Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died.
I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich last year. I didn't enjoy it but I'm sure that was entirely intentional.
Stay Awhile And Listen
No word on release date (of course), but there's actual footage now: Diablo III is finally happening. Quick, are frogs falling from the sky?
Addendum: it feels weird adding this to a post on a computer game, but Danish author, Jacob Ejersbo has passed away.
Webs We Weave
How badly do I want this uppercase scarf? Pretty badly, I tell you. The scarf led me on a typographic journey of the net which yielded new interesting sites: the & Blog, Bembo's Zoo which is seriously cool, FontStruct which lets you design your own (very basic) typefaces, and, er, The Swedish Furniture Name Generator.
Hey, I can't be all arty and intellectual all the time!
How about A.S. Byatt on textiles, textures and texts, then? It marries all my loves: books, texts, literary theory and, ahem, yarn.
Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on a spindle, the Lady of Shalott is entwined in thread, Silas Marner is enclosed in his loom - why have spinning and sewing so often been associated with danger and isolation? (..) We think of our lives - and of stories - as spun threads, extended and knitted or interwoven with others into the fabric of communities, or history, or texts.
The Timeline of Fictional Events
This is really nifty: The Timeline of Fictional And Fictional Future Events.
1609: A vampire known as the Master converts a young woman dying of syphilis to fellow vampire Darla. The conversion reportedly took place in the Colony and Dominion of Virginia which at the time only included Jamestown 1620: Norville "Shaggy" Rogers' and Scooby-Doo's ancestors, McBaggy Rogers and Yankee Doodle Doo, arrive in Plymouth, Massachusetts aboard the Mayflower. 1622: Duncan MacLeod revealed to be an immortal. 1626: D'Artagnan arrives in Paris and meets The Three Musketeers. 1635: Gotham City is founded as part of the Swedish colonization of the Americas. 1659: Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked 1666: September 2 - September 5 - During the Great Fire of London, the Ancient One battles Dormammu and forces him to retreat. 1685: John Ridd and Lorna Doone find themselves caught up in events surrounding the Monmouth Rebellion 1687: Robinson Crusoe rescued
When I Say Bad, I Mean BAD
Danish blogger Emme has a category of books she calls "matadormix" - "mixed candy". These books do not ask much of you as a reader: they're easy to zip through, leave you feeling slightly bloated if you overindulge and there's a bit of everything in them. "Mixed candy", indeed. These past few days I've made my way through such books.
Background: I do have a pronounced weakness for regency romances for which I blame my mother (who has an almost completely collection of Barbara Cartland's books). I also grew up on a heady diet of Jane Austen and fashion history*. When I encountered my first Georgette Heyer, I was clearly doomed. Heyer wrote sharp-witted books filled to the brim with historical costume design details, eccentric characters and frothy plots.
Unfortunately, most regency writers are not Georgette Heyer. And even more unfortunately, I have not been reading Heyer. I've been reading atrocious, atrocious books involving dead clairvoyants, pervy lords, stupid heroines, serialised novels .. oh, and a kitchen sink too. I feel bloated and unhealthy now. Time for something a bit more fibrous: Heyer, here I come.
(* indeed, I neglected studying for my third grade history exam because I was convinced my superior knowledge of fashion history would dazzle my teacher. Sadly I was given a question on Iron Age agriculture)
I Will Drink Life To the Lees
It's deeply unfashionable, of course, but I love me some Lord Alfred Tennyson. "Ulysses" continues to resonate strongly with me:
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
Tithonus is magnificent too. What gets me about Tennyson is how he is often branded 'sentimental' and 'feeble' (mostly by my beloved modernist poets and critics) - and yet the poet I encounter strives to understand the world around him through characters (just like my beloved modernist poets). I read Tennyson's dramatic monologues and find a restless mind. That's someone as far from sentimental and feeble as you can get.
Now, I've never understood the love for Robert Browning..