back for a moment
Mar. 26th, 2015 01:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitHi all my buddies! I'm in Starbucks, sitting on a very uncomfortable chair and drinking an overpriced frappuccino. (I fully intended to order an iced tea, the cheapest drink. Instead, somehow a frappuccino happened.)
Remember the thing from last month when I was pulled over for having one headlight out, and then got cited because I didn't have proof of insurance on me? That's resolved now, pretty painlessly and without my expired driver's license ever getting noticed. Since I spent much of the last month in a state of such anxiety over it that I was sort of emotionally paralyzed and physically unwell, this is a very very good thing. Feeling better now.
Since I remain internetless I've been reading a lot. I followed up Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger with Night Watch and The Paying Guests. I liked them both a lot, but between TLS and TPG, I started to feel about Sarah Waters' work the way I feel about Thomas Hardy's--the sinking feeling as one crushingly terrible thing after another happens to all the characters I like. Night Watch isn't exactly the most cheerful book in the world either but when it's sad, it's sad on a more normal, less cosmic scale, if that makes sense. I'll probably read more of Waters but for the moment I need a break from her.
Neil Bartlett's 2014 The Disappearance Boy is the novel I've read most recently. It's set in 1953 and tells the story of Reggie, a backstage assistant to a mediocre stage magician, and his friendship with Pam, the onstage assistant whose disappearance in a "magic cabinet" is the centerpiece of the act. Bartlett is a gay writer, and Reggie is gay, and that plus the postwar setting are the main reasons I read it. It's not a bad book--I like the story at the center of it--but it's weighed down with a lot of pointless literariness which the story is ultimately too slight to support.
On a fairly random whim, I also picked up a few of W. J. Burley's Wycliffe mystery series from the library. (This would not be John Wycliffe the late-medieval English theologian and heretic, but Charles Wycliffe the police inspector.) The time span of Burley's writing career almost exactly parallels that of his fellow English mystery writers Ruth Rendell and Reginald Hill, but Burley doesn't reach their heights, either literarily or, for lack of a better word, politically. The most recent of the Wycliffe books I read was published in 1991, but from the level of sexism and homophobia it could have been written twenty years earlier. (Oddly, all three of the books I grabbed, fairly randomly, turned out to include male-male relationships as a plot point, and in all three cases this was presented pretty homophobically even though Burley seemed to be trying to be liberal/tolerant. By contrast, in 1987 Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe series revealed that a major character, Sergeant Wield, was gay, and Wield was never depicted with the mix of pity and contempt with which Burley writes gay and bisexual men.)
I've also been trying to read some of the history books I pick up like a magpie on the grounds that I might want to read them someday. I'm about halfway through Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe and finding it very interesting, though I'm sometimes wishing for more detail. So far there's been very little about policing and the role of the Gestapo, for example, which strikes me as an odd omission. Anyway, Mazower makes some very telling comparisons between Nazi rule within Europe (not the mass murder of Jews, which Mazower puts in a separate category, but forced labor, expropriation of resources, the expulsion of local inhabitants and resettlement of Germans onto vacated land, etc.) and colonialism as practiced outside Europe by the British and the French in particular. I'm sure this didn't originate with Mazower but it was new to me. Equally interesting was Mazower's exploration of how very little policy and centralization Nazi rule actually had: there was a huge amount of improvisation, and conditions in any given occupied territory could depend a lot on who was in charge (e.g. the SS or the Wehrmacht or a Gauleiter who was an old buddy of Hitler's and had never administered anything before in his life).
Not much else to report. I'm still watching Person of Interest despite a distinct feeling, a couple of episodes ago, that the show had jumped the shark. It was the "women MMA fighters combat scene" that did it, what with all the sweat and the crotch shots. I wish I could quit you, POI, but I still care about the characters and want to know what's going to happen to them.
So, how are all of you?
Remember the thing from last month when I was pulled over for having one headlight out, and then got cited because I didn't have proof of insurance on me? That's resolved now, pretty painlessly and without my expired driver's license ever getting noticed. Since I spent much of the last month in a state of such anxiety over it that I was sort of emotionally paralyzed and physically unwell, this is a very very good thing. Feeling better now.
Since I remain internetless I've been reading a lot. I followed up Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger with Night Watch and The Paying Guests. I liked them both a lot, but between TLS and TPG, I started to feel about Sarah Waters' work the way I feel about Thomas Hardy's--the sinking feeling as one crushingly terrible thing after another happens to all the characters I like. Night Watch isn't exactly the most cheerful book in the world either but when it's sad, it's sad on a more normal, less cosmic scale, if that makes sense. I'll probably read more of Waters but for the moment I need a break from her.
Neil Bartlett's 2014 The Disappearance Boy is the novel I've read most recently. It's set in 1953 and tells the story of Reggie, a backstage assistant to a mediocre stage magician, and his friendship with Pam, the onstage assistant whose disappearance in a "magic cabinet" is the centerpiece of the act. Bartlett is a gay writer, and Reggie is gay, and that plus the postwar setting are the main reasons I read it. It's not a bad book--I like the story at the center of it--but it's weighed down with a lot of pointless literariness which the story is ultimately too slight to support.
On a fairly random whim, I also picked up a few of W. J. Burley's Wycliffe mystery series from the library. (This would not be John Wycliffe the late-medieval English theologian and heretic, but Charles Wycliffe the police inspector.) The time span of Burley's writing career almost exactly parallels that of his fellow English mystery writers Ruth Rendell and Reginald Hill, but Burley doesn't reach their heights, either literarily or, for lack of a better word, politically. The most recent of the Wycliffe books I read was published in 1991, but from the level of sexism and homophobia it could have been written twenty years earlier. (Oddly, all three of the books I grabbed, fairly randomly, turned out to include male-male relationships as a plot point, and in all three cases this was presented pretty homophobically even though Burley seemed to be trying to be liberal/tolerant. By contrast, in 1987 Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe series revealed that a major character, Sergeant Wield, was gay, and Wield was never depicted with the mix of pity and contempt with which Burley writes gay and bisexual men.)
I've also been trying to read some of the history books I pick up like a magpie on the grounds that I might want to read them someday. I'm about halfway through Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe and finding it very interesting, though I'm sometimes wishing for more detail. So far there's been very little about policing and the role of the Gestapo, for example, which strikes me as an odd omission. Anyway, Mazower makes some very telling comparisons between Nazi rule within Europe (not the mass murder of Jews, which Mazower puts in a separate category, but forced labor, expropriation of resources, the expulsion of local inhabitants and resettlement of Germans onto vacated land, etc.) and colonialism as practiced outside Europe by the British and the French in particular. I'm sure this didn't originate with Mazower but it was new to me. Equally interesting was Mazower's exploration of how very little policy and centralization Nazi rule actually had: there was a huge amount of improvisation, and conditions in any given occupied territory could depend a lot on who was in charge (e.g. the SS or the Wehrmacht or a Gauleiter who was an old buddy of Hitler's and had never administered anything before in his life).
Not much else to report. I'm still watching Person of Interest despite a distinct feeling, a couple of episodes ago, that the show had jumped the shark. It was the "women MMA fighters combat scene" that did it, what with all the sweat and the crotch shots. I wish I could quit you, POI, but I still care about the characters and want to know what's going to happen to them.
So, how are all of you?
no subject
Date: 2015-03-27 01:15 am (UTC)We finished Season Three of Person of Interest which I loved. LOVED. Still catching up on S4.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-29 05:25 pm (UTC)