So, I've been diving in to Sherlock Holmes fic - experiencing rapture of the deep, really. Most of the stories I've read so far are incredible - I must have found a picky rec-page, because this level of quality is surely unusual.
Then today, my iPod plays "Famous Blue Raincoat" by Leonard Cohen for me and I start semi-consciously filking it for H/W.... hilarious! "Sincerely, M. Morstan," indeed!
Okay, okay... I can't help myself. Here goes:
It's four in the morning, the end of December I'm writing you now though you won't get the letter London is cold, but we like where we're living There's music on Baker Street all through the evening I hear that you've finished your work deep in Switzerland You've died for nothing now and he's kept all the records
And John came in with a lock of your hair He said that you gave it to him That night that you planned to go clear But you never went clear
Ah, the last time he saw you you looked so much older Your famous wool cape coat was torn at the shoulder He's been to the station to meet every train And he came home having gone there in vain You treated my husband to a flake of your life and when he came home, I was nobody's wife Well I've seen you there with a pipe in your teeth One more thin gypsy thief And now John's far away - you've all his regard And what can I tell you, his brother, my killer? What can i possibly say? You know I don't miss you, will never forgive you I'm glad that you have gone away If you ever come by here, for John, on your knees While your enemy's sleeping, and her man is free... No thanks for the trouble you put in his eyes I know that it's there for good, while I'm by his side
And John came in with a lock of your hair He said that you gave it to him The night that you planned to go clear
From Gail Collins' column in the NYT: "This week, Barton became the star of another hearing, which was convened to grill Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP. The rosy-cheeked Englishman had the kind of dopey sullenness you might find in an underachieving student at the Hogwarts detention room."
LOL... alaana_fair should start a new meme: Which Harry Potter Character is This Evildoing CEO?
In other news, my house got broken into, my purse and my husband's laptop stolen. BLAH doesn't cover it. AARGH doesn't cover it. Frantically closing down and reopening two checking accounts, two credit cards, getting my house and business re-keyed by locksmiths, getting new I.D., having no debit cards for a week, losing all my nice, new makeup (purchased for my wedding), my awesome sunglasses, FUCKING HELL. What a nightmare. This is all made only slightly better by the fact that the stupid thief has been apprehended - he tried to cash a forged check at my bank, and the eagle-eyed teller sensed that something was off. The cops came within minutes and took him into custody.
Also, I've been reading candle_beck 's Sherlock Holmes stories. Hot diggety damn, she's (he's?) good. Highly recommend if you are into Holmes/Watson even in theory.
I've bolded the ones that i've read. I start out really strong, but peter out towards the end. Too much H/D in my life, I guess....
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible (well, enough of it to get the gist)(and also, the dirty parts, repeatedly) 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare Most, but not all 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger 19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (this is a classic????) 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (okay, I LOVED this as a 15 year old, but a classic?) 26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (nope, but I saw the movie. What a pointless load of drivel.) 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (will never forget the last scene. I expect to revisit it every time I nurse.) 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (My favorite book of childhood. Memorized nearly all the poems, and can still recite many of them) 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis 34 Emma - Jane Austen 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis How is this different from 33? 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (I second Bryoney -what is this doing on a classics list???) 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel 52 Dune - Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (oh Sydney Carton! I swoon!) 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (okay, i only read it for the gay scene at the beginning, but I got halfway through and I think I 'get' it) 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses - James Joyce 76 The Inferno – Dante 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal - Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession - AS Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell YAYYY The best modern novel! 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - (second bryoney- for real?) 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -- I tried, I really did. But the blowhard protagonist reminded me too much of an ex) 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Of all the men for my darling man to be fascinated by, I would NOT have picked Mr. Sparkly-Can't-Act-His-Way-Out-of-a-Paper-Bag, but in all honesty I'm somewhat tickled by this.
Plus I'm laughing my ass off.
I'll probably stop laughing later tonight, while sitting through Remember Me. I never thought I'd have to reluctantly accompany my manly boyfriend to a chick flick.
Thank you, Romaine, for the gift! That was incredibly sweet, considering how inactive I've been in fandom for the last... long... while. I've never really felt a part of fandom, mostly because I don't know how to do the work it takes to make LJ friends, but your gift made me feel included, and warm and fuzzy to boot!
Also, I had to post to tell of the AMAZING thing that happened last night. I was bartending a private party at a venue I'm closely connected with, and they had my friend do karaoke for them. A fellow with a british accent came to the bar and I started a tab for him, noticing that his last name was Froud. "No relation to Brian Froud?" I asked whimsically. Brian Froud was the genius behind the design of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, as well as many other things. He said, "He's my father, actually."
Well, I gushed. I LOVED The Dark Crystal as a kid. Hell, I love it now. I've watched it as recently as 6 months ago. Nevertheless, I felt bad gushing about this person's father, so I forcibly stopped myself and let him enjoy his beverage.
Later, though, he was lingering at the bar, looking in the songbook for songs to sing, and I couldn't help it. I said "I'm going to be one of those people and ask you about your dad." He smiled, and it looked genuine, so I continued. "He designed Labyrinth, right?" He said, "Yes, he did. And you know the little baby in Labyrinth?"
THAT WAS HIM. TOBY WAS ACROSS THE BAR FROM ME. I SERVED TOBY A DRINK! Several, actually, and when he was nice and drunk, I and my KJ got him to take pictures with him.
And then he sang "Magic Dance," making the night complete.
He was extremely nice. He's also a designer, of large puppets. In fact, he was working on Michael Jackson's stage show, when... well, we all know what happened. Anyway, he's in my town now, teaching puppet workshops! I'm going to attend one.
Oh, and finally: This makes me ONE DEGREE AWAY FROM DAVID BOWIE.
I just learned that Sarah Rees Brennan, formerly known as Maya and Mistful, has not only taken her fics down and requested that those who have downloaded her master fic file not share it with others, but she has reportedly deleted her own stories from her hard drive.
I felt sick to my stomach when I read this.
Her stories have meant so much to me, given me such joy, that I really cannot express the effect they've had on my life. Maybe that sounds weird, but it's no different to me than the effect H.G. Wells or Ursula Le Guin has had on me. Good authors, no matter their subject, illuminate life and what it means to be human, and I deeply feel that SRB has done this as well as many more established authors. To know that these stories, which she must love, are lost to her and lost to all that didn't get the pdf in time or who lack the network to track someone who has the file, just makes my heart hurt.
I know the reasons why she did she took the stories down from public view. They make a certain amount of sense professionally and legally. I still can't help but feel that violence has been done to some great works of art, that by permanently removing them from her world she has symbolically repudiated and negated those works. In a way, it is an insult to her readership.
I'm not angry with her, by any means, but I do feel deep sadness and yes, somehow betrayed.
Just in case someone reads this and misunderstands, I do not dispute her right to do as she has done. I just needed to express how I feel about it.
I've never read Samuel Butler. Until now, that is. Why is that? I shall never know. What I do know is that he is my new dead literary soulmate.
From The Way Of All Flesh:
(I have underlined the part of the text that I brought to my lips and kissed.)
Nor yet did he know that ideas, no less than the living beings in whose
minds they arise, must be begotten by parents not very unlike themselves,
the most original still differing but slightly from the parents that have
given rise to them. Life is like a fugue, everything must grow out of
the subject and there must be nothing new. Nor, again, did he see how
hard it is to say where one idea ends and another begins, nor yet how
closely this is paralleled in the difficulty of saying where a life
begins or ends, or an action or indeed anything, there being an unity in spite of infinite multitude, and an infinite multitude in spite of unity.
Can you think of a better description of fanfiction? Unity in spite of infinite multitude, infinite multitude in spite of unity.
I would wax rhapsodic about this man at length, but I have a book to finish!
So, sadly, about a month ago we had a death in our little voluntary family: Googly-Eyed Pete went to meet the Great Goldfish in the Sky. This left poor Ginny Weasley quite bereft, so I knew I must get her another fishy little companion.
Yesterday, I was selecting said companion when I noticed a silvery little darling wriggling amongst the other gingers. Guess who is now cohabiting with Ginevra?
Welcome Draco Malfoy, the fish animagus! Now all I need is a black goldfish and we're all set for an EWE showdown, aquarium-style!
In other news, I rashly signed up for Beltane, because apparently the fear of deadlines and dissappointing other people is the only way I ever get anything written, these days. Wish me luck!
I really can't imagine a better holiday than the one I'm having right now - my boyfriend making the turkey and about to go wrap my presents, my tree decorated and, underneath it, presents to all my friends waiting for them to come over tonight, reading a promising hd_holidays story in front of the fire (The Great Divide), and outside my city is snowier than it has ever been at this time of year. Huzzah!
If anyone wants to help motivate me, I sat down and jotted off a few paragraphs of holiday H/D yesterday.
silly
cheerful