minnaway

Avengers (again, because it was a long weekend): ( dribs and drabs of thoughts )

And ( a couple more recs )

I didn't really technically have time this weekend to see Avengers again, ( and yet... )

Oh, Slings and Arrows season 1. ♥

I only intended to watch episode 4 today, having parceled out the first three episodes over previous days. But at the end of four, how to stop with Darren Nichols sent on his way and Geoffrey taking over the Hamlet? At the end of five, how could one turn off the television on a thread that thin? So onward it was.

Eta: Hmm, also, for good or ill, I think all my post-VVC earworms have been driven out by the Slings and Arrows theme song. "buck up, you melancholy Daaaaaane."

This year, my catch-up-on-an-older-show-through-DVDs-during-the-summer plan brought me to The Middleman, about which I had heard many good things, all of which turned out to be true. I found the 12 episodes that the show got to be adorable; it was a goofy, witty, kind, funny, silly, warm-hearted bundle of zestful joy. Natalie Morales as Wendy Watson, the pragmatic, smart-on-her-feet, snarky protagonist who ends up as the apprentice to the straightlaced, upright MiddleMan felt recognizable: a woman I might know.

I found myself wanting to take the characters and cross them over with other shows: make them into wizards and Reapers; have the MiddleMan meet dS's Fraser so they could compare cleaning tips for uniforms; and obviously you could have them meet the Doctor without any trouble at all. Amy Pond and Wendy Watson: they would be wonderful together. (Also imagine, if you would: the human version of the Tardis meeting Ida.) (Huh. I actually am not entirely sure how that would go.) I *completely* wanted Wendy and the Middleman to have a fake badge-off with Sam and Dean.

I also found myself wanting to map other fictional universes onto the Middleman setup and see how it would go. Matt Keesler reminded me vaguely of a younger Peter Krause in his Casey McCall days, plus the rapid patter/banter/repetition in phrases in the dialogue reminded me of Sorkin's dialogue, so: Casey McCall as the cleancut MiddleMan; Natalie as his apprentice; Dana as her best friend who's a performance artist (my god, can you not imagine Dana Whitaker organizing the *shit* out of art crawl, and keeping Pip well in line); Jeremy as Tyler, the boy who almost was a Middleboy; Danny as Natalie's guitar-playing, low-key friend; and Sally Sasser in Ida's role (after all, Danny did compare her to an android once).

Or there's the West Wing version: Donna, of course, is our Middleman-in-training, to Jed Bartlett (natch). Josh is Tyler; Sam is Donna's earnest BFF roommate, and Mrs. Landingham is Ida. Or possibly Toby Ziegler is Ida. He would make an excellent cranky android.

Or Josh Lyman is the Middleboy in training to kickass hero CJ Cregg, with Sam as his earnest BFF roommate and Leo as the android who punctures Josh's moments of hubris with well-placed sarcasm.

Or Ronon Dex, apprentice in training to Teyla--she saves the world a lot. I'm not actually sure who the BFF roommate is in that scenario, given that John Sheppard pretty much has to be the laconic guitar-playing guy in the hallway, but I do know that the cranky android is of course played by Rodney McKay.

Or, because The Middleman having once been a SEAL reminded me of Hawaii Five-O: Kono as apprentice to Steve the Middleman, Chin as her cousin and BFF and roommate, and Danny as cranky android.

Anyway. Clearly, I've been getting way too much amusement out of this. Returning to the actual show, and the things I adored about it.

( cutting for vague spoilers )

In short, love love love. Btw, I am not sure if I want to read fic at the moment, but does anyone know of any good Middlevids out there?

Book rec: Midnight Riot, by Ben Aaronovitch. First in an urban fantasy series starring Peter Grant, a new cop in London, finding out about and tapping into unexpected undercurrents of magic after he encounters a ghost on a case. Snappy and relatively well-paced (I felt the end went a bit wonky); the first person narration is tight and engaging; and the banter between Grant and his mentor Nightingale made me grin quite often. Aaronovitch's depiction of London is diverse and multi-ethnic--Grant himself is mixed-race--and vibrant. I think probably people who liked Lindsay Davis's Falco series would like this as well.

Off to track down a copy of Moon Over Soho, the second book in the series...

Someone on my flist (thank you, whoever you were!) mentioned about a month ago that Carla Kelly had a new book out, and The Admiral's Penniless Bride came via interlibrary loan today. Only about 70 pages in, so I suppose it could go horribly awry, but I'd forgotten how much I *like* Carla Kelly's characters. They have texture. They are damaged in ways that feel genuine, not for more drama but simply because life can be brutal sometimes. So pleased to read new material from her!

Also read: Picked up Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series since Rachelmanija made them sound intriguing. Fast reads, and they get more engrossing as the series of five continues; I finished the fourth at 10:30 and started the 5th right away that night. A couple of brief vaguely spoilery impressions and thoughts: ( behind the cut )

Before that...hmm, what was there? A reread of McKillip's The Cygnet and the Firebird because reading The Bards of Bone Plain made me crave vintage McKillip.

Reread of Dawn Treader because I'd seen the movie courtesy of a friend (thanks, J!) with tickets. (The visuals mostly matched my imagination, and that visual of Lucy opening the door to Coriakin's house was especially evocative. I liked the actors very much. The plotline...sigh. It's not that I can't see why they found it necessary to change things, I just wish their changes had been *better.*)

Then I reread The Silver Chair, just because.

The first third or so of The Dragon Book, a collection of stories about dragons, before I had to return it to the library.

Sarah Monette's Corambis, the fourth and final book in the series that started with Melusine. Like Melusine, a page turner; read it in a rush. Liked seeing Corambis and getting a sense of their magical customs, very different from what we'd seen before. Liked the new character who narrated parts of the book, Kay Brightmore. Still like Mildmay the best, and wish we had gotten more of him than we did. Was more or less pleased with where the series ended. Went back and reread Melusine afterward (still a page turner even though I knew what happened.)

Category: things that are adorably awesome!

Barry Deutsch's YA graphic novel, Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword. The tagline is: "Yet Another Troll-Fighting 11-Year-Old Orthodox Jewish Girl," which pretty much encapsulates the awesomeness of this. Mirka wants to fight dragons! She has an incredibly awesome stepmother! And an adorable younger brother among other siblings! There is a witch and a troll and a pig, and the illustrations are lively and fun, and there will hopefully be many sequels to this.

Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Pink, about 20 minutes from the end.

( cut for spoilers )

Monday TV

( The Event 1.2 )

( Hawaii Five-O, 1.2, Ohana )

Brief reactions

( The Event series premiere )

( Hawaii Five-O )

Eee! There will be a new Peter Beagle out soonish, in the same world as Innkeeper's Song!

http://www.amazon.com/Return-Peter-S-Beagle/dp/1596063092/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280965945&sr=8-12

Reading log, non-fiction:

Philip Dray's Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen. A really fascinating history about post-US Civil War Reconstruction: the prose goes down easy and the story goes down hard, because for every hard-fought success you know that you're inching (and sometimes hurtling) towards Jim Crow. Dray doesn't present biographies of the congressmen so much as he uses incidents in their lives and political careers as lenses to talk about the arc of Reconstruction. Occasionally heavier on the white men than I expected, and lower on women than meets my personal interests, but still highly recommended.

( things that caught my attention while reading )

About halfway through A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, ed. Nguyen Ngoc Bich, translated Nguyen Ngoc Bich with Burton Rafeel and W.S. Merwin. Picked this 1974 collection up from a library display at the very end of April, which apparently was National Poetry Month. I haven't read a poetry collection for a long time--like, a decade--but I've been enjoying dipping into this.

Here's an early one:

Rebirth, by Man Giac (Ly Dynasty, 1010-1225)

Spring goes, and the hundred flowers.
Spring comes, and the hundred flowers.
My eyes watching things passing,
my head fills with years.
But when spring has gone not all the flowers follow.
Last night a plum branch blossomed by my door.

Something about that last line makes my toes curl in happiness.

And here's the first stanza of another early poem, Emotions on a Spring Day, by Tran Quang Khai (Tran Dynasty, 1225-1400):

The drizzle, white over the plum trees, falls in fine threads.
I close the door, sit and read, book-drunken.
Two thirds of my spring have been idled away.
At fifty I see myself a dwindling old man.
The mind years for home, but the bird is spent,
The tides of imperial favor swell, but the fish comes too late.
Only the reckless spirit of youth remains:
I will roll back the winter wind and write a new poem.

Book-drunken. Book-drunken. Most perfect word in the universe, y/y?

Okay, and this poem from the same time period in the Tran Dynasty evokes something of the same feel as 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

( Chrysanthemums (Excerpts) by Huyen Quang, cut for length )

Some of the early anonymous poetry from the folk tradition was hit or miss for me (ditties about women who were unmarried because they were too picky abounded), but I really liked this one:

( A Farmer's Calendar, cut for length )

Anyway, am well pleased with the collection, and with my library for putting it out for me to pick up. (Occasionally, libraries astonish me all anew: the idea of them! That this book from 1974 should come my way, this book that, if I look at the due date sheet on the inside, has been checked out only four times, and mine is the fourth--1992, 1994, 1995, 2009. It's possible that no one has touched this book for years! A decade! Until the librarian came to the poetry section and picked it out to put on the display for patrons to browse in April, and there it came to my fingertips, so that I could read a poem written a thousand years ago and say, "book-drunken! yes!")