a bit of canon that hasn't come up in Sherlock yet. The comment about Joan having two alarm clocks was nice too; good line. And the fact that he's actually gone off drugs puts an interesting spin on things.

Holmes texting Joan is a little…well, I guess I can't really blame them, since such is modern communication, but that's, like, the famous thing from Sherlock. I'm glad they're having Joan look at the medical shots and be that trustful person victims can talk to, because it somewhat justifies her continued presence; it was beginning to seem a little weird and why-is-he-even-bringing-her. And I guess she's curious about the case, at least. It's slightly smoother than it was, but it's still not Holmes and Watson. It's as simple as this; you can't do Holmes and Watson with a man and a woman. You can do a very interesting, complex relationship, but it won't be a Holmes and Watson relationship.

Okay, I'm glad Joan is kind of showing some personality now. She even buys opera tickets--and he's not the one who likes opera. Some interesting twists here, and there's almost a fatherly quality to Holmes now. (Interestingly, this Holmes doesn't seem to have trouble understanding feelings--he tried to spare Joan's. Earlier in the episode, a woman called Holmes "a jerk", and now it seems she's genuinely right. Cumberbach's Holmes comes off as a jerk because he's socially backwards; this Holmes is just eccentric, but he understands people. Therefore, when we see him acting like a jerk, it actually is because he's a jerk. Hah.) I like Holmes' handling of the case so far (noticing the mole in the photos, and suddenly this case seems more complicated then we thought), but it feels stupid when he says he got all the photos "via" Facebook.

I like that Holmes is actually calling Watson "Watson". It just feels right, and it put a smile on my face. (That was one thing that always bugged me about Sherlock--the first-name basis, with Watson being "John". I understood them trying to incorporate the modern element, but "Watson" is a name with some heft to it, a name that one can snap out or whisper huskily in the same breath as "The game is afoot!", and I felt that, by removing the constant use of the name, they'd taken out a more potent element than they were aware of.) The fact that he's trying to embarrass her at the opera house so she'll listen to him, however, killed my Holmesy-good-feeling buzz and reminded me that this guy ain't Holmes. Holmes would show some reverence for the opera.

Section with Holmes discovering the killer was really well-acted and intense. Once again we see him filled with human concern for the victim and anger at wrongdoing; none of that "you're scum but so am I, really" thing Cumberbach's Sherlock has when interacting with killers. Tough and gritty, this Holmes, but certainly not emotionless or sociopathic. We actually see his face set like a Sidney Paget illustration at one point, which was unintentional, but awesome.

The whole "redeeming conversation through prison glass" setup was cheesy, but well-acted. "I'm very pleased, Watson" made me feel happier than that hive of bees on the New York rooftops--great delivery. And Watson makes the point I made before: that Holmes' shtick feels forced. He's not a misanthrope, she posits, just afraid to make connections. Kind of taking the opposite tack of Cumberbach's Holmes, who simply doesn't understand or need connections.

Y'know, it occurs to me that this whole show would be vastly better if Jonny Lee Miller's character were being played as a somewhat delusional wannabe Holmes--a guy who's read the Conan Doyle stories (and probably seen Sherlock as well), who genuinely has a gift for deduction, who longs for Holmes' emotionlessness but doesn't actually have it. A broken man, hiding under a Holmes disguise that doesn't really fit him.

Bottom line: Lucy Liu's stoic female Watson turned out to be genuinely lovable. Holmes is enjoyable, too, if you regard him as what he is--a guy who isn't really Sherlock Holmes, if they'd just stop pretending.

Just so I know

I'm drinking decaf tea that I think might have some cinnamon in it, out of a multipurpose mug with a too-wide mouth.

I'm supposed to be studying Latin instead of surfing the Internet, so I pin this blog post here to hold myself accountable.

Non-Comet Allie

I don't know why it is, but when I'm someplace where I really shouldn't be writing--in the back of my Art History class, for instance, with the lights out and the projector running--I have almost no choice. Those phantom ideas I keep hoping to catch in my free time cross the boarder of my brain on exaggerated cartoon-like tiptoe, shoes in hand. And there I am, off my guard, and not knowing how to handle them.

(Internal monologue starts with something about a meteor--it sounds like meatier. What's meatier than a meteor? A comet, maybe. But it can't be a comet, because they had one of those in Avatar: The Last Airbender. No comets. I could have a meteor about to come crashing to earth, and Din would call it "the wrecking ball of the gods"--how like him--and some enemy or other has "the wrecking ball of the something gods at their beck and call", for the sake of the rhyme. I just need an adjective there, to make the metre work…)

Now once I get out of class, and I have some hours of free time in the library, with my cup of tea and everything handsome about me, I simply don't write. I flit from shelf to shelf, reading titles and beginnings, but not committing to anything, and I idly check to see if I've been emailed. Sometimes I don't even touch the laptop, as if some instinct kept me from it--maybe some instinct that, thousands of years ago, prevented men from messing with cave paintings all day long and turned them toward the crops.

Wow, too much college lecturing on social evolution for me. Also too much Steinbeck. I have a musty copy of The Wayward Bus beside me, and I'm reading it--noncommittally.

teabag's torn to form a bookmark in case

I want to come back to it next week

Grab Your Hat and Fetch a Camera

What website would any of you recommend for starting a photo blog on? Because I need to start a photo blog, and badly. I suppose it would make more sense to just upload stuff to Facebook like everybody else, but Facebook is greedy and I think it does Facebook good to be denied a morsel or two of my existence now and then.

See, when I got my new iPhone 4s with its perfect little camera perfectly smushed inside it, I really had this idea that I'd be a smart, judicious photo-taker. The perfect round of images from all the events I went to, and no more.

And now look at me. There are things I go to and don't take a photo at all, and then there are times when I let my camera get its hungry little mouth around every view I see. Today, for instance, with the sky too bright an Autumnal blue to be really feeling well, and the sun and the shadows making such a sweet contrast--I started taking photos off the top of the swingset, feeling vaguely that it reminded me of some Robert Louis Stephenson poem. And I had to get every angle of this little idyll, even with a guilty part of me knowing how much it filled up memory space.

And I can't delete photos, not even the bad ones. Because so what if it's blurry, it's a moment in time, a second in time, and if I touch that little trash can it'll be gone forever. It's a big responsibility I have. (This is also why I don't usually take video. Because I have a pathological fear of forgetting, and if once I let myself get too obsessive with the video camera, I'd never stop filming long enough to watch.)

This is the same side of me that ran around with mittens on when I was little, trying to catch all the snowflakes, because I'd heard no two were alike and I needed to save all of them that I could before they fell into that snow bank and got lost to the ages. I wonder if all writers feel on a pretty day that they're being dictated to, and that they're so busy listening that they're forgetting to write down every single word.

Two songs compete in my head right now. Panic! at the Disco, reminding me what I owe:

Go on, grab your hat and fetch a camera,

Go on, film the world before it happens.

And on the other hand, Matt and Kim insist:

No time for cameras, we'll use our eyes instead.

Sing, o muses.

Well, anyway, my camera's crammed and I need to start a photo blog.

I'm gonna sing a song to you and I refuse to make it fake

College continues. I find myself on a perplexing new schedule where I want to sleep suddenly at three or four in the afternoon, and then I have to resist the urge to drink my tea at seven. I come early for my lectures and sit in the dark theater, tapping my fingers on a paperback copy of The Odyssey, my mind wandering from the subject of the morning's sermon at daily Mass to whether or not those sounds I heard could possibly be rats. I develop a weird affection for the speakers in the cafeteria, which are always playing some dippy song along the lines of Whoa, I swear to you, I'll be there for you, this is not a drive by-y-y-y-y. I seem to tremble beautifully on the brink of figuring out this Latin thing.

Clair, seeing that I'm busy, has enlisted Mary as her new cartoons-in-the-evenings buddy. As I work on my latest summary essay and hear them in the other room, laughing their heads off over The Regular Show, I wonder if there's room here for some pithy aside about Lost Innocence. (Hey, we're studying Genesis. Maybe I could work it in.)

Doesn't really matter, though, that I'm not an active cartoon-watcher anymore, since at literally any given moment, the question is not so much whether I have a song from Adventure Time stuck in my head as which one it is. I walk from this building to that hall and people don't know that I'm walking to the strings of an invisible ukulele, mentally singing a song that makes zero sense outside the context of the scene in question:

So Finn and Jake set out to find a new home,

It's gonna be tough for a kid and a dog on their own,

There's a little house, ah, Finn's sticking his foot in,

Well that's a bad idea, dude, 'cause now that bird thinks you're a jerk, Finn.

And now they're chillin' on the side of a hill and thinkin' livin' in a cloud'd be totally thrillin',

Unless they find something inside,

Like a mean cloud man and his beautiful cloud bride.

A beehive, oh no! Don't stick your foot in there, guy,

Y'all tried that before, and you know it didn't turn out right.

Perhaps I'll never really grow all that old.

(Aside: I'm way more opinionated about Adventure Time than I should be. In case you're familiar with the show, my issues specifically have to do with my loathing for toilet humor, combined with the fact that they totally jumped the shark introducing that "Flame Princess" character to be Finn's new love interest. If anyone wants to debate me, I'll take them.)

Agatha Christie Week (with a side order of Sayers)

“She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read.”

- Agatha Christie, Elephants Can Remember

I don't go in much for these holidays no one's heard of, unless they celebrate something of which I'm personally fond, in which case I break out the garlands. Apparently it's Agatha Christie Week. You've probably got a paperback of hers lying around somewhere, and it's the perfect rainy Sunday on which to read it. Make some tea and find yourself a cozy chair someplace.

Oh, and surely the woman they call the Queen of Mystery wouldn't mind if I gave a little attention to some lesser-known lady detective writers while I'm at it. The other day, two used books I'd been awaiting came in the mail--Lord Peter, with all of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey short stories, and The Likeness, second in Tana French's contemporary Dublin Murder Squad series. Plus, I'm literally about ten pages away from finishing Sayers' Strong Poison, and it'd be a shame to put it down now, especially considering how long I had to wait for my copy.

Funny story about Strong Poison, by the way. I continued to await the order, wailing and gnashing my teeth, until I was convinced that it must have arrived when I was out of the house, and that someone must have lost the package. Because I knew that meant I'd stumble upon it sooner or later, I spent a long, weary month refusing to order another copy. Finally I caved in, and the day they shipped it I found the original order, still in its package, in a pile of books beside my bed. It had indeed arrived, and someone had delivered it up to my room without letting me know. I'm no Lord Peter.

So, seeing as I've got two copies of Strong Poison on my hands, I feel I might as well pass one on to somebody. I can't think of a better book to celebrate Agatha Christie Week. It concerns a detective novelist as a murder suspect, and shows how much trouble Christie could have gotten herself into if anyone close to her had died suddenly of the same poison she'd researched for use in her latest.

If you'd like my extra copy, let me know! I'll get it to you ASAP so you can enjoy it before the week is out.

A Motivational Spider

Spiders seem to be appearing in my life a lot lately. Not those meek little measly-spindly house-dwelling ones, the kind you see Garfield smacking with a rolled-up newspaper in the Sunday funnies. I mean those giant garden-variety spiders that spin big, gorgeous orb webs wherever they find a place to hang their hat. They've been in my yard, they've been in Delaware--the other day I caught a collection of students staring one down on my campus, coffee cups forgotten in their hands, completely awed. Maybe there's been an insect surge on the East Coast, and these guys have decided to drape their webs out and try their luck. (Or maybe they got wind of the reboot of the Spider-Man franchise.)

Wandering into the living room today to do nothing in particular, I happened to glance at a window, and I saw this orb web coming out at me like an air-bag. It nearly touched the glass, then slacked back as the wind died down. In the dead center, curled up tight as a nut, was a spider, and not a small one.

This fellow decided to spin his web right outside a window--a window, I need not add, that any one of us could crank open at any moment. It's not an up-and-down window, it's a window that opens out. That takes guts, I guess. He risked demolition for a pretty view. Either that, or he just doesn't know.

At any rate, that window's the least of his problems. It's the first truly blustery day of the season, and he happens to have placed himself right at the crux of the storm. Every time the merest breeze goes barreling by, that web of his bops around like one of those cheap old screensaver graphics, and every time it happens you're positive it's going to detatch. But when it calms, there he is in the center, utterly motionless, pretending that nothing happened. I think he's got a spidery stoic-philosopher thing going on.

Other spiders sprawl around in their kingly webs like Emma Lazarus's take on the Colossus, with conquering limbs astride from strand to strand. Not this guy. He can't afford to sprawl. He remains huddled against the cold, cringing in the way spiders do, looking like one of the test subjects for Mad-Eye Moody's Cruciatus Curse. It's all the odder because he's one of those spiders with a vacant smiley face etched on their inner abdomen, so all the while his top half buries his head in his hands, his bottom half looks on the verge of throwing me a merry wink.

One time a pine needle landed among the strands somewhere near the edge. The spider felt it and eagerly trapezed his way over, convinced that it was his dinner. When he got to it, he fished it out, examined it tremulously with his front legs, and finally threw it away with the same air of disgust a writer has as he flings his fourth crumpled paper across the room. Then he went back to the center of the web, to wait.

I wanted a photo of that beautiful web of his, so I went looking for my phone. (By the way, none of the photos I did get were any good. Glare too bright.) When I came back the wind had punched a hole in it and turned it from an orb into a work of modern-industrial art. And there sat Spider among the wreckage, looking subtly, stoically sarcastic, as if to say, why me?

But after a moment of this, he stretched his legs and went climbing out to the pieces where the thread had frayed, connecting a bit here, eating a bit there, until it looked--well, it didn't look the way it had before, but at least it looked like something that was serving its purpose. And he crawled back to the place that used to be the center to wait.

I like this guy. There's something valiant about him. He's brave in the old-fashioned sense of putting forth a good face. I dread the day that someone opens that window and sends his web floating into the atmosphere.

Though, knowing him, he'll probably just tack it to the nearest tree and keep on waiting.

It ain't all satin / And silk, this Latin

It's hard to know what to even write about anymore, because a lot is going on. I'm a college student now. Navigating a campus, lugging my books from building to building, taking a million notes, the works.

I'm also a commuter, and thank goodness for that. I'm simply not a dorm-dweller by nature. I need to recharge. I've decided that a shift in scenery is the secret to stimulation. (Also, I have this new college laptop, and if, after my studying, I couldn't use it to watch cartoons with Clair, I'd cry.)

But yes. Latin is a tricky business. I'm only just starting it, and I've been made aware that what I've signed up for is essentially a slow broiling in conjugations. I must prepare myself either to become gradually stronger or to experience a premature decline. (Decline! "A, ae, ae, am, a, ae, arum, is, as, is!")

In one of my crazier moments I developed a theory about British accents. In every English book you read, the characters are just about drowning in caffeine. They think it's perfectly reasonable and normal to have tea in bed, then go downstairs and have breakfast with a pitcher of coffee. Imagine drinking one type of caffeine to work your way up to drinking another type. (That's not even mentioning all the stress-induced whiskey-mixing that goes on in Jeeves and Wooster. No wonder this is the civilization that came up with Alice in Wonderland; their solution for everything is to find the right thing to drink.)

Thus I conclude that a British accent is like an app on a phone. Its constant use drains battery life faster, and the only cure is near-constant caffeine.

Taking this as a hypothesis and following it to its logical conclusion, no wonder these books always depict the Romans looking all bulky and muscular. Merely speaking their own language was the world's most efficient workout.

And, just as the bird too weak to crack the egg would surely perish outside the shell, those who can't lift their copy of Wheelock's Latin have no hope whatsoever of surviving the course it suggests.

[By the way, I'd just like my readers to appreciate the fact that I wrote this entire post without once using that cliché old joke about "it killed the Ancient Romans and now it's killing me." I bet it occurred to you, though.]

Tranio, since for the great desire I had

Off to college officially! I mean, today I start classes. Last week was Welcome Week, and did it ever live up to its name. It was just a series of welcomes, one after the other. I understand that today, in addition to kicking off the program, they're going to welcome us yet again. I don't know if I can take all this merriment.

I've had Shakespeare on the brain of late (of always), and the opening of The Taming of the Shrew, featuring Lucentio and his servant Tranio, has been running through my head. Lucentio obviously isn't a commuter (he has to go to Padua University on a boat!), but like me he's heading off to college full of idealism and zeal--maybe a little too much of it. Fortunately the trusty Tranio is around to bring him back down to earth.

Enter LUCENTIO and his man TRANIO

LUCENTIO

Tranio, since for the great desire I had
To see fair Padua, nursery of arts,
I am arrived for fruitful Lombardy,
The pleasant garden of great Italy;
And by my father's love and leave am arm'd
With his good will and thy good company,
My trusty servant, well approved in all,
Here let us breathe and haply institute
A course of learning and ingenious studies.
Pisa renown'd for grave citizens
Gave me my being and my father first,
A merchant of great traffic through the world,
Vincetino, come of the Bentivolii.
Vincetino's son brought up in Florence
It shall become to serve all hopes conceived,
To deck his fortune with his virtuous deeds:
And therefore, Tranio, for the time I study,
Virtue and that part of philosophy
Will I apply that treats of happiness
By virtue specially to be achieved.
Tell me thy mind; for I have Pisa left
And am to Padua come, as he that leaves
A shallow plash to plunge him in the deep
And with satiety seeks to quench his thirst.

TRANIO

Mi perdonato, gentle master mine,
I am in all affected as yourself;
Glad that you thus continue your resolve
To suck the sweets of sweet philosophy.
Only, good master, while we do admire
This virtue and this moral discipline,
Let's be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray;
Or so devote to Aristotle's cheques
As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured:
Balk logic with acquaintance that you have
And practise rhetoric in your common talk;
Music and poesy use to quicken you;
The mathematics and the metaphysics,
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you;
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en:
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.

"Blackberry Winter" giveaway

An author friend of Nicole Baart's is hosting a giveaway of her novel, together with a blackberry-themed gift basket that includes such things as blackberry jam and a really delicious-looking blackberry tea. (Wow, now the word "blackberry" is beginning to sound foreign.)

I admit, my motivation for sharing this isn't entirely unselfish--a blog share counts as an extra entry! That delicious--ahem, elegant-looking novel will be mine.

"Tom!" No answer.

I like to read old-timey kid-and-teen books--or, as they were simply and sweetly known back in the day, "boys' books". They were, essentially, YA before YA was invented. The British ones were about how great boarding school is, and the American ones were about how great skipping class is. Which just goes to show you.

I've noticed that a lot of protagonists are named Tom. Between Tom Sawyer, Tom Brown, Tom Playfair, Tom Swift and Tom Denniston, it's all a little confusing.

Roller Rink

Today and Tomorrow: Therese Heckenkamp's "Past Suspicion", Melissa Wiley's "The Prairie Thief"

Happy Monday, readers! (And happy Feast of St. Monica.) If you're looking for a few good books to take you through your week, look no further. I have two to recommend right now.

Both today and tomorrow, Therese Heckenkamp's Past Suspicion is available as a free Kindle download. I reviewed it here a week or two ago, so give it a look and go get it while it's up for grabs.

And tomorrow is the launch date of Melissa Wiley's The Prairie Thief. You may know Melissa as the author of two series of novels about Laura Ingalls Wilder's grandmother and great-grandmother. The Martha Years and The Charlotte Years were the stuff of my childhood, and I even clearly remember liking Martha better than Laura, though in Charlotte's case it was more of a tie. What I loved about Martha was that she lived in the Highlands and got to listen in on all the legends about brownies and sprites and Tam O' Shanter--and there were times when Martha's active determination to meet the wee folk blurred the edges and you wondered if the series was about to go from Historical Fiction to Historical Fantasy. You knew, of course, that it could never be, this being a straightforward and factually-accurate series published by HarperCollins, but you still couldn't help but hope--was our heroine ever going to befriend a brownie?

Well, in The Prairie Thief, that's exactly what (finally!) happens. I feel as if I'm witnessing something that's been in the cards for a long, long time. Get this book as soon as it's out, because it's probably going to be unlike anything you've ever read before, and you'll want to be in on it first. I'm personally going to be the first in my family to snatch that preorder off the doorstep.

Congealment

Stories are sort of like sourdough. You aren't making each one from scratch; you're cultivating a bit of the old one, even if you don't know it, and it makes the new story better.

I hope I'm doing that successfully. I'm writing the current novel in scrappy little bits, all of which I need to connect. All these different files, it's like trying to create life by growing all the organs in different boxes. And since it's first-person I've got tricky things to worry about like keeping the voice consistent.

Whenever one of us is in a play and we come home from rehearsal, my dad says--always, no matter what--"Is the show gelling yet?" Really. And he never uses the word "gelling" in any other context, ever.

So I'll say this about this story of mine--I hope it gels.

Unconnected (but happy) thoughts

Fantastic night out roller-skating with the friends. Well, we were only out for about an hour, but it's worth it with these people. I love those square 60s skates that won't let you make sharp turns. I'm probably going to set a scene in my novel at a roller rink now.

Clair and I have been bonding over Adventure Time. You probably know the cartoon. It's a stream-of-consciousness surrealist show that's set in a sort of colorful, candy-coated Valhalla. I'm a little iffy about it--don't love it without reservations, the way I love, say, Phineas and Ferb. But even though it's mostly noted for its animation, it's the talking that's good; it utilizes this slangy dialogue ("Slamacow! That fool looks rumped!") that makes me smile hard.

Someone I didn't know IRL commented on this blog.

I won an essay contest. Maybe I'll go on a bit about that later, but suffice it that I am excited.

I'm rereading In the Woods. Obsessed = me. (Also, is it way too late in summer to start Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine? I had thought I'd start on the first day of summer and have it be all poetic and In Memory of Ray. He probably won't care.)

The younger sibs think I'm the coolest thing ever because I showed them what Bugs Bunny on YouTube was and then let them use my phone to watch it.

I waste so much time on the internet and I don't even work on my story. I should go back to diary-writing.

Review: "The Amateur Cracksman" hits a little too close to Holmes

After hearing a chap by the name of "Raffles" mentioned offhandedly in every other P.G. Wodehouse book, I had to hunt him up to see what made him such a vital part of the era's popular literature. Wodehouse's generation grew up on Sherlock Holmes stories in in much the way kids from the 90s onward grew up on Harry Potter--no doubt the reason so many of his writerly peers turned to crime (fiction). But the Sherlock Holmes generation read Raffles, too, which was close enough. I imagine it could be likened to Harry Potter fans getting into Percy Jackson as a substitute after they've read the former series to death.

The other reason I picked up Raffles was that I'd heard the concept was "Holmes and Watson as criminals". Who hasn't been tantalized by all those delicious little hints within the Holmes canon that the Great Detective would have made an excellent criminal? (And, by the way, who says he wasn't? He's got plenty of spare time between mysteries, and more than enough lockpicks lying around the place.) So I psyched myself for "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton: The Series". And I guess that's exactly what I got: no more, no less.

"Bunny" Manders, accomplice to Raffles and part-time publisher of his criminal escapades, isn't a Watson double in the way that, say, Agatha Christie's Hastings is; Bunny's on the wrong side of the law, after all. He's as loyal to Raffles as Watson is to Holmes, but whereas Watson's reliability stemmed from soldierly courage and manly feeling and all those other things that made England great, Bunny is reliable for the opposite reason--he's a wimp. Sniveling, needy and quite the nervous case altogether, he's pained that his best friend is robbing jewels left and right but just can't bring himself to put his foot down and stop assisting him. Besides, they could use the money. (The major characterization difference is solidified in the first story: Bunny finds himself in the same situation as Watson in A Study in Scarlet--bankrupt, friendless and badly in need of someone to share the rent--but instead of maintaining the stiff upper lip as Watson did, he shows up at Raffles' flat with a gun, threatening to blow out his brains.)

The divergence of character is overridden by the similarity of the writing style. Bunny may not have Watson's decency, but when it comes down to dialogue his rapport with Raffles is simply and solely Watson's with Holmes, down to the last "said I".

Similarly, Raffles is nothing like Holmes in theory. He's a star cricket player, full of a psychopathic charm dating back to his schoolboy days (Bunny was his starstruck sidekick even then--think Steerforth's manipulation of the young David Copperfield, complete with a cutesy nickname), and his cleverness doesn't amount to inhuman genius. But in practice, Raffles is still Holmes. He discusses crime from the opposite moral angle, but he scarcely phrases a thing differently. His wit is enjoyable, but that's because it's often Holmes' wit.

The episodes contained in this book are shorter than the Holmes adventures, more like newspaper columns than magazine serials. This is something of a necessity, since one key aspect of Holmes doesn't hold up to a criminal translation: the mystery-solving. There can be no mystery when you're following the thieves at their work. To fill the gap, Hornung usually provides a quick crisis at the eleventh hour--a few guards to be outwitted, for instance--but it can't replace a Holmes investigation.

There are cracks in Hornung's largely effective aping of Doyle's style, moments when one catches a glimpse of a different, but talented, writer before he retreats into his pastiche again. He's capable of turns of phrase that Doyle would never have attempted: a man on the black market is equipped with "the shiftiest old eyes that ever flew from rim to rim of a pair of spectacles", and a scarred opponent of Raffles has "a treble-seamed, hand-sewn head". I could read an entire book written exactly like this, but sadly, Hornung didn't quite trust himself to write one.

For all their wars are merry, And all their songs are sad

"For the great Gaels of Ireland

Are the men that God made mad,

For all their wars are merry,

And all their songs are sad."

- G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse

Wait a minute, Irish authors? I thought I was an English authors girl. Despite my Irish heritage, I'd never even thought twice about there being authors living in Ireland nowadays, and now I'm apparently gulping down their books at the rate of three a month.

I finished Tana French's In the Woods yesterday, and it was one of those books where I actually had to calm myself down and swear not to post about it until tomorrow, for fear of sounding like one of those chicks on Tumblr after seeing The Avengers ("dfslkjsdfjladfslhdsahjkldsf SO MANY FEELS"). I never would have read it if it hadn't been for this book club thing, the premise not being the type of thing I go for and the title being just about the least impressive thing about it. Now I want to gad around recommending it to people, but I probably can't because it's full of disturbing content. But it's Ray Bradbury meets BBC crime drama, and it couldn't have come at a better time in my life, when I was feeling down because my beloved August was starting to masquerade as Autumn and all I needed, though I didn't know it, was a cathartic summer-fall transition read.

I also had to promise myself I wouldn't plunge right into its sequel, The Likeness, until I had had some time to breathe.

Instead, Bernadette requested that I read her Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl, which all the kids in her theater group have read. So far, it's not really my thing. There's a manic energy to it that I think would make for a great graphic novel, but the author is so absorbed in his world that he can't stop telling instead of showing. There are also steampunky versions of the Fair Folk that are low on ambiance and high on possibility as Lego sets.

(It's got its moments, though, not least of which is the revelation that the protagonist's dad and his manservant's uncle perished years ago aboard a ship full of exploding cola. That's a backstory.)

Gotta get off now. She's bugging me to read her Chapter Four, so I daresay the author's doing something right.

my own habitual heroine Renee Rant

In my recent review of Therese Heckenkamp's Past Suspicion, I included a throwaway line about "my own habitual heroine Renee Rant". Out of the context of my own fiction writing, that makes no sense, but I couldn't resist the alliteration. So I thought I'd do a quick post about young R.R. that I could link to in that review, so that anyone who reads it doesn't think I'm insane.

So who is Renee Rant? I live by the theory that every writer eventually gets a permission slip from the world at large, letting them know that it's okay to start the thing they've been building up inside.

Renee Rant is my permission slip.

As a writer, you'll sometimes have a couple of ideas come to you separately and stay with you, untouched, so long that they blend together and become the same idea. In my case:

- I had a dream about a magic bookmobile that sold jewelry and junk from other worlds. I ran in the house to get my money and when I came back, it was pulling away. Poignant, right?

- I saw a truck in traffic painted like a caravan. I tried to get a picture of it with my mom's phone, but only captured one of the corners. The license plate said Gua Gua.

- In the middle of a stolen spoonful of peach cobbler ice cream, it occurred to me that ice cream was nothing but nature preserved in a really weird way.

And somehow, I began thinking of that bookmobile of mine as an oddly-painted ice cream truck. Somehow its owners turned out to be a poet and a professional madman (although the latter shifted somewhere in the writing process and became an ordinary guy). Now we were getting somewhere.

My poet and his go-to guy needed a passenger, though. They needed someone who, unlike me, wouldn't miss the photo op, wouldn't turn her back and let the Gua Gua pull away. So I took some notes and absently played around with the idea of a female main character, but I never actually wrote a word. It was more of a thing that had dawned on me, which I meant to work on one day, than a straighforward writing plan at that point.

One day, the choir I was in at the time were waiting in a church basement for some kind of performance, and I found myself scanning the walls. The CCD kids had done self-portraits in crayon, and one of them caught my eye. A girl had drawn it--grayish hair, brown eyes, if I recall correctly, lips very red. Renee Rant, read the name.

Renee Rant? What kind of a name was that?

It sounded like a name for a main character, a name that would make me roll my eyes if I read it in a book and say, "No one would name their kid that." Yet here it was. Somebody had named their kid that, which meant it was realistic, which meant I had to use it.

I wrote it down. I kept in in mind. I'm not sure when I realized that Renee Rant was the main character for my ice cream truck story, but she fit it like a scoop fits a cone.

Can I rave about the Rant? She's selfish, she's adventurous, she's part poet and part cynic. She's a protagonist, she's a pair of eyes, she's lazy and innocent and jaded all at once. She's a habit of mine and, hopefully, she might be even a heroine.

But mostly, she's a permission slip.

Maybe some day, if I haven't jinxed her and her story by talking about it, I'll send her your way.

Love vs. Laughter

"He was not in love with her. One does not fall in love with a girl whom one has met only three times. One is attracted, yes; but one does not fall in love.

A moment's reflection enabled him to diagnose his sensations correctly. This odd impulse to leap across the compartment and kiss Joan was not love. It was merely the natural desire of a good-hearted young man to be decently chummy with his species."

- P.G. Wodehouse, Something New

One of the revelations I had while reading P.G. Wodehouse is this, and it's a surprising thing: I love romantic comedy. I'm one of these people who will read any genre, kind of like those people who listen to whatever's on the radio. But romantic comedy had never really showed up on my radar before, and suddenly I'm realizing that it's one of my favorite things. (It's actually kind of like a romantic comedy. "I loved you this whole time and I never knew!")

Maybe I never figured it out until now because romantic comedy is so rarely done right. Either it's romantic, but it isn't funny, or it's funny, but it isn't romantic, or neither. I don't blame the innocent genre, bless it; I blame its parents, Romance and Comedy. They used to be the happiest of couples, and now they've strayed so far from themselves and from one another that their poor child doesn't know where to turn.

This review of New Moon introduced me to one of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes, a critique of the modern portrayal of romance: "the rapt, the intense, the swoony-devout; seldom a hint of gaiety". The Twilight films are famous for featuring characters who a) epitomize love and b) don't ever crack a smile, as if their love is a thing too serious to be happy about. They'd sooner giggle in a Puritan church service than they would in the presence of their Adored Object.

The romantic comedies of old, meantime, saw love as inherently funny. Guys would make fools of themselves going after girls; girls would misunderstand guys and thus, more subtly, make fools of themselves right back. The idea was that it might have been a sort of beautiful game for the parties involved (or not), but for any third party, such as a reader, it could be severely amusing. At any rate, there's a touch of the ridiculous to any good romance, and once you drain it out, it runs the risk of becoming a staring contest.

So now we know what happens when you deprive romance of comedy (Twilight happens), but what about robbing comedy of romance?

Comedy these days is supposed to be just like Shakespeare's Benedick--loveless, mocking and mean. I guess comedy writers forget that we laugh at gallows humor because we're afraid of the gallows; they've gotten to think they have to string people up just to get some giggles going. And, though you have to look a bit closely for it, there really is a difference between laughing over a bruised shin and actively seeking other shins to bruise, that you may laugh. My point is that, in a modern romantic comedy, when a man starts delivering a sweet declaration of love, we're naturally expecting him to become the stooge of the movie, if he even exists past half a frame of a montage about bad dates. That's not funny. What's funny is when the guy gets made a fool of and somehow, after much trial and error (all of which is entertaining), gets the girl anyway.

You know, this whole thing makes me want to pull the Much Ado About Nothing plot on Comedy and Romance. The real reason they act so distant and treat each other with such disgust is that, deep down, they're nothing without each other.

Happy Birthday, Percy Jackson

Percy Jackson's birthday--August 18th

National Bad Poetry Day--August 18th

If I were one of those baking geeks
(I mean...one of those geeks who could bake),
I'd celebrate Percy's special day
And make him a bright blue cake.

But since it's also Bad Poetry Day
And bad poetry's more my speed,
I write him a terrible poem instead,
Which I hope he'll be able to read.*

*He being dyslexic and everything. Then again, since this is a bad poem, maybe not being able to read it will be the present.

I'm back

Houses are so fickle. You leave them for only a few days, and they give you up for dead and start smelling like paint and sawdust again, as if to give the impression that they've been unlived in for decades. It's like they suddenly get desperate and want someone, anyone, to come and fill the gap, so they put themselves back on the market. They can't help it, I guess. It's instinctive.

Now at the crack of dawn we got home from Delaware and since I couldn't really sleep when I was in the car, I fell gladly into the arms of my poor, deserted, still-unmade bed and started making up for lost time.

Couldn't be happier to be back. The house hasn't started smelling right again yet, but give it a day or two.

A few links and a word about ripped jeans

Sat up a bit last night finishing Bulldog Drummond. And now for my catchphrase (say it with me): I might write a review at some point. In the meantime, have someone else's. I especially like the observation about thrillers as daydreams.

When a friend of G.K. Chesterton asked him to edit a book called "Platitudes in the Making", the Apostle of Common Sense sat down with a green pencil and proceeded to utterly lay waste to it in the cheeriest way you can imagine. Oh, and draw pictures. I love that man!

I feel like I should include another link and make it an even three, but I can't come up with one, so allow me to ramble a bit. I am not now very well-dressed, being clad in a Perry the Platypus t-shirt and a pair of jeans with an unintentional hole in the knee. It took two cups of tea (made in a microwave and a saucepan respectively, because we don't have a kettle here) to resurrect me to my current state of consciousness. Bulldog Drummond, I blame you.

Cousins

My favorite thing about these vacations is getting to befriend the younger cousins all over again. We're staying in a house right now with my Dad's twin brother and his family (Aunt Nadine, Wynn, Simon, Ansel, Paul and Eddie), plus my Aunt Gretchen and her son Max. It's way too much fun already. Neil, Simon and Max were the three cousins who were baptized together, and at any given Gunther event they're guaranteed to be inseparable.

Clair, Bernadette, Mary and I have been sleeping in the basement. I woke up around nine this morning to a racket around the pool table. Aunt Nadine didn't understand how I had slept through it.

Ahh, I wish my diary was with me. You can't really write about day-to-day life and little conversations and things like that on a blog. Suffice it to say that breakfast this morning was a lot of fun.

Vacation Reading

If I had known this was the kind of vacation where you bring paper books, I would have brought paper books (to say nothing of my diary.) Clair knew. She, quite fortunately, had a couple John Greens and a collection of Robert Frost handy to line the shelves with. Even if you don't touch them, there's something sweet about knowing your books are around.

And I, never one to be taken unprepared, have my Kindle. This is the perfect place to polish off the last of Bulldog Drummond, and last night I scratched the surface of The Two Perfect Vacation Reads, which Fate clearly placed in my way for the purpose.

I'd been waiting for the day when Clair would request more Jeeves and Wooster and I'd had the feeling it would be on our August vacation (me having staved off them all summer), so when she looked at me sideways and said, "Do you have any more of those?" I had Right Ho, Jeeves ready for the purpose. We just read the first chapter, so hopefully it'll last us a bit, but I'm officially back in pre-series-finish mourning mode. (We still have a bunch of novels to go, but whaa, there'll never be enough books narrated by Bertie Wooster!) Since I'm told it's Shark Week, it's worth mentioning that apparently Bertie's cousin Angela nearly got eaten by a shark while they were all on a cruise together...and that's all we're going to hear about it. One of the many reasons I love this series, people. (I wish I had my copy of Thank You, Jeeves with me, too. It's partly about the potential perils of staying in a vacation home.)

That was directly after my friend Suzanne and I, who'd been excitedly texting each other about The Hunger Games, decided out of nowhere to start a cross-country book club. (Well, really it was her idea--I just texted her back in all-caps to display my enthusiasm.) For our first read she decided on Tana French's In the Woods, a mystery book no one's heard of, which she just happened to have on her shelf untouched. Thanks to the magic of Kindle, I was able to get myself a copy in seconds.

I've read less than one percent of it in solidarity with Suzanne, who can't start it until the weekend, but about the amount I have read, I can only say that it is nothing short of breathtaking. It's one of those books I wouldn't have discovered on my own in a million years, and it's got a Ray-Bradbury-meets-gritty-thriller thing going on that I never would have guessed at from the cover or the title. (Suzanne, by the way, only just read the first book in The Hunger Games, and she's craving Catching Fire. I feel her pain. I had to make a bookstore run while on vacation two summers ago just to buy it. She's making me want to read it yet again.)

I've also been checking out my cousins' book of Stan Lee Spider-Man comics, which is one of the most entertaining superhero things I've ever read.

And vacation's only just started.

Look, I can't explain why I'm so excited about reading books in a summer house. Call it one of those charming Allie things.

Moment

Books are everything. I don't know how I'd survive a long car ride if we didn't have books.

Right now Clair is reading John Green's An Abundance of Katherines (birthday present from our friend Timmy) and periodically doubling over and letting out a gasp of laughter, while I'm reading Bulldog Drummond on my Kindle. It's cozy.

Review: Past Suspicion by Therese Heckenkamp

"Almost instantly, I was pulled back into the story. The characters came alive in my mind, and I became the heroine. I felt her feelings, her desperation and terror, and for a little while, forgot my own problems."

- Robin Finley, the book's first-person narrator, explains why she reads suspense novels, while unfortunately inhabiting a suspense novel herself

"Christian Romantic Suspense". The words stopped me in my tracks as I gazed down the list of free Kindle books. There's always a fascination in a genre you've never heard of, especially when the author puts the genre in the title in parenthesis.

I'm not sure if this genre obsession ever existed in the pre-Internet era; as far as I can tell, there was science fiction, there was detective fiction, and then there was everything else. But once Google and Goodreads came into being, people started looking for a fix of whatever their last book was made of, and the next thing you knew we had Paranormal Romance and Dystopian Fiction and all those other things readers crave. And now, apparently, there was Christian Romantic Suspense. I tried to think of anything else that might fit that category and came up with Regina Doman's Fairy Tale Novels, which taught me, in my early teens, what suspense was in the first place.

Clicking over, I saw that Regina Doman herself had written the blurb on the front cover. That sealed the deal. If I was witnessing the dawn of a new genre, I wanted in on it.

I have every reason to envy author Therese Heckenkamp; it wasn't until I'd finished the book that I found out she wrote it the summer before she started college. (Darn it, that's what I wanted to do with this summer.) And what she tells is clearly a pre-college-summer kind of story. That's not to say it's juvenile, but there's a sweetness to it that reminds you of 80s photographs. A bookstore, a diary, the scent of lilacs and a long-abandoned house figure prominently into the plot. Oh, and boys. Two of them. They don't seem to like each other.

But look at me, I'm making this sound like Nancy Drew. The book wouldn't be any good if it didn't have that bit of edge, and heroine Robin Finley--who could be a sort of literary second-cousin of mine, so much she reminds me of my own habitual heroine Renee Rant--likes a bit of edge. She likes exactly the bit of edge that a girl raised, as she was, by an overprotective mother might appreciate--suspense novels. There's a touch of class to them and they won't put her in actual danger, but they'll keep her busy.

Because Robin's reading habits fascinate me, I here include the name of her author of choice: Victoria Holt. I'd never heard of Victoria Holt up until now (googled her name; she does exist), but how perfect a name is that? It reeks of musty attics and long forgotten perfume and just a touch of the ghostly. I now want to hunt up Victoria Holt and devour everything she ever wrote. It helps that all Robin's copies are used, somehow. (You'll never guess who used some of them.)

Unfortunately, it turns out that Robin's mother was overprotective for a reason--her own past was a sort of suspense novel in itself. She's dead now (last words: "Don't trust anyone"), and Robin is back in the town where her mother grew up--a town, in fact, that her mother never talked about. Now, of course, the Suspense Gods see Robin as a fair target for a sequel.

The result echoes Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca as much as it echoes the summer of a normal eighteen-year-old girl. Whereas Rebecca was full of descriptions of towering rhododendron bushes and flowers dropping their petals every which way, Past Suspicion stops to let its heroine eat ice cream by a quiet campfire after a rain--something I know I've definitely done at some point, or close. ("There was something mesmerizing about the erratic, snapping fire. Warmth saturated my veins and soaked through my bones…Sighing, I thought of how no other flavor of ice cream was quite as enjoyable as vanilla.") She gets to watch a Memorial Day parade; she rambles around in a graveyard, another thing we romantic teenagers do (though not all of us witness dramatic confrontations in them, as Robin does); she listens to an old song with lyrics so dead-on Frank-Sinatra sounding that I googled them (they don't exist, though I wish they did); a modern girl would have this stuff all over her Instagram. Like any teenager who might be reading, she takes her breathers; then she goes and picks up the book again.

Why do we eighteen-year-old girls (or at any rate, Robin and myself) love our suspense novels? I think it's because we're too wrapped up in everything, so it's nice to get wrapped up in something else. We need to try on a few emotions that are almost our own, but aren't quite; at a time in our lives when everything is changing, we need to read something fast-paced just so we can learn to take it a bit slow. The story is somewhat predictable, but pleasantly so, and it's at its best when the heroine is taking time to breathe and sort things out.

The denouement seems a bit far-fetched after all these glimpses of reality, and once the story's over it seems to melt away like that ice cream so close to that campfire. Fortunately, thanks to its strong nostalgic feeling, it holds up well the second time around, and like any good novel in a teenage girl's life, it's always there to dip into again when you need it.

A Case of (Secret) Identity

I think I've figured out the fundamental difference between Marvel superheroes and DC superheroes. It's all about the secret identities.

DC characters are superheroes pretending to be ordinary people. You get the feeling, for instance, that Superman is really Superman and he's only pretending to be Clark Kent.

Marvel characters, on the other hand, are ordinary people pretending to be superheroes. Pete Parker really is Pete Parker; he just happens to go around pretending to be Spider-Man.

It all comes down to which life they'd chose if they had to just pick one. In my somewhat limited experience of Batman, whenever his secret identity gets threatened with exposure, he sets his jaw grimly (admittedly, that's his default expression) because he hates the idea of just being Bruce Wayne, stagnating in that fancy house and not getting to be Batman. Real life for him consists of outwitting madmen atop tall buildings and bombing around Gotham in the Batmobile. (Batman, by the way, is a direct offshoot of that character type from English literature who's brilliant and bored and needs to go on adventures to stay sane. No Sherlock Holmes, no Batman. And I don't think there'd even be a Holmes without Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg, so the DC superhero strain goes way back.) Bruce Wayne is nothing but a role for Batman, and while he'll play it if he needs to, it isn't his reality. (Besides, when was the last time Bruce Wayne went to anything? I think the whole Batman thing started as an excuse to get out of all those bazillions of charity events he doesn't go to.)

Meanwhile, if a Marvel writer wants to give Peter Parker some drama, he has him quit being Spider-Man for a bit so he can live his life, only to realize that he can't do that no matter how much he wants to. Superheroing isn't a hobby for him, it's a job--a responsibility, we're told time and time again. He'd just as soon live without it. (The recent reboot of the movie franchise has him discover his new powers and instantly use them...to do skateboard tricks. That pretty much sums it up; he loves using his abilities for fun, but when it comes to the messier side of fighting villains he'd rather not be doing it.)

This theory is reaffirmed by the way both companies handle those few characters who chose to go without secret identities. The secret identity-less DC characters are the ones who don't feel the need to live as civilians; as far as I can tell they just wear those costumes all the time (except those aren't costumes, those are their clothes).

Iron Man doesn't have a secret identity either, but that doesn't mean there's no Tony Stark; it just means that Tony Stark has allowed everyone to know that if they see a guy soaring through the air in a metal suit, that's him. (No fear of anyone trying to hurt his loved ones, seeing as his company manufactures bombs.)

Wow, I'm more of a geek than I ever realized. But if you need any more proof of this theory, let me just say this: Superman is dating Lois Lane. Pete Parker is dating Mary Jane.

Over and out.