(no subject)
Nov. 4th, 2003 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liadnanI'm absolutely shattered... A combination of that, continued lack of a decent internet connection, generalised irritability and Other Stuff is keeping me from posting much at present, for which I suspect you're all greatly relieved.
Contrary to what the datestamp on this post says, or will say... willenhave said.... I'm writing this on Sunday evening with Midsomer Murders on in the background (and now tinkering with it on Monday evening with Radio 4 on in the background) and a copy of the European Commercial Agents Regulations open before me. The latter is a model of clarity, a work of beauty and staggering erudition, with which I am well familiar.
Everything in the previous sentence is, in the currently accepted reality, a lie...
Why is it that Sunday evening television drama is invariably this undemanding pap, anyway? I suspect the answer is that the schedulers believe that it's all we're capable of coping with after two nights and days of debauchery, and in my current state I can't deny that they may have a smidgen of a point.
Anyway, for those who are, for whatever reason, interested, here's what I've been doing...
I saw my sister and her family on Wednesday, down to stay with my brother-in-law's family and do the London tourist thing. I envy them in some ways: the kids are growing up in beautiful countryside, miles from anywhere (near Exmoor until a few years ago, in Co. Durham now) and only have to wrestle with the sprawling mess that is London for recreation. I love this city, but sometimes it gets to me...
I have an odd relationship with that sister. She looked after me much of the time when we were children (she's ten years older than me) but we see the world in very different ways: at one point she was a member of an organisation linked to Opus Dei. Thankfully she eventually left that group but she remains a very hard-line and traditional Catholic. But over the last few years I've begun to value her, and indeed my other siblings, more than I once did... she's not such a bad sort really and she seems to be bringing up the kids as reasonable approximations of human beings, which in my darker moments seems something of an achievement these days.
I really am becoming quite appallingly pre-War in my attitudes, aren't I? The Franco-Prussian War, possibly.
I took Friday off from being a practising lawyer and went to Oxford. Spent the morning, or what was left of it, working in the Bodleian on various Plans of mine before wandering around the usual haunts. Picked up a copy of Pullman's Lyra's Oxford in Blackwells: a clear cash in but a reasonable one as such things go. Then onto the Eagle and Child to meet Olympia and Penelope for the first time, where were shortly joined by Chrysaphi. Olympia very kindly offered me dinner, which I gratefully accepted: even had the company not been so good it's a personal rule never to refuse food... Turned out she lives about twenty yards from where I spent two years living some years ago.. ho hum.
Back to London late.. arrived at Baker Street just in time to miss the last tube to Swiss Cottage (from where I can walk home in a quarter of an hour) by one minute. I wandered round to the nightbus stop, as the drizzle grew more unpleasant by the moment, only to discover that the next bus due was twenty minutes away and no use to me anyway: the one I needed was likely to be ten minutes behind that. So I called to mind my mental map of Regents Park and decided that I could actually make it home round the west and north sides of the park in that time, so off I set.
Bloody bus passed me when I was five minutes from the stop where I'd have left it.
Saturday I woke up very late and went straight off to shop at Borough Market.. about the only place I'll buy meat these days. Wittered around and then eventually off to Rob and Steph's for a party for those who went on holiday to Greece this summer: me, Rob and Steph, Fiona, Ruth, Dan, and Adele, who didn't actually come to Greece but was supposed to. H., was sadly missing, having upped and gone to New York: no accounting for tastes. Dinner fantastic, as ever, particularly the meatballs: thanks Rob. Alcohol plentiful.... Ruth went for her last train, but Adele and I, who were both intending to make our way back to our respective flats by minicab and/or nightbus, eventually realised that we were just too tired and pissed. Since Dan and Fi had pre-booked the comfortable spare bedding, we made do as best we could with cushions and the like.... not the most comfortable bed one can imagine. Which explains my current mood. Sunday I did the small amount of work of which my stunted brain was capable before re-joining the others and Alan in first the pub and then a rather good Turkish restaurant in Victoria.
And finally back here, to my cold and lonely flat. Boo. Weep for me....
I have a nightmare first half of the week ahead of me: by the time I go home tomorrow I have to send through a fairly complex piece of drafting, and on Tuesday I have a hearing in Birmingham. At present I know absolutely nothing about that case... Ho hum.
Snce I'm now tinkering with this post on Monday evening, I can, in a world exclusive, reveal that I did in fact manage to send out said pleading by email at about 8PM today, and unless they change their mind again in the next 11 hours (for the third time) I am no longer going to Birmingham tomorrow morning. Hurrah for small mercies.
Oh, stuff recently read. Jonathan Stroud's Amulet of Samarkand isn't at all bad as children's fantasy goes. Quite obviously riding the Harry Potter coat tails, but worth a look: alternate history where Britain is ruled by an oligarchy of magicians. The time in which the novel is set clearly parallels our own, but Stroud, very subtly and without making too much of the point, makes his society Victorian in feel, indicating what he considers the social effect of such a change would be. The novel is written half from POV of a child magician being trained by a second rate master (there's a cheap shot about the unlikelihood of the way magicians are trained being changed and them all being sent to public school...) and half in the first person by a demon he summons up. The chapters in the demon's voice are rather more amusing and better written, though the device of heavy use of footnotes becomes a little irritating: to me it felt just a bit too much like self-conscious winking over the heads of the child readers to the adult readers. (I said winking and anyone who misread me is just vile.)
Where Stroud actually does something original is in the way the child hero is quite clearly portrayed, particularly but not solely in the demon's narration, as increasingly becoming as power-crazed as his adult mentors. Equally, while our hero does of course save the day, and the Prime Minister, from the Evil Magician/Government Minister, the cynical position of the demon, that there is little to choose between the two of them, is never quite answered.
Other stuff... Ross King's Ex Libris should have been good: spies, smugglers, ciphers, and book collectors, half set in Prague at the start of the Thirty Years War, half in England a generation later after the English Civil War. Unfortunately, it's badly written drivel, committing the cardinal sin of not only having occasional infodumps but also of being inaccurate on some of the minor details he chooses to dump. Add to that the fact that half the plot seems to vanish at the end of the book - I honestly don't understand why I'm supposed to care about the ending, or to put it another way, why the ending merited us being told about the events that had caused the plot to happen, and I don't care enough to re-read it and find out - and you have a very disappointing book.
Julian Branston The Eternal Quest: a first novel and a very good one. Literary, but amusing, and wearing its learning lightly. I suspect it might not be as enjoyable if you aren't a fan of Don Quixote, but I counted it as a real find, bought entirely on spec. after judging it purely by its cover (a painting of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza by Honoré Daumier).
Yann Martel, Life of Pi... having written off this novel as trite and twee drivel on first reading, I came to the conclusion that it had received so many plaudits it deserved another try.
Nope. Still twee and trite drivel...
Quicksilver: very good, but with some major flaws. But I'm tired now and it deserves a post of its own.... which it might get, some time.
Contrary to what the datestamp on this post says, or will say... willenhave said.... I'm writing this on Sunday evening with Midsomer Murders on in the background (and now tinkering with it on Monday evening with Radio 4 on in the background) and a copy of the European Commercial Agents Regulations open before me. The latter is a model of clarity, a work of beauty and staggering erudition, with which I am well familiar.
Everything in the previous sentence is, in the currently accepted reality, a lie...
Why is it that Sunday evening television drama is invariably this undemanding pap, anyway? I suspect the answer is that the schedulers believe that it's all we're capable of coping with after two nights and days of debauchery, and in my current state I can't deny that they may have a smidgen of a point.
Anyway, for those who are, for whatever reason, interested, here's what I've been doing...
I saw my sister and her family on Wednesday, down to stay with my brother-in-law's family and do the London tourist thing. I envy them in some ways: the kids are growing up in beautiful countryside, miles from anywhere (near Exmoor until a few years ago, in Co. Durham now) and only have to wrestle with the sprawling mess that is London for recreation. I love this city, but sometimes it gets to me...
I have an odd relationship with that sister. She looked after me much of the time when we were children (she's ten years older than me) but we see the world in very different ways: at one point she was a member of an organisation linked to Opus Dei. Thankfully she eventually left that group but she remains a very hard-line and traditional Catholic. But over the last few years I've begun to value her, and indeed my other siblings, more than I once did... she's not such a bad sort really and she seems to be bringing up the kids as reasonable approximations of human beings, which in my darker moments seems something of an achievement these days.
I really am becoming quite appallingly pre-War in my attitudes, aren't I? The Franco-Prussian War, possibly.
I took Friday off from being a practising lawyer and went to Oxford. Spent the morning, or what was left of it, working in the Bodleian on various Plans of mine before wandering around the usual haunts. Picked up a copy of Pullman's Lyra's Oxford in Blackwells: a clear cash in but a reasonable one as such things go. Then onto the Eagle and Child to meet Olympia and Penelope for the first time, where were shortly joined by Chrysaphi. Olympia very kindly offered me dinner, which I gratefully accepted: even had the company not been so good it's a personal rule never to refuse food... Turned out she lives about twenty yards from where I spent two years living some years ago.. ho hum.
Back to London late.. arrived at Baker Street just in time to miss the last tube to Swiss Cottage (from where I can walk home in a quarter of an hour) by one minute. I wandered round to the nightbus stop, as the drizzle grew more unpleasant by the moment, only to discover that the next bus due was twenty minutes away and no use to me anyway: the one I needed was likely to be ten minutes behind that. So I called to mind my mental map of Regents Park and decided that I could actually make it home round the west and north sides of the park in that time, so off I set.
Bloody bus passed me when I was five minutes from the stop where I'd have left it.
Saturday I woke up very late and went straight off to shop at Borough Market.. about the only place I'll buy meat these days. Wittered around and then eventually off to Rob and Steph's for a party for those who went on holiday to Greece this summer: me, Rob and Steph, Fiona, Ruth, Dan, and Adele, who didn't actually come to Greece but was supposed to. H., was sadly missing, having upped and gone to New York: no accounting for tastes. Dinner fantastic, as ever, particularly the meatballs: thanks Rob. Alcohol plentiful.... Ruth went for her last train, but Adele and I, who were both intending to make our way back to our respective flats by minicab and/or nightbus, eventually realised that we were just too tired and pissed. Since Dan and Fi had pre-booked the comfortable spare bedding, we made do as best we could with cushions and the like.... not the most comfortable bed one can imagine. Which explains my current mood. Sunday I did the small amount of work of which my stunted brain was capable before re-joining the others and Alan in first the pub and then a rather good Turkish restaurant in Victoria.
And finally back here, to my cold and lonely flat. Boo. Weep for me....
I have a nightmare first half of the week ahead of me: by the time I go home tomorrow I have to send through a fairly complex piece of drafting, and on Tuesday I have a hearing in Birmingham. At present I know absolutely nothing about that case... Ho hum.
Snce I'm now tinkering with this post on Monday evening, I can, in a world exclusive, reveal that I did in fact manage to send out said pleading by email at about 8PM today, and unless they change their mind again in the next 11 hours (for the third time) I am no longer going to Birmingham tomorrow morning. Hurrah for small mercies.
Oh, stuff recently read. Jonathan Stroud's Amulet of Samarkand isn't at all bad as children's fantasy goes. Quite obviously riding the Harry Potter coat tails, but worth a look: alternate history where Britain is ruled by an oligarchy of magicians. The time in which the novel is set clearly parallels our own, but Stroud, very subtly and without making too much of the point, makes his society Victorian in feel, indicating what he considers the social effect of such a change would be. The novel is written half from POV of a child magician being trained by a second rate master (there's a cheap shot about the unlikelihood of the way magicians are trained being changed and them all being sent to public school...) and half in the first person by a demon he summons up. The chapters in the demon's voice are rather more amusing and better written, though the device of heavy use of footnotes becomes a little irritating: to me it felt just a bit too much like self-conscious winking over the heads of the child readers to the adult readers. (I said winking and anyone who misread me is just vile.)
Where Stroud actually does something original is in the way the child hero is quite clearly portrayed, particularly but not solely in the demon's narration, as increasingly becoming as power-crazed as his adult mentors. Equally, while our hero does of course save the day, and the Prime Minister, from the Evil Magician/Government Minister, the cynical position of the demon, that there is little to choose between the two of them, is never quite answered.
Other stuff... Ross King's Ex Libris should have been good: spies, smugglers, ciphers, and book collectors, half set in Prague at the start of the Thirty Years War, half in England a generation later after the English Civil War. Unfortunately, it's badly written drivel, committing the cardinal sin of not only having occasional infodumps but also of being inaccurate on some of the minor details he chooses to dump. Add to that the fact that half the plot seems to vanish at the end of the book - I honestly don't understand why I'm supposed to care about the ending, or to put it another way, why the ending merited us being told about the events that had caused the plot to happen, and I don't care enough to re-read it and find out - and you have a very disappointing book.
Julian Branston The Eternal Quest: a first novel and a very good one. Literary, but amusing, and wearing its learning lightly. I suspect it might not be as enjoyable if you aren't a fan of Don Quixote, but I counted it as a real find, bought entirely on spec. after judging it purely by its cover (a painting of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza by Honoré Daumier).
Yann Martel, Life of Pi... having written off this novel as trite and twee drivel on first reading, I came to the conclusion that it had received so many plaudits it deserved another try.
Nope. Still twee and trite drivel...
Quicksilver: very good, but with some major flaws. But I'm tired now and it deserves a post of its own.... which it might get, some time.
