you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

(From awomanthatsblue)

Bolded what I've read, italicized what I've started, etc.( cut for space )

67/100

Catholicon Anglicum. An English-Latin dictionary c.1483 (OMG Richard III's dictionary?).

Now, I always partly suspected that most of Anatole's celebrated dishes would be things that I, a semi-picky eater, would not be terribly enthralled by. But this, and this? Or this? Now these, I would conceivably make or eat. But the others? Not with the proverbial 10-foot pole.

Books to read when I'm back home and have time for utterly frivolous reading (and don't have to request them via inter-library loan).

-The new Chrestomanci book (the existence of which I just learned about yesterday) about Cat and Chrestomanci.
-All of A Series of Unfortunate Events (a reread for the first two-thirds-ish), so I can read the last one.
-Twilight, to keep on top of the latest teenage vampire trends.
-The New Tamora Pierce Book, I guess, even though I couldn't make it through the exerpt on her website. But I have to see if it has any howlers along the lines of "Hakkoi's Hammer! What is that?"
-The new Wrede-Stevernmer novel, even though Grand Tour wasn't nearly as good as Sorcery and Cecilia.
-Imperium (I'm blanking on the author) -- maybe. It got a good review in today's Book Review, but then, I've also read some pretty negative reviews, and it's long, and I sort of want to get a handle on the Late Republic history-wise before I launch into a lengthy novel about it.
-I think there were another couple, but this will serve for now.

I am going to mail in my ballot tomorrow. Oh, I hope we can get some decent people into the legislature! And then there are the propositions. Among the things that I, as an Arizona citizen, got to vote on this time:

-Whether or not to establish a lottery in which everyone who votes will be entered. The idea is that it will make people vote. I guess some people don't think the nifty little stickers are enough of an incentive.

-The obligatory marriage amendment, which would additionally bar any kind of civil unions AND prohibit any local governments from giving partner-benefits. Can we say spiteful?

-To deny punitive damages to parties in civil suits who can't prove their immigration status. This one is just STUPID. The whole point of punitive damages is to punish the other party: it should have nothing to do with who the injured party is. In other words, we are going to say that it's less bad to, say, kill the relative of an illegal alien while drunk than to kill the relative of a citizen. And the terrible thing is that this probably IS what the proponents of this proposition believe, but won't say in so many words. I think its in defence of this proposition that someone submitted a claim about "gangs of illegal aliens roaming the suburbs and committing organized crime." (Oh, please. The only gangs of illegal immigrants in your cookie-cutter gated community are the ones trimming your lawn.) Or maybe that was for the proposition to deny bail to those who can't prove their immigration status at the time of arrest.

But undoubtably the stupidest proposition on the ballot is the English as the Official Language of Arizona one.
Among its provisions:

Section 3. A. Representatives of government in this state shall preserve, protect, and enhance the role of English as the official language of the government of Arizona.

"Preserve, protect, and enhance the role of English" includes:
(a) Avoiding any official actions that ignore, harm, or diminsih the role of English as the language of government
(b) Protecting the rights of the persons in this state who use English."

So if this passes, I could sue Bush next time he makes a speech in Arizon, right?

But seriously, what is wrong with this state country? We already have English Only education; this one is mostly designed to protect employers from discrimintion suits when they fire their employees for speaking Spanish during the breaks (it won't do much else, as Federal law requires us to provide government documents in other languages). One would think that living on the border with a country that speaks a foreign language would make use less, not more phobic about multi-lingualism.

Iris came over the other day and we had a good talk about fundamentalist religious friends who don't try to convert you (I mean really: don't they care about our immortal souls? What kind of friend lets a friend blithely go to hell in a handbasket?), being intolerant, nervous breakdowns, and distribution/grad school entrance requirements. I should keep in touch more often with her.

Also yesterday, I read Rose Tremain's Music and Silence. It made me realize several things: that I know absolutely nothing about 17th century Scandinavian politics, that I haven't read a "literary" novel in a while, and that this kind of novel ALWAYS seems to deal with The Darkness of the Human Condition and Repressed Desires and so on. Always. This particular one centered (sort of) around an English lutenist coming to the court of the fading, indebted, and occasionally off-his-rocker Christian IV of Denmark. It isn't really about the lutenist though, any more than it is about King Christian, or his morganatic wife Kirsten, or her lady-in-waiting Emilia. And of course all of these characters have Pasts, distant and recent, which are being recounted alternately with bits of the present. I did like it, though, enough to stay up all night to find out whether it ended happily or not.

There were other things I was going to write about, but now I don't want to. Maybe later -- tomorrow, when things that happened today can be yesterday.

All the books are moved. It's rather amazing, but Camp now has a library. We have about 8 boxes of stuff to get rid of, from which I rescued a mouse-eaten 1840's Vergil and a Cicero. In the former, they have the poetry rearranged into standard (English) word order in the margins. Tee hee, but it does make it easier. I love old books.

I also found a fountain pen. It is much easier to get pretty flourishes and curlicues (I have been feeling ashamed of my ugly handwriting since looking at so many old copperplate-written journals) with a proper nib. It's also much easier to smudge the ink, though. It makes one realize that it wasn't just a love of conformity and superstitions about the sinister side that made them switch lefties -- before ball-point pens there was a very good reason for writing right-handed.

I was rereading Anne of Windy Poplars yesterday, and I made a Harry Potter discovery. Well, at potential one at least. Windy Poplars is the one where Anne has a three year stint as a principal in another (larger) town while Gilber is at medical school. It has always struck me as very episodic -- one eccentric family with whom Anne becomes entangled after another. One of these is Miss Minerva Tomgallon. Tomgallon is not an exact anagram from McGonagall, of course, but the characters not dissimilar. There was one particularly striking scene with her cat. Miss Tomgallon is the last of an illustrious family and lives all alone in the old family mansion, full of dusty rooms,old portraits, and six generations of hair-raising stories. A slightly less dark version of Grimauld Place, perhaps. I'm almost sure JK Rowling pulled a few things from here. Or perhaps it's all a coincidence. Are the Anne books even popular in Britain, or are they a North American phenomenon?

So I was reading 1599 again to cheer up this morning, and I noticed the references to John Hayward's Life of Henry IV which apparently plagerizes Tacitus quite a bit. Since Tacitus + English history must be one of the epitomes of possible happiness, I was hunting around for a copy I could get a hold of, when I discovered that ASU subscribes to EEBO, even if my college doesn't. Hurray!

I am feeling quite strange right now. I suppose I should either go practice or start trying to trick iDVD again. (I thought I had fooled it, but it caught on: the computer appears to be cleverer than I am.)

Today, I put the bottom two hoops in my farthingale. It was unbelievable how often the best laid plans of mice and men went awry during the process. I am telling myself that they only get smaller as I go, and I must get better and binding ~1 foot straws into several yard multi-strand bundles so that I can shove them through casings and not have them collapse, but I am not sure. I pinned it onto my dress-form so I could actually manipulate the "bents" properly, but I didn't do it with any concern for how it should actually hang; I hope that this is why it is collapsing in on itself instead of standing out completely. As it is quite full even so, I suspect I made it too wide. At the moment, I am not at all sure that it will support a skirt, even if I end up having enough cloth to make one full enough, but we shall see -- probably not until next year, at this rate.

I read King of Attolia today -- I got it from the library. I couldn't resist raiding the discards for sale corner: the Norton Critical Ed. of selected Canterbury Tales, "6 Restoration Dramas," a stupid-looking JV fiction novel about a girl who goes back in time to fall in love with Edward VI who, according to the back cover, "turns out to be kind of cute." I'm not sure why I have an affinity with this kind of thing. I also grabbed a paperback Wolves of Willoughby Chase partly because I read Joan Aiken's books when they were out of print, so I have an instinct to grab them whenever I see them. And then I found that I didn't have any change, so I ended up only paying 60 cents, although I owed more like 1.50. I always seem to find a lot of books I want to buy when I don't have the money, but I never am able to give them up. "I'll put money in next time," I have said several times, now, but have I? I really should make an effort, I suppose.

So. King of Attolia. I really like this series. Very much. And it isn't just because it fills a big gap where there should be more fantasy set in a vaguely classical era. That is, it isn't fantasy so much as ahistorical fiction. It annoys me that they have guns, though. I wish they didn't, even though they were slightly necessary to the plot of this one. I know they have been annoying you, voglia_di_notte, ever since Gen married the queen, and so this one will probably continue to annoy you. I liked it, but then, for some reason I didn't really have a problem with them getting married.

I find that I don't want to write too much, because the more I think about it, so little happens, in one sense, in this book, that to say anything would be to spoil it. At the end, everything seemed rather pointless: the wide-reaching political intrigue was there, at the borders, threatening to break into the story (and leaving much room for sequels -- I KNOW she is going to get sequels out of this) but in the end… something totally different turned out to be the focus. In one sense, this is a Book in Which Not Much Happens. But, I sort of like books that have a fantastical/historical setting but do not involve issues at the level of the country (Jackaroo is another rare exception to this pattern), if not the entire world. Obviously, with a title like "King of Attolia," this book does involve issues that are pretty big, but its ultimate concern turns out to be smaller. One of the really neat things here, is that the story is not narrated by Gen, or the queen, but mostly by Costis, a relatively nobody and clueless soldier of the Queen's Guard. This means we get an interesting worm's eye perspective on not just events but characters. Meghan Whalen Turner has had two books to build up Gen and Irene as interesting, severly flawed, passionate people, and now we see them as… something completely different. Costis's perceptions spoke quite a bit to my own ideas about, well, various things, and I would like to write more, but, again, I think it would spoil the book.

Also, I wish I got spam like Chaucer's

So I think a normal person would not be feeling woeful during her spring break. Exhibit A that I am not normal?

I finally got Maureen Dowd's Are Men Necessary and read it, yesterday. It's a lot like her columns, which means that it gets a bit wearing after chapters and chapters of it. It also didn't really have anything I didn't already know about or worry about. But if Dowd is right, and I suspect she is, mostly, the outlook does not seem to be good. Of course, I don't need her to tell me that.

It's interesting to have read Mary Wollstonecraft, and now read this take on the "anti-feminist" movement. The similarities in what they describe are frightening: weren't things supposed to significantly change in 200 years? But more depressing, for me, is the party that can be blamed by both authors: women themselves. Dowd isn't writing about Fundamentalist sects for the most part, or even about such things as anti-choice legislation. She's concerned with the educated women who don't want careers, but who do want to be adored and pedestalized by men for their beauty and charm. It's a return to a desire for the 'illegitimate power' that Wollstonecraft's women used to get their way in an utterly patriarchal society. When that's all that one can get, it's understandable. But to choose it over equality? But my (admittedly small) anecdotal experience tends to confirm this: all of those girls in high school (and now, in college, though less noticeably, to me) who expected flowers and constant attention from their boyfriends: often it seem(s)(ed) like they want(ed) worshippers, not companions. I'm probably going off the wall here and will offend someone, as I tend to do when I attempt to talk about this sort of thing, so I'll shut up.

The other thing I read yesterday was the second book of the Bartimaeus Trilogy, by Jonathan Stroud. (Yay for Middle School Fantasy!) I had read the first, and am now wondering when I will get the chance to read the recently-released third. The series has several things going for it:
a) An Alternate-Universe English setting. This is always a good thing. In fact, when I think about it, just about all of the fantasy novels I really like [Diana Wynne Jones, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel, the Mairelon books, Harry Potter, Caroline Stevernmer] have alternate-universe English settings. This one is a 20th c. world, where the British Empire has more or less conquered Europe (having beaten the Prague-centered HRE sometime in the last century or so) and is still holding onto North America, as well.
b) A dystopically corrupt System. I'm not sure why I have a fondness for reading about fictional Evil Oppressive Governments, but they always do seem to make it more interesting. In this case, the magicians rule the empire, and everyone else subsists in a sad, downtrodden, impoverished sort of way. But although we do now have a semi-main character attempting to lead a rebellion and all that, the more main character is a part of this government, and quite in support of it. There's also something that feels very real about all of these self-serving, corrupt wizard-officials. Probably it's that none of them quite measures up to, say, Cheney, or Ashcroft, or Rove.
c) Footnotes. Although not as copious as those in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel, one of the narrative voices -- the titular djinni Bartimaeus -- footnotes himself rather a lot, usually to a pretty good comic effect. This is a good sign: Jonathan Stroud is not taking himself entirely seriously.
d) A thouroughly obnoxious main character. In some ways, Nathaniel, the young protagonist, is an anti-Harry Potter. Actually, he's more like a young Tom Riddle, except that he doesn't need to take over the world to create that society ruled by brutal wizards: he's already a part of it. It was fascinating watching Nathaniel become less and less compassionate as he became more aware of his power and it's possibilities in the first book; in this second one, he is really repulsively callous and arrogant (although I suppose that he's due for a moral turn-around in book three, as this is a children's series). And this, surprisingly, does not bother me. I disliked Artemis Fowl, who was much the same way, because clearly we were supposed to admire his "bad-boy" ways. Here, we aren't. Nathaniel is not irredeemable, but he's in need of redemption, and until then, the author doesn't expect us to particularly admire him.

This afternoon, I swear, I am going to start my paper. And practice. Yes. I really will.

C. accosted me at dinner last night, which meant that I had to talk to him, and thus had to read Thus Spoke Z. later. On the other hand, he's the first person I was able to talk about Notes from Underground with in terms of a novel, and not as philosophy. That isn't entirely accurate, as it implies that in class, we looked at it purely as a non-fiction-esque commentary on society/nature of humankind. Which we did not. (We did, however, get hung up on lofty reason vs cheap happiness, which was utterly pointless, as everyone simply congratulated themselves on picking lofty reason, totally ignoring one of the central points of the novel (in my opinion) for one thing, and for another… I think I shall get into this more below.)

Now, cut and sectioned off for ease of ignoring:
( Notes from Underground )

( In which I philosophize )

( In which I look down on others and rant about them )