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landingtree) wrote2023-03-31 06:01 pm
landingtree) wrote2023-03-31 06:01 pm
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Reading diary: poisoned bibles
This week has been very low energy, I have been handing in assignments and essentially cancelling everything else from dance class on down. However, here is reading diary from days ago, all subsequent reading diary has looked rather like '27/03/2023: Read something, forget what, more later.'
26/03/2023
I was in a reading of The Duchess of Malfi today. God this play is good. This language.
There is a turn in my emotional response to it from 'So very bleak, I care about these people and they're being destroyed' to 'In order to be Jacobean enough, this priest is required to carry around a poisoned bible just in case he wants to poison someone by asking them to make an oath with one hand on the book. Luckily for him the situation arose! He got to murder! Also, this is a play where someone lusts after his own sister so hard he becomes a werewolf. The person reading his part today missed this detail and did not know they were playing a werewolf, which is understandable, because the scene goes by pretty fast. Meanwhile the titular Duchess of Malfi has only one sin to her name, and that's being too strong a female character for the period: everything she says and does about marriage is lovely to behold, and it's only a shame she had to be in a Jacobean.
Also I am reading Almost Nowhere, partly because it is the first thing I know of to be influenced by both Homestuck and Terra Ignota. Also spoilers, I guess, but I'm not going to cut these ones! Almost Nowhere, still being released serially, is the longest and most ambitious of author Nostalgebraist's three novels. It is also the one I find most annoying. Nostalgebraist likes stylistic play, and has described Almost Nowhere on his blog as his most considered book, and the one that most consistently satisfies him to look back over. My experience of it is 'laboured.' First, a narrator will spend a paragraph describing how a kind of telepathy-with-aliens isn't wordlike and can't be described. Then, later in the novel, another narrator will interrupt the first narrator's attempt to do a yet more high-flown version of that description of the indescribable and say “For god's sake narrator you did this twice already, we get it, jeez.” The problem is that I find the high-flown narrator and the undercutting narrator equally annoying. I find what a certain Homestuck podcast* describes as 'the deflationary move' unsuccessful here because it is trying to deflate what never began inflating. The book has been telling me from the start that one of its characters, Azad, is a pretentious git too in love with his own words, but, well, I've never been in love with his words at all; he never gets all that high-flown, and perhaps that's intentional – but you've got to have some version before your subversion can get started. (Contrast this with the AI who talks in ludicrously purple prose in Floornight, which I found charming enough to podfic).
Caveat: I am reading rapidly (62% of kindle copy in one day) something that has been released serially since 2016, and is to some extent designed to be read that way: many points to stop and wonder, stop and absorb new developments, see what they might mean, skipped blithely over.
What's it about? First contact / The Fall. Time loops. Physics. Communication difficulties. Misogyny. Who gets to tell the story.
*Homestuck Made This World. It is Very Theory, to the 'referencing a line of Foucault is inherently amusing' degree, and so resolutely critical instead of fannish that it rubbed me the wrong way. (I'm not used to people regarding 'we might enter into the reader-writer contract of assuming briefly that these characters are real or that this worldbuilding is being done for its own sake' as a distant, perverse sort of behavior, perfectly acceptable of course but not at all what they're doing. I kept listening, well, the root reason I listen to most podcasts is 'these voices are comfortable in my ears' and 'white dudes do theory about Homestuck, grumbling' is, to my sheepishness, apparently comfort-listening - but also because of the really interest cultural context. When I was reading Homestuck I had no idea, so much of the comic is about what was happening on the internet about the comic.
26/03/2023
I was in a reading of The Duchess of Malfi today. God this play is good. This language.
There is a turn in my emotional response to it from 'So very bleak, I care about these people and they're being destroyed' to 'In order to be Jacobean enough, this priest is required to carry around a poisoned bible just in case he wants to poison someone by asking them to make an oath with one hand on the book. Luckily for him the situation arose! He got to murder! Also, this is a play where someone lusts after his own sister so hard he becomes a werewolf. The person reading his part today missed this detail and did not know they were playing a werewolf, which is understandable, because the scene goes by pretty fast. Meanwhile the titular Duchess of Malfi has only one sin to her name, and that's being too strong a female character for the period: everything she says and does about marriage is lovely to behold, and it's only a shame she had to be in a Jacobean.
Also I am reading Almost Nowhere, partly because it is the first thing I know of to be influenced by both Homestuck and Terra Ignota. Also spoilers, I guess, but I'm not going to cut these ones! Almost Nowhere, still being released serially, is the longest and most ambitious of author Nostalgebraist's three novels. It is also the one I find most annoying. Nostalgebraist likes stylistic play, and has described Almost Nowhere on his blog as his most considered book, and the one that most consistently satisfies him to look back over. My experience of it is 'laboured.' First, a narrator will spend a paragraph describing how a kind of telepathy-with-aliens isn't wordlike and can't be described. Then, later in the novel, another narrator will interrupt the first narrator's attempt to do a yet more high-flown version of that description of the indescribable and say “For god's sake narrator you did this twice already, we get it, jeez.” The problem is that I find the high-flown narrator and the undercutting narrator equally annoying. I find what a certain Homestuck podcast* describes as 'the deflationary move' unsuccessful here because it is trying to deflate what never began inflating. The book has been telling me from the start that one of its characters, Azad, is a pretentious git too in love with his own words, but, well, I've never been in love with his words at all; he never gets all that high-flown, and perhaps that's intentional – but you've got to have some version before your subversion can get started. (Contrast this with the AI who talks in ludicrously purple prose in Floornight, which I found charming enough to podfic).
Caveat: I am reading rapidly (62% of kindle copy in one day) something that has been released serially since 2016, and is to some extent designed to be read that way: many points to stop and wonder, stop and absorb new developments, see what they might mean, skipped blithely over.
What's it about? First contact / The Fall. Time loops. Physics. Communication difficulties. Misogyny. Who gets to tell the story.
*Homestuck Made This World. It is Very Theory, to the 'referencing a line of Foucault is inherently amusing' degree, and so resolutely critical instead of fannish that it rubbed me the wrong way. (I'm not used to people regarding 'we might enter into the reader-writer contract of assuming briefly that these characters are real or that this worldbuilding is being done for its own sake' as a distant, perverse sort of behavior, perfectly acceptable of course but not at all what they're doing. I kept listening, well, the root reason I listen to most podcasts is 'these voices are comfortable in my ears' and 'white dudes do theory about Homestuck, grumbling' is, to my sheepishness, apparently comfort-listening - but also because of the really interest cultural context. When I was reading Homestuck I had no idea, so much of the comic is about what was happening on the internet about the comic.
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(I checked in on Gunnerkrig Court the other week btw, as I do once or twice a year. It continues excellent but my sense, when last read, that it was homing in on its grand final destination was... correct if seen from a vantage of 2030, maybe. It has definitely rounded some sort of last or penultimate bend. But the finish line isn't very close).
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I also glanced at Gunnerkrig Court the other week, which I drifted away from at a point where fire was becoming extremely important. At this point I think I'm waiting for it to be done and then I'll read the whole thing.
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