bloodygranuaile

 So, reports of my death and/or abandonment of this spiffy lil blogging project have been greatly exaggerated.

Why, then, you may ask, have I not posted in so darn long? Surely I have not gone an entire month without reading a book?

The Seven forbid! What I have been doing, curious and/or indifferent readers, is rereading the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series in preparation for July 12th's release of A Dance with Dragons. Since I have already read the first four books, I was planning on just doing one big blog post after I'd reread the lot, and doing a second blog post for ADWD since that one will be a new read. I partly planned this because I cannot seem to bring myself to waste time pounding on the keyboard when I finish one volume instead of moving on IMMEDIATELY IF NOT SOONER to the next one. They are that addictive. And they always end in really cliffhangery places.

I was sort of going to do a post when the first season of Game of Thrones finished airing on HBO, but I got distracted getting one of my new roommates hooked on True Blood instead. Bwahaha. Perhaps I will discuss it later. Perhaps I will also discuss Season 4 of True Blood, when I can move my brain beyond "WHAT 80S GOTH BILL WHAT" and kind of a o.O face.

I kind of want this to be my personal theme music. I think I would just be so much more productive and epic if this played every time I went somewhere.



\m/ >_< \m/

For comparison purposes--and also because the visuals are gorgeous (and weirdly steampunky for a medieval-based show)--here is the original:



I may be musically illiterate but I do like me a strong epic theme song.

Have spent this weekend watching two very, very, very different takes on the King Arthur legend.

I watched the first two episodes of Starz' new show Camelot, which is being billed as "the King Arthur legend for adults," which I guessed was TV-speak for "We made it as brutal as it probably was originally, but with many more awkwardly lengthy sex scenes because we are a premium channel." It appears I am fluent in TV-speak because this is exactly what it was.

The sets and costuming are gorgeous, as is most of the cast. King Arthur is played by the guy who played Anthony in the Tim Burton version of Sweeney Todd, which fits quite well with the show's very... modern characterization of Arthur as basically being an irresponsible pretty boy who has to grow up really fast when the plot lands on him. Eva Green is a beautifully bitchy and witchy Morgan le Fay, although I think her eyeliner might not be super historically accurate. Merlin, for some reason, is not an old wizard dude, but instead is Joseph Feinnes, being ridiculously badass.

The show seems to stay more or less close to the plotlines of the legends, or at least what I remember of them (I am not as well-versed in Arthurian stuff as I should be), although the whole "Sword in the Stone" thing is taken up to eleven by having the sword stuck in a rock at the top of a gigantic waterfall. It is very epic, and very pretty, although a bit cheesy and overdone at times. Kind of like the whole rest of the show.

I will, of course, have to see how the rest of the show plays out before I can come to any sort of serious conclusions on it. For the moment, I like it enough to keep watching, even though I will probably collapse under the weight of following this and The Borgias and Game of Thrones all at the same time. There will be so much pseudo-medieval costume drama ridiculosity and terrible sex that I will go mad. Mad, I tell you!

I also started watching the first season of the BBC's The Adventures of Merlin. God help me, this show is so doofy and adorable. Merlin and Arthur and Morgana and Guenevere are all awkward teenagers, and Anthony Stewart Head is awesome as Uther Pendragon, bizarre combination of legendary British king Uther Pendragon and the obligatory Close-Minded Adult Who Doesn't Believe Those Silly Kids No Matter How Many Times They Save The World. For some reason there is an awkward budding romance between Merlin and Gwen, although there also seems to be some degree of weird subtext between every combination of the four of them, except Morgana and Merlin. They seem like they could totally just be platonic best buddies.

I was inordinately amused by the sets, which are very clearly made out of very modern concrete and cinderblock, and by the terrible CGI. The costumes are decent, though, although they do not quite reduce me to weebling "I WANTS ALL THE DRESSES" like the Camelot ones.

In addition to Merlin being an awkward teenager, he is also Prince Arthur's manservant. Morgana isn't evil (yet), and is King Uther's ward instead of being related to Arthur. Gwen is Morgana's maid, and the daughter of Camelot's blacksmith, and has a weird habit of accidentally sort of insulting Merlin and then putting her foot in her mouth even further when she tries to fix it (I am hoping this particular running gag doesn't go on forever; I could see it getting old).

The plots all seem to revolve around magical things happening, and King Uther's hardline anti-magic stance getting in the way, and the court physician being wise and telling Merlin not to do anything stupid (Merlin is also apprenticed to the court physician, to secretly study magic). Then Merlin does something stupid, Gaius (the physician) berates him for it, and then he and Arthur and sometimes Morgana and Gwen team up and miraculously save the day, without Uther finding out that Merlin used magic to do it. At some point, Merlin also goes down to the dungeon and asks the Dragon what to do, and the Dragon says something about his destiny, and Merlin goes "BUT THIS CAN'T BE MY DESTINY I'M CONFUSED", and the Dragon flies away on its chain. I am hoping it might get a little less formulaically episodic as the show goes on, but we will see.

I now find myself really wanting to rewatch that old TV miniseries Merlin that came out in 1998, but it is not on DVD yet. Maybe I can find it online somewhere.

Tonight: The Borgias premieres! This is gonna be fun.

My goal for 2011 is to log at least something about each book I read. This might slow down the 50 Book Challenge for the year, but I will do it anyway. I failed 2010's 50BC, which is particularly egregious since I was actually going for the 100. (In 2007 I beat the 100BC; in 2009 I failed it but I at least hit 50.)

Anyway, this blog gets devoted to books, movies, TV shows, vampires, and Nightwish videos. Not necessarily in that order. Particularly not today. Today the order is:

Vampires (also books)

The first book of 2011 for me was Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, which is about Dracula. Specifically, it is about Vlad Tepes, known as "the Impaler," a Wallachian prince in the fifteenth century who was nasty even by princes-in-the-fifteenth-century standards. It's an amazing combination of really well-researched stuff about Eastern European medieval history and Vlad Tepes, and more modern elements of a vampire story. It also has many of the tropes that are particularly near and dear to my heart, including:

-kickass ladies (Helen Rossi is the main one; also the narrator and Aunt Eva are pretty cool)
-vampires that actually are really scary and drink blood
-lots and lots of churches
-letters
-book nerdery
-WACKY LIBRARY HIJINKS

I am so not kidding about the wacky library hijinks. The basic plot of the book is that Dracula really does not like people researching him and trying to find his tomb, so the people involved in researching him keep getting attacked by vampires in university libraries and stuff. It's amazing.

The book is very much in the nineteenth-century-novel tradition of being long and deliberately paced, although it has avoided most of the ways in which long and deliberately paced nineteenth century novels suck; namely, the plot does show up fairly near the beginning of the book. (If you've read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which you should, you'll have an idea of what I mean by "stylistically very nineteenth-century except not bad.") It also uses my favorite framing device EVER, which is "giant packet of documents format." I don't know if this format actually has its own name or if it is considered a derivation of epistolary format (which I personally tend to think of as "a letter or packet of letters from one character to another, or a letter correspondence between two characters only"), but it is the format used in some of my favorite nineteenth-century novels ever, like The Woman in White (which is framed as a police "case file" for the mystery), and is--something which I find particularly delightful and most people probably don't care about--also the format used in Bram Stoker's Dracula. (The book even copies his notice about all the documents being put in the order that makes the most sense.)

Anyway, if you like vampires,  history, books about books, and stories about scholars being all action-hero-y, you should drop whatever you're doing and read this immediately.

Books

My second book of 2011 was tammypierce  's Bloodhound, the second book in the Beka Cooper series. This is Tamora Pierce trying her hand at pseudo-medieval police procedurals. The awesomeness potential of combining all the awesomeness of pseudo-medieval fantasy stories with all the awesomeness of cop shows will not be lost on anyone familiar with Terry Pratchett's Night Watch subseries of Discworld books, and I am glad to say that Tamora Pierce does not waste this potential. Beka is a hilarious narrator; her magic powers are cool and creepy but she's still a clever and resourceful heroine in her own right, not in any way a passive cipher for "wouldn't it be cool if I had those powers; I wouldn't have to ever try to be an awesome person in regular ways again" fantasies (I am looking at you, Bella Swan... and 90% of pulp fantasy). This series takes place a century or two before the Song of the Lioness series starts, and the differences between the two settings are fascinating--similar enough to be definitely the same place; different enough to show a marked change in history and social progress. The really interesting thing to me about the Beka Cooper series is the way in which it clearly demonstrates that sometimes society "progresses" in ways we think of as "progressive"... and sometimes it backlashes. In Beka's world, slavery is still legal in Tortall, something that has been outlawed in most of the Eastern Lands by the time Alanna shows up (although not in Carthak or the Copper Isles, which always have fascinating imperialism/colonialism storylines). However, gender roles are much freer in Beka's time--Bloodhound hints at the emergence of a "cult of the Gentle Mother," a sort of Victorianesque angel-in-the-house type of thinking that Beka mostly ignores but makes the reader, if the reader has read all the other Tortall books, go "NOOOOOO NOT THAT IT IS GOING TO RUIN EVERYTHING" and what's really interesting is, that is kind of true. The Victorians were much more restrictive than a lot of times and places in history before them, for all that the Victorian era was relatively recent. Beka's world still has lady knights as a matter of course (a bit rare, but perfectly legal and definitely in existence), as well as female police officers, female heads of organized crime syndicates, female mercenaries, and gender-neutral public bathhouses. And for most of the book, this is presented as completely normal. Pretensions towards femininity, and the apparently "new" idea of female modesty (a passing mention of nobles "starting to" have sex-segregated bathhouses), are luxuries of the very uppermost classes.

Pierce's books, looked at in the order they're written rather than the order they take place in, are actually a pretty solid case study in phases of feminism (and probably most social justice movements in general, these just happen to focus on women):

Song of the Lioness Quartet: very much Wave 1: "I can do the same things the boys can do, and you're wrong to tell me I can't." Dealing with very blatant (including "enshrined in law") issues of being restricted from doing things on the basis that girls are lesser and can't do the cool stuff. Straight-up fight-the-patriarchy. (Also crazy plot about necromanced dukes and throne-stealing and stuff! Man, I need to reread that series.)
Immortals Quartet: Deals with women and power that's not been coded specifically masculine. Daine has animal magic, something that is pretty rare in the Tortall books, but a lot of the aspects of "wild magic"--including its first manifestation of "talking to animals," and particularly "I have a pony and I can talk to it and it's my best friend"--are, out in this universe, basic Disney Princess powers. The Immortals quartet revisits "feminine" coded tropes and instead of eschewing them for being feminine, it develops, expands and explores them to create  story in which "talking to animals" magic is the first stage of seriously crazy powerful magic that results in shape-shifting abilities and saving the world from horrible things that want to suck it into the Chaos Realms. It's also seriously deromanticized--Daine's animal magics result in her spending time running around the woods thinking she's a wolf, and stuff like that.
Protector of the Small is the book for what happens when you've stopped being specifically barred from stuff because you're female, but you're still facing non-legal hurdles: Kel gets put on probation for a year for no reason whatsoever, and, while only a few seriously cranky old misogynists will flat-out argue that she shouldn't legally be allowed to be there, she is very much not welcome. She is othered, alienated, judged extra harshly, doubted and singled out, etc., and has to deal with all of that. This is also the first series where Pierce begins talking substantially about other social justice issues, such as homosexuality.
The Trickster quartet deals somewhat less with femininity and a lot more with colonialism. Intersectionality is very important. There are some interesting scenes between Aly and her mom that have some parallels to issues of intergenerational/"waves"-of-feminism conflicts, though. But mostly: racism, colonialism, class warfare! These are all important things for feminists to know about, since gendered power is only one facet of a dominance-based social order and all the other types of power dynamics all play off each other in weird ways. (In a word: kyriarchy.)
And then we get Beka Cooper, where we have: NORMALIZATION. Where we get to stop invoking stereotypes (and stereotype threat) altogether; we get to stop saying "Prove you can do what the boys can do" and it's just portrayed as perfectly normal that you can, why would you bring up the idea that you couldn't? Beka doesn't have to be the groundbreaker or the pioneer or the martyr For The Cause. The Provost's Dogs are predominantly made up of male-female pairs, but Beka spends most of Bloodhound with Clara Goodwin as her partner (Tunstall's injured for a good chunk of the book), and... they fight crime. They are allowed to focus on fighting crime and having an awesome adventure trying to break counterfeiting rings and shit instead of having their gender made a focal point of every page. This series also introduces (who I think is) Pierce's first transgender character, Okha. (Okha's awesome, btw.)

The one downside to this series: The language is a little different than the other books, in that it takes place two hundred years earlier and as such the "medieval" street slang is two hundred years more medieval. If you ever laugh at modern American authors using terms like "lads and lasses," be prepared to bust a gut over "lads and gixies." It's actually a fascinating set of vocab (cove, mot, spintry, doxie, bardash, honeylove, looby, pox, murrain... God they are so much fun to say) but it definitely starts to remind you of the awkwardest people you run into at Ren Faires.

Movies

I am afraid I gotta let you guys down on this one. I've had Scarface sitting around for a week. I'll watch it soon!

TV Shows

Castle is awesome, as always, and the latest episode, Nikki Heat, was no exception. Watching somebody make Beckett uncomfortable is way more fun than it should be; I usually love that Beckett is all cool and in control and basically awesome in every way, but seeing other sides of her definitely humanizes her a lot. And uncomfortable-Beckett is really, really funny because Stana Katic just does everything about the character so well. Also: Ryan and his girlfriend are so adorable I almost cried. Also also: I forgot Esposito's first name was Javier and for some reason I found it really jarring to hear Ryan call him that, probably just because mostly he never does.

Nightwish videos

I Wish I Had an Angel is one of my favorites.

This is a tripartite post!

Part the First: Stuff that is not actually happening in my life

This means this part of the post is about television.

Season 3 of Dexter was exponentially better than season 2, because Lila wasn't in it, also because Deb's taste in men gets somewhat better with each season (season 3 dude is a drug dealer, but is not a serial killer, or older than her dad, and she doesn't throw over anyone who is actually awesome to be with him). Despite the OMG Pregnancy And Marriage subplot, this season is not about le awesome power of romantic love, and is only about as much about le fucking-you-up power of family, but is very much a Power of Friendship season, which is a type of relationship that has really not had much show time in Dexter so far. Of course, Dexter's BFF winds up being just as frakked up as he is, but cuddly new cupcake-wielding LaGuerta definitely showcases the positive transformative power of having cuddly cupcake-wielding bestest friendses. Rita still awesome, in her soft-spoken cute-little-mommy way, and handles falling headfirst into A Pregnancy Plotline with maturity and grace. I give this season an A for massive personal growth on the part of everyone who doesn't die.

Dollhouse: I don't wanna spoil things for people who haven't seen this week's yet, or who did not know season 2 had started because Fox sucks and seems to be allergic to actually advertising the damn show, but: I think Joss Whedon is a Man on a Mission to get every single cast member of Battlestar Galactica on the show. Tahmoh Penikett's been on it since the beginning, obvs, and the weird cockney lawyer dude was on it sometime in season 1, and then Jamie Bamber was on last week, and this week has another Special BSG Guest. Here's to hoping Tricia Helfer and Katee Sackhoff show up soon!

Also: last week's Dollhouse and this week's Castle totally both used the word "frenemies." Which I had previously heard, like, once, several years ago.

Castle: Last week's fantastic. Really exciting for the upcoming week's. This week was about models, but it was an episode of Castle, which means it'd be fabulous if it were any other cop show and I was thoroughly entertained by watching it, but the moment the mystery was solved I stopped caring about the main plot. Hopefully they won't subject us to multiple "because so-and-so was/I thought (s)he was cheating on me"-motivated murders in a row again, like the beginning of season 1, because even as non-predictable as those plots manage to be when they're still unfolding (this is Castle, after all) they always leave me feeling like That Was Totally Unoriginal, Sheesh.

On the movie front: Today I watched Soylent Green. Some bits of it were surprisingly good, especially compared with how bad some other bits of it were. Overall it was better than I expected.

Unfortunately I am not having much time for reading outside of school. Northanger Abbey awesome, as Austen usually is. Am about halfway through A Long Fatal Love Chase (the NEW Louisa May Alcott book!) and so far it is a hell of a lot better than the front or back covers would have you believe.

Part the Second: In Which I Annoy Everyone I've Ever Met By Being Really Cranky

Mega uber super crackdown on club sports procedure and paperwork this year. Like, they used to be like "handing in your med forms is nice, and here's the deadline for financial stuff" but now they have gotten utterly fascist about it. All forms must be in by Tuesday or they freeze the club! They are sending people to observe us, so that if anything is being done not by the book they will freeze the club! Tuesday we are still on motherfucking break, but the forms still need to be in by five o'clock or they will freeze the club! Grad students cannot practice with us, or they will freeze the club! I asked, what about the loopholes to the grad students policy me and Shay and Shihan discussed with Mike McKenna last year? If we jump through those hoops, can they stay? No answer. I asked, if people want to join and get me their health forms after Tuesday, can they still do that, since karate club often has people join at weird times in the semester? I was told... get all your forms in by Tuesday or we freeze the club! So I'm not sure if that's a yes or a no, but apparently it is very threatening to ask them complicated questions so they needed to threaten me back. Aaargh.

Part the Third: Why I Should Totes Not Be Writing This Entry

It is the holiday weekend and I have a ten-page novel synopsis due next Friday and I had very little plot development in my head, just the premise and ending. So now I am home, in a nice empty house (mom is out of town til tomorrow evening), so that I can actually figure out what the frak happens in my story.

I spent all of today worldbuilding, and outlining my plot mountain (yes, I plan stuff in on a visual of that 'plot mountain' shape they teach you about in sixth grade), and wrote the first page or so of the actual synopsis, in addition to going to the gym and drinking wine (Gnarly Head is on sale at Gary's, whee) and hunting centipedes (ew) and a few other things that were not actually writing. Oops. But I did get some stuff done.

Tomorrow needs to be more productive, though, so I's going to bed now.

Goodnight!

Man, I haven't book/movie logged in a really long time.

Ermmmm. So, recently, I read The Sweet Far Thing, the sequel to A Great and Terrible Beauty and Rebel Angels, which is about as long as the first two put together. TSFT definitely gets a lot more explicit with its This Is A Progressive Book For Progressive Girls message, which occasionally seems a little contrived in its deliberate attempt to treat every single social issue ever (women's rights, child rights, worker's rights, race relations, class warfare, and GLBT), but it might just seem like that to me after an entire semester of reading really long, meandering Victorian novels in which we had to pick out the ways the Victorian British Suck At Life In Relation To Race, Class, Gender And Empire ourselves. Also, still hate the Kartik subplot; he's still following in the mold of Obligatory YA Love Interests where they give him irritating-as-fuck random mood swings as a shortcut for making him mysterious/realistically flawed/has-a-complex-personality or some shit instead of developing him as a character. Other than those two gripes, however... it was so nice to see Gemma and Ann and Felicity and Pippa again! Dead!Pippa is wonderfully creepy, especially. The plot twists are ridiculous, and as usual the juxtaposition between all the crazy hardcore magic politics and fate and destiny shit of the Realms, and the stiflingly infantilized world of everyday Victorian privilege, is simultaneously appropriately jarring and brilliantly tied together via ~forbidden magic powers~. Also, Felicity just keeps getting more and more awesome.

Then I read Jessica Valenti's The Purity Myth, which has three basic tenets: 1. the virgin/whore dichotomy is complete BS and needs to go, 2. the Christianists/right-wing abstinence nutters are dangerously insane and have way too much political power, and 3. the notion of "masculinity" is at least as dangerous a lie as #1 and needs a serious overhaul, pronto. It was very informative, but also scary, especially reading it right in the wake of Dr. Tiller's assassination.

Now I's reading The Godfather. Go me.

In screen-staring at news, I finally watched Memento, which is really hard to say anything about because it's a very complicated movie and the full strength of its awesome cannot be communicated by telling you that it's about a dude investigating a murder, and he has short-term memory loss so he has to take pictures and tattoo shit all over his body. It's much more brilliant than it sounds.

I also started Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was interesting since I know nothing about the Terminator franchise whatsoever, but Summer Glau is in it so I figured I'd watch it anyway. Not far enough along to figure out their time-travel rules enough to pass judgment on them as internally consistent or making sense. There is a major inconsistency in Summer Glau's character--namely, that when we first meet her she passes herself off as a normal human decently well for about two scenes, what with making and understanding jokes and all that, but the minute we find out she's a robot it goes into comical Robot Lady Is Social Retard territory and she can't go two seconds without making somebody's life really awkward. Other than that, there are lots of explosions, and also time travel and Summer Glau, so overall I'm inclined to keep watching.

Do need to finish Buffy season 6 at some point. Have kind of stalled at the musical episode, because it was so awesome I kind of just want to stay there. Oops.

What have you been reading/watching?

During the House party (by which I mean five people watching House, MD):

METAL ADAM: Is that a dental dam?
JON: It's ORIGAMI PAPER!

House is pretty awesome, btw, even though medical stuff makes me very squeamish unless it's happening to me. Apparently I can watch people getting shot all day, but stick a needle in someone's eyeball and I go crawling under the couch.