mme_hardy | Entries tagged with reviews

The book deserves a longer review. If you're interested in the Victorian period, and like social history that doesn't just present but analyzes --why were some pleasure gardens acceptable and others not? Class-- read this book. It has lots of little satisfying things I didn't know. The precursor to the music hall was "free-and-easies" (men only) and "cock-and-hens" (coed), which were group singing sessions held in pubs, and later in large extensions to pubs, led by a chairman who called for group and individual songs, and (of course) for toasts. These were suppressed, and reborn as 'saloon-theatres', which were suppressed, which were reborn as music halls, which survived.

The subtitle is "From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How The Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment". I'm just to the seaside, and am having a very good time.

This morning I unpacked one large box of kitchen stuff and am wiped out for the day. This is why the unpacking is going so slowly. On the other hand, the good big roasting pan and the pretty Polish casserole dishes have surfaced. To the trash, a well-made Swiss kitchen gadget that both slices and grates garlic. We have knives.

Someday I will find the beaters to the Kitchenaids, dammit. There will be baking.

There are books that are like nothing other than themselves. Gormenghast. Lud-in-the-Mist. The Worm Ouroboros.

The Hands of the Emperor is one of those. I love it so much that I can say nothing but here. Here is this book I love. Kermitflail. I hope you love it too.

THotE is about Cliopher 'Kip' Mdang. If, in his native land, you asked Kip who he was, he would respond, "I am Cliopher Mdang. My island is Loaloa. My dances are Aoteketetana." (thanks, edenfalling!) If, within the Empire, you ask who Cliopher is, you will be told that he is the Hands of the Emperor. Kip is an emigrant from the Vangavaye-Ve to the Empire. Kip is a two-cultures child, someone who was raised in one culture and became a bureaucrat in the second. Kip is a man who set out to change the world, and succeeded.

THotE is competence porn. Kip succeeds because he has a gift for the particular and the widespread. Kip can perceive both the local and the Empire-wide consequences of his decisions. Kip wants to change the world. He does. There's a lot of thought about colonialism, and about the importance of colonialized cultures, and about the importance of knowing who you are.

The world is changed, ultimately, because Kip recognizes that his Emperor needs a vacation. From that, the remainder of the novel flows. The novel also flows from Kip's slow, slow realization that his home doesn't recognize what he's done, and his home culture's slow, slow realization of how his work has changed their lives.

THotE is a 900-page novel. It's a big ask. I have read it at least five times since I bought it, in a time when I have barely been able to read novels at all.

e: For an alternate, well-reasoned take on the book, see Skygiants. They are absolutely right that this book is idfic. It hits my id, so. This is the only book I've ever read in which the performance of a ceremonial dance is a page-turner that I stayed up late to finish.

Welp. A fic I liked a lot praised Donna Tartt's The Secret History, and I remembered that I had been vaguely planning on reading it for *gulp* decades. Reader, I bought it.

The Secret History is set at a small second-rate liberal-arts college in Vermont, some time in the 1970s. Reader, I attended a small second-rate liberal-arts college in Vermont, late in the 1970s. This is my specialist subject. As I read, not only did I dislike the characters (more later), I disliked the milieu. I'm going to go a bit Mark Twain here.

Small liberal-arts colleges in the 1970s do not teach domestic arts. One of the characters' girlfriend is taking classes in the Early Childhood Center. If a liberal-arts college in the 70s taught anything as obviously job-oriented as that, all the professors would have been laughed out of the next MLA or equivalent. My own college was vaguely ashamed of teaching education; you couldn't major in it, and IIRC the minor didn't include all the courses necessary to earn a teaching certificate.

The protagonist is forced to stay at school during the winter break, which for some reason lasts through all of December and January. He can't stay in the dorms, and he can't afford to pay for housing. The only thing he can find is sleeping quarters with a hippie who builds furniture. When he arrives, it turns out that the barn he's supposed to sleep in not only has no heating, but has a hole in the ceiling through which snow falls. He sleeps in blankets, "two or three sweaters, long underwear, wool trousers and overcoat". In those pre-global-warming days, Vermont winters routinely (and this is mentioned in the text) hit 20-below-zero Fahrenheit, -29 Celsius.

"A good many people asked me later if I had realized what a dangerous thing this was, attempting to live in an unheated building in upstate Vermont during the coldest months of the year, and to be frank, I hadn't. ... the stories I'd heard, of drunks, of old people, of careless skiers freezing to death, but for some reason none of this seemed to apply to me."

Here is the problem. Anybody who has lived through -20 weather knows that just walking through the air freezes your face. It freezes the breath in your nostrils. If, late for class, you run across campus with wet braided hair, it freezes your hair. No matter how vague your notions about cold weather are, once you've walked through negative twenty, you are well aware that this stuff will kill you if you let it. Pride is all very well, but sleeping night after night in -20 weather in a room that is open to the goddamned sky will kill you, and death will not come as a surprise.

The hero's wealthy friends apparently do not notice that he's poor, except for the one nasty bully. If there's one thing that people who have grown up wealthy notice, it's the signifiers of being wealthy. I'm only halfway through the book, so maybe it will turn out they've known all along but are pretending not to know.

The hero's friends commit a Dionysaic murder, as one does. One of them punches a man so hard that his brains splash all over the murderer's clothes.

And here is where we get into my really, really specialist subject, and I get very cross indeed. Our heroes (?) want to poison somebody. They feed mushrooms to two dogs, one of which dies, the other doesn't. They want to calculate from this the lethal and sub-lethal doses of Amanita muscaris.

The hero says that he could certainly have done this with a Physician's Desk Reference, but unfortunately it doesn't cover mushrooms. No. But you know what does, that your college library will certainly have? A book or two on toxicology. It's not hard. Look up "poisons", rejoicing in the knowledge that it's the 1970s and that card catalogs do not track search history. Read your finds in the stacks, rejoicing that the librarians will pay you no notice at all.

The heroes then spend a dreadful night's effort because to work out the two doses would require "a good working knowledge of calculus and chemistry proper. There's no way to figure it otherwise." They use calculus and fail, because only somebody with "three or four years of college calculus" could do it.

Not everybody is mathy, but when you're faced with "Dog A died of X amount of poison, Dog B didn't", calculus could not be more beside the point than Boolean logic. If you knew the dogs' weights, it would be a fricking ratio. The friend blathers on about the variation in concentration of poison from one mushroom to the next, and this concept right there tells you why mathematics in general, and calculus in particular, will get you nowhere.

The hero goes on, "There's no way to figure it otherwise. I mean, chemical concentrations aren't even measured in terms of grams and milligrams but in something called moles."

The friend, like the hero, is attending a small mediocre liberal-arts college. That means that he has in fact studied high-school chemistry and knows perfectly well how to convert grams to moles and back.

The hero thought vaguely of being a doctor, and spent a lot of time volunteering and taking side classes before college. He knows what the PDR is. He therefore knows that medications are in fact prescribed in practical units, not moles, and he probably knows that medications are dosed by body weight.

And that's where I stopped for the night. I hope that all the characters are successful in their murder, that they are then sent to jail for the rest of their natural days, and that everybody else in this book is hit by falling casques.

At this point, I am in it to the bitter end, but I have noticed some more annoying things.

(1) Myfanwy, both pre-Scratch and post-Scratch, resents all women she perceives as prettier than herself. This makes me loathe her, but it's either a deliberate character trait --why?-- or another cause of the author knowing What Women Are Like. A few greatest hits:

This time, I got the female body, Eliza, as company. She's everything I'm not: tall, blond, exquisite, with large breasts. [Note: in this context, "female body" is appropriate: she's a part of a gestalt, four people who are the same human but happen to have four different bodies.] I realized abruptly that I hadn't actually seen Eliza for months, and was secretly pleased to see that she'd put on a bit of weight.
...
...there were two blond Cockney girls down the bar from me ... One was tall and thin, and one was built like a normal person.
...
[Myfanwy has just met an American who is her equal in rank in the Sekrit Organization.]
Please let her have slept her way to the top, thought Myfanwy. No one deserves to be this beautiful and clever too.
...
[Myfanwy has just met her own long-lost sister]
She looked at the woman, recognizing her own features, albeit much prettier (gorgeous, really, let's admit it) along with a taller body and long, fashionably highlighted hair.

(2) Myfanwy has experienced something horrible, so she goes for a drink.

I wandered into the most disreputable pub I could find and then realized that I couldn't find any cocktails. Finally, I asked the man to make me something that would kill the pain and not taste like arse. He eyed me thoughtfully and then produced a drink with an alarming number of layers. I accepted it dully, took a long sip through a bendy straw, and swung around to face the room, my legs dangling from the stool.

I think this is wildly out of sync with British pub culture -- wouldn't you be taking your life into your own hands if you asked a disreputable publican to make you a drink, any drink, given that probably the only not-tasting-like-arse thing in the pub is beer? -- but it's unfathomable even in an American context. If I went into a dive bar, and weren't, as in fact I am not, a beer drinker, I'd order something absolutely un-fuck-upable like a Scotch and soda or a vodka tonic. The Scotch wouldn't be good, but I still like bad Scotch. If I did, having lost my sanity, ask the bartender for something that didn't taste like ass (truthfully, I'd expect the irritated bartender to make something based on Red Bull, six tablespoons of bitters, and possibly the dregs of the bar towel), I would fall out of my chair if he brought me a pousse-café or anything like it. Layered drinks take skill, but more importantly, they take time. A disreputable bar would have drink stirrers, but not likely bendy straws, any more than they'd have cocktail umbrellas.

(3) Finally -- not going to type this one in -- our heroine has gone into a wildly botanically dangerous situation, where she winds up infected with sentient mold, but it all works out okay. When she gets out, instead of screaming "BIOHAZARD, walk this way into the nice van, don't touch anything", she is left to clean up on her own, and doesn't take a shower on the grounds that headquarters was packed with other people who needed showers. None of the hotels have vacancies, because of course it is a brilliant idea to take your covered with mold spores self into a hotel, so she goes to a youth hostel.

Holy cow.

I'm greatly enjoying this book, and looking forward to learning what happens next. (Avoid the TV series. It's terrible.)

The premise that Myfanwy Thomas wakes up with complete amnesia and has to interpret the world through letters she's left herself. (This isn't Memento; she's sorting out a government conspiracy rather than a murder.)

So far, there have been two moments that threw me out of the book. Here's the first. Myfanwy is standing in front of a mirror for the first time, naked.

I am nondescript, she thought. Nondescript features with shoulder-length dark hair. Hmm. She opened the robe and looked critically at her body.

Lots of adjectives beginning with the letter S are appropriate here, she thought grimly. Short. Scrawny. Small breasts. Skinned knees (although presumably those were only temporary). She remembered something from the letter and felt along the inside of her left thigh. A small hard scar. From falling out of a tree and impaling this leg at the age of nine, she thought. Her body was not particularly fit-looking but seemed blessedly free of cellulite. Shaved legs. A conservative and recent bikini wax. More bruises had risen to the surface, but they didn't conceal the fact that she was not possessed of an especially sexy body. I think I could do better, she thought. I won't be able to hit the level of Hot, but I might be able to manage Cute. If I have a big enough budget. Or at least some makeup to work with.

Hands up if you think this description was written by a woman. Two sentences for her face, a paragraph for her body. Focusing on "how sexy I am" (see also bikini wax) and not "what does my face say about me?" Like, I'd be wondering how old I was. What color my eyes were. Whether I looked like I smiled a lot. The bikini wax would come very low on the list.

Five pages later, our heroine looks at her picture. "Ordinary features, pale, with independent-minded eyebrows." Her driver's license tells her that her hair is brown, her eyes, blue, and she's thirty-one. She hasn't noticed any of these until she looks at the license.

Second, our heroine has called a cab.

She gave the address to the extremely scruffy driver and was then forced to concede that she didn't know where it was.
...
So you have no idea where this house is? the driver asked. He was elderly and wearing one of those dubious flat caps.

It's been established that our heroine is fabulously wealthy. Surely she'd be calling a black cab, whose driver had The Knowledge? (I checked. Yup, author is Australian.) If she did call a minicab, surely it would have GPS?

It's a ripping yarn. I am enjoying it. I am just a picky crankypants.

A decade or so ago, I learned the fandom phrase, "This is not my beautiful cake," meaning "I get that this is important to you, but it's not for me." A bit later than that, as an RWA member, I learned the phrase "I don't think I'm your reader," meaning "Here's my critique, but given that I don't resonate with the book, you may want to ignore it."

Well. I don't think I'm this beautiful cake.

The Good Luck Girls is set in a dystopian Old West --but I repeat myself. The world is divided between dustbloods, who don't cast shadows, and fairbloods, who do. This is a not-at-all-heavy-handed metaphor for American chattel slavery. "Others had been sent to Arketta on reeking prison ships from the colonies. Dustbloods, they were called. They looked just the same as ordinary, fair-blood folks, except that they couldn't cast a shadow. The first dustbloods had had their shadows ripped away as part of their punishment, and their children had been born without them." As I recall, the "does a person cast shadows" issue doesn't appear in NPC encounters later.

Poor families often sell their daughters -- never sons, at least not in the text -- into Welcome Houses (bordellos). The daughters work as daybreak girls (servants) until they reach age sixteen, at which point they become sundown girls/Good Luck Girls (sex workers), working for room and board. Good Luck Girls age out at 40, after which they're thrown out. Children sold into the Welcome Houses are mentally tortured by Raveners until they are broken; they are spayed; they are marked with tattoos, "favors", that burn when covered by makeup or clothing. The girls and women are prisoners. They are also deliberately addicted to sorrow-killing drugs that destroy the mind.

In the first chapter, and only that chapter, our viewpoint character is Clementine, who is about to experience her Lucky Night (three guesses). Instead of going quietly, she clonks her brag over the head with a slag lamp, killing him.

Thereafter, our viewpoint character is Aster, Clementine's older sister. All the girls in this particular Lucky House are named after flowers, although I think the author may have confused the citrus "clementine" with the flower "columbine". Aster rescues her sister from the inevitable murder prosecution; the two escape, along with Tansy, Mallow, and Violet, the last a fairblood Good Luck Girl who has been the madam's enforcer up to this point.

They mean to escape across the plains to the place where Lady Ghost can remove their favors, freeing them to rejoin the general population without fear of being identified as escapees. But it's all so joyless. I mean, yes, I'm reviewing a YA book about dystopian teens fleeing sex slavery at the risk of death or recapture. This is not going to be a laugh riot. But if I contrast (say) The Hunger Games, there are lots of individual incidents of comfort, interest, and satisfaction. If I contrast Holes, there are enormous quantities of fuligin-black humor. In The Good Luck Girls? There are just women being miserable for pages on pages on pages, often having flashbacks to times when they were even more miserable.

It's a very unhappy book, the journey toward the promised (ish) land is grueling, and the final arrival is both pat and disappointing. If you like dystopias, there are more engrossing ones.

This is a Japanese crime series that bows to the BBC Sherlock in the way that the BBC Sherlock bows to Conan Doyle. The theme music is a response to Sherlock's violin theme; the visuals are equally inventive, but in a Japanese fashion.

There's so much more than copying here. Both Sherlock (as you might guess by the title) and Wato-San, a pun revealed at the end of the first episode, are women. And their relationship is a relationship between Japanese women, rather than between Englishmen. Miss Sherlock is playful; although the murders are grim, Miss Sherlock is joyful. She's funny, in a spontaneous way. Two episodes in, her contrasting relationships with Wato-San and [not sure of her actual in-show name] Mrs. Hudson are lovely, as are her relationships with the Japanese police force. And she can not only walk, but run, in 4-inch stilettos. HMOG.

I can't quote memorable lines, because it's all in subtitles. I've only seen two episodes so far; the science behind the murders is dubious, but the detection itself is wonderful.

Want to be delighted and surprised? Try Miss Sherlock. In the U.S., it's on HBO Now or regular HBO. I assume it's also available from the usual sources.

N.B. I will quibble that it is extremely obvious that Miss Sherlock knows absolutely nothing of playing the cello. Tsk.

Two more quotes from A Conspiracy of Whispers.

First, from the climactic showdown. Wallis is the spymaster who sent Olivia to what was supposed to be her death. Our hero Galen speaks first.

"You know the root word for altus, don't you?"
"Of course. Feed. Altered to be mindless predators," Wallis scoffed. You couldn't even get that right."

"That might be the Syn interpretation." Galen dryly realized how all of Olivia's prejudices had formed. He shook his head. "The root could be feed, or it could be fodder, those to be thrown to a cause. Antiquated, perhaps, but the root word for caricae is treasure."

Elsewhere, Galen and Olivia's first kiss.

And oh, after it all, how she needed to be kissed like this. A kiss like a wall, stopping her thoughts. A kiss like a wolf, snapping up her breath. A kiss like stone, anchoring her in. A kiss like sunlight, chasing shadows and warming places so long in the cold.

Current Mood: welp

Ada Harper, A Conspiracy of Whispers
( spoilers, NSFW text, mention of rape threats )

I have tried not to be real-world gender-essentialist in this writeup. Please let me know if I have phrasing that excludes people with non-binary or other genders. I'll edit.

Current Mood: cross
Current Music: Anything You Can Do

Apart from everybody's favorite (right?) comedy/D&D podcast "The Adventure Zone", I mostly prefer history.

There are a lot of bad -- and beloved, in some cases -- history podcasts in which the author postures, makes bad jokes, and assumes you don't know much and only want to know a little more. Two exceptions to this are "The History of the Mongols", which is excellent and clear and takes a fair amount of concentration, and "Revolutions",* which takes an in-depth look to various European revolutions starting with the English Civil War. I've just gotten to Charles I leaving London for the last time (although he doesn't know it).

If there were ever a more shining counterexample to the Divine Right of Kings than Charles I, it has to be one of the monarchs who was actually insane or intellectually disabled.

* Revolutions' podcaster, Mike Duncan, is known for an earlier history of Rome, which I haven't listened to but hear is excellent.

If you like true crime that is dispassionate rather than overblown, I highly, highly recommend "True Crime Japan". The podcasters are gaijin living in Japan, and they do an excellent job of explaining Japanese customs and cultural aspects that are relevant to how crimes took place. These are not crimes that have been rehearsed over and over in English-speaking media -- no Ripper, Bundy, Lizzie Borden -- which makes them all the more engrossing.

All of the above are, of course, available on iTunes and other aggregators; I'm linking to the authors' sites.

This looks like another "young outcast discovers his powers" book. Wow, is it not. Trust me. In the very first scene, Kellen needs to fight a magecaster's duel.

There are three requirements to earning a mage's name among the JanTep. The first is the strength to defend your family. The second is the ability to wield the high magics that protect our people. The third is simply to reach the age of sixteen. I was a few weeks shy of my birthday when I learned that I wouldn't be doing any of those things.

And we're off, into the duel. Kellen's problem is that he doesn't have magic. This is not a survivable problem. But Kellep does have a very, very clever mind. In a lesser book, Kellep would discover his magic and wipe the floor with his opponent, winning the acclaim of the crowd.

This is not a lesser book. Spellslinger is actually about a young outcast discovering and creating his own moral fiber. Kellep's struggle, although he doesn't realize it early in the book, is to become a decent human being in an indecent society. This is a far more interesting coming-of-age story than you usually get. When the Mysterious Stranger shows up, she's not a kindly wizard mentor. She's (possibly) not a wizard at all. She doesn't teach Kellep: she gives him opportunities to teach himself. Kellep acquires some new resources, but they are challenges as much as gifts.

Oh, the Mysterious Stranger kicks ass. I can't say more, because it would be a spoiler. She is compelling and ambiguous and funny and tough.

The characters are engrossing. The worldbuilding is unusual and clever. It's partly based around an original variant of a Tarot deck, but is in no way woo-woo; the cards do not predict your future, but (sometimes) illuminate your choices. The cards are playing cards, but are also a weapon. The cards have nothing to do -- as far as we know -- with the magic of the JanTep.

The book itself is gorgeous, in a way that made me extremely nostalgic. The red-and-black cover has two line drawings of the main characters, presented as a face card. (Don't look too closely at Kellep; it's a spoiler.) Red is used as a spot color, very effectively. There are interior illustrations of relevant Tarot cards at the beginning of each section. And the page edges (forget the technical term) are red! Taken as a whole, the book looks a bit like a deck of cards, which is, I'm sure intentional.

Here's the catch. There (as of time of writing) no U.S. or Canadian distributor of Spellslinger or its sequel, Shadowblack. If you're in North America and want to read them, you'll have to order from the, in my experience, reliable, fast, and cheap www.bookdepository.com or an equivalent.

Note: de Castell's Greatcoat books are also awesome. If you like the Musketeers books, you should love them. The nice thing is that they preserve the essential "three duelists against the world" spirit without either copying the plots or being pastiche-y. The second nice thing is that the author is a stage fight choreographer and is able to communicate fights clearly to the non-fighter (me).

Current Mood: happy

Many good social histories are centered around a single person and use that person to throw light on their times and customs. These generally fall into one of the following categories:

Person A, though little-remembered today, was an important influence on their community and friends.
Person A, though forgotten today, left private papers that vividly illustrated aspects of everyday life.
Person A, though well-remembered today, was at the center of events and (ideally) I have new research to bring on the subject.

I've read books I've enjoyed in all three categories. Then there's D.J. Taylor's Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation. His central character is Elizabeth Ponsonby. She was not a writer, or an artist, or a wit, or somebody whose early promise was never filled. She was at the center of the Bright Young Things because her party concepts were ingenious and infamous. Elizabeth he was one of the co-devisors of the Bath and Bottle Party, held at St George's Swimming Baths, whose invitation instructed "Please wear a Bathing Suit and bring a Bath towel and a Bottle." Even if she didn't organize it, Elizabeth was always the life of any party. None of the other survivors of the period quote anything memorable she had to say, which, given the prolific memoirs available, suggests she didn't.

So. Why is this book centered on the life of Elizabeth Ponsonby? Her father was a comfortable but not wealthy Labour minister, and his and his wife's diaries and papers were made available to the author. That's it. Not only are we focused on a minor person in the period, but we're seeing her through the eyes of her parents, who were certainly not in the Bright Young Thing circle and in fact despised it. They thought Elizabeth was selfish, expensive, and dissolute, and despaired of her as she proceeded through wild parties, some sort of flamboyant sexual misbehavior (probably adultery), alcoholism, and a bad marriage to an embezzler. Few of Elizabeth's letters survive and she didn't keep a diary. Why are we looking at the period through her eyes? Because that's where the lamp-post is.

There is a secondary viewpoint character, the failed writer and successful alcoholic Brian Howard, who envisioned wonderful books but never actually got around to writing them. He did write diaries of his own, which are quoted, but I didn't find them engaging or enlightening. His own biography, which is supposed to be good, is called Portrait of a Failure, which pretty much sums it up.

When discussing other prominent characters in the period, the author draws on newspaper clippings from the social columns, or on the more famous participants' memoirs, letters, and novels. If you want to know what Beverley Nichols or Evelyn Waugh or Cecil Beaton, or the Mitfords, all of whom were everywhere and knew everybody, were up to, you might as well read their own witty writings, because everything in this book is quoted directly from them.

Note to self: Why haven't you ever read Vile Bodies?

Current Mood: thinky
Current Location: comfy chair with cat
Current Music: It Ain't Necessarily So
Crossposts: http://mme-hardy.livejournal.com/315542.html

I went to see a double-feature of this and "Applause" (also 1929) with

movingfinger last night. It was a lovely evening; I always enjoy her company, and we found an Indian place with spectacularly fresh food and fun nouveau cocktails. Mine was kaffir-lime vodka and a ginger-jaggery syrup, to give you the general idea, and perfect for what now appears to be a very early summer.

Anyway, The Love Parade is a Lubitsch movie, and a Maurice Chevalier movie, and a Paramount movie from the period when that meant opulence. All these elements are absoutely perfect. So is the first (roughly) half of the movie. The erotic jokes are light and funny; Chevalier is witty and risque and exquisitely tailored. I was particularly struck by his carriage. His spine is perfectly straight -- even when, as he often does, he leans into the camera -- and his shoulders are far back. It's not a stance you see often in the modern world, and it's very attractive without at all impairing the appearance of flexibility. The magnificent Lupino Lane plays his comic valet, and is a miracle of acrobatic comedy, both as a dancer and as a pratfaller. His straight woman and physical support is ably performed by the uncredited Yola d'Avril.

So, what goes wrong in the second half of the movie? The movie is about a charming man in a Ruritanian republic who marries the Queen and therefore becomes Prince Consort. This offends his male desire to run things and romantic conflict ensues. The premise per se isn't terribly offputting for me, because it's a period piece and otherwise charming. The problem is that Chevalier spends the post-marriage half of the movie sulking.

The male character expresses his resentment of his lack of a constitutional role by throwing temper tantrum after temper tantrum. He shouts, he refuses to eat his breakfast, he sulks at the Queen when she drops by for a kiss. I find sulking just as unattractive on Maurice Chevalier as on a toddler. The writing isn't deft enough to pull it off, and even the irresistible Chevalier can't be consistently charming while whining.

The movie, or at least the print we saw, has 1929-quality sound editing, which is to say that the art of mixing, and especially of mixing songs, wasn't there yet. Jeannette McDonald's soprano keeps threatening to burst the tweeters, the orchestra drowns out the ensemble pieces, and almost nobody's lyrics are easy to understand. The songs are forgettable sub-operetta: the title number is Chevalier assuring Macdonald that she has all the best (mimed) features of all the other women he's loved. Then, for no apparent reason other than operetta, she duets the list back at him.

I sound cranky; I'm not. This was a 1929 Lubitsch-Chevalier-Paramount --I'm neither for nor against Jeanette Macdonald-- and therefore a joy to behold. I just came away humming the flaws rather than the many successes.

Current Mood: pleased
Crossposts: http://mme-hardy.livejournal.com/293274.html

This is the best knitting book of all time. Seriously.

You'd think Knit Your Own Kama Sutra would be a one-joke wonder: naked dolls boinking. Ha ha, how droll, let's go read Oh Joy Sex Toy for some real laughs. Hypothetical straw-person you would be wrong. This is a fabulous knitting book about making 11 1/2 stockinette dolls, with the best accessories ever. The author has contemplated knitted dolls and the tropes of pornography, then created appropriate sets and costumes for each scenario. There's the farmer's daughter (dress, overalls, cowboy hat, milk pail, and chicken). There's the rustic lodge (winter coats, bearskin rugs, moose head). There's the office (pinstripe suit, skirt outfit, briefcase, and photocopier).

This is a knitted doll book that has a knitted photocopier. An awesomely detailed photocopier.

As far as the Kama Sutra goes, each scenario starts with two knitted dolls in a position from the Kama Sutra, with a page-long description of the position and how to achieve it. The bulk of the scenario, however, is knitting instructions.

As far as diversity goes, all couples are heterosexual, but there's multi-racial representation (signified by different-colored yarn). All body shapes are the same, because there are only two patterns, male and female. (If you want varying body shapes, I suggest Knit Your Own Royal Wedding, which has the short, stocky Queen.) The naked dolls are more-or-less people shaped, but lack pubic hair, nipples, and genitalia for the woman. These deficiencies, if you consider them such, are easily rectified with embroidery and a little ingenuity.

If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you like. It's a poor joke gift for a non-knitter, but the right sort of knitter will be very grateful.

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: http://mme-hardy.livejournal.com/291219.html

My God, that was bad. A potpourri of bad, with each element stinking up the place, independently, so as you move around the room you are constantly catching new pockets of distinct stink. We're talking Last of the Time Lords bad.

( spoilers )

In summary: What a great season, but I don't understand why it contained only two episodes ("Mummy on the Orient Express" and "Flatline", if you're curious.)

Crossposts: http://mme-hardy.livejournal.com/286528.html

Jennifer Kloester, Georgette Heyer.

Never read biographies of your favorite writers. Jennifer Kloester builds on the research Jane Aiken Hodge did for her Heyer biography; Kloester has the great advantage of full cooperation from the Heyer family, and complete access to Heyer's letters. The book is well-written and enlightening. Kloester has done substantial original research, including scanning British periodicals page-by-page to track down forgotten Heyer short stories. Kloester tends to gloss over, or at least excuse, Heyer's prejudices and crankiness, but she scrupulously presents the evidence before drawing her own conclusions.

Converts are often the most zealous enforcers of the formal strictures of a religion; similarly, the most ardent enforcers of a hierarchy are often those in the middle, the ones who see any progress by those below them as a threat to their own hard-won positions. Georgette Heyer was one of these. Heyer was the granddaughter, on one side, of a Russian emigrant -- almost certainly a Jew, although there are no records of this and the family never spoke of it-- who worked his way up from being a warehouseman to a businessman; on the other side, of a family whose money came from a successful tugboat company. Heyer came, in short, from Trade, and from families that had fought their way up to Trade from the working classes. Heyer's novels, on the other hand, laud the inherent superiority of the nobility.

For instance, In These Old Shades, a noble girl and a peasant boy are switched at birth -- it's a Heyer novel, there's usually cross-dressing -- and each child demonstrates his or her inherent class throughout rearing. At the climax, the peasant-raised-noble is greatly relieved to lose the position of heirdom to a great French title and to retire to a farm, while the noble-raised-peasant gets to marry a fellow noble who recognized her probable parentage at sight. That's standard Heyer, and TOS is one of my favorites of her books.. When I read Heyer's letters, I am reminded that this wasn't just Heyer's id-fantasy: it was how she really thought the world did and should should work. A tobacconist's assistant and fan once wrote Heyer complaining about a speech in a modern novel that included the line "It's always been my dread that he might marry something [sic] out of a tobacconist's shop so you can imagine what a relief to me it is to know that he's had the sense to choose a really nice girl. Not that I'm a snob, but there are limits, and young men are such fools." Heyer commented on this letter to a friend: "I can see not the slightest reason for encouraging her. I don't write for that kind of person, after all, & if she chooses in future to ban me from her library list it's all the same to me. What is more, there is nothing to be said. I should regard it as a major tragedy if my son were to marry a tobacconist's assistant." Kloester comments:

Although [Heyer] held to the idea of a natural social hierarchy, she also recognized the capacity for vulgarity in any individual regardless of class [ha!] and frequently depicted dishonorable aristocrats alongside principled lower-class characters [Note: vulgarity is different from honor. ] Ever class-conscious, in Horsham society she felt herself to be on the same social plane as those who moved in "county" circles, despite the fact that she did not own an estate, hunt, or even farm her own land. [And also despite the fact that she moved household every few years.'] ... Georgette's particular kind of snobbery was rarely overt -- she was much too private for that -- [huh?] but it is implicit in most of her public and private writing.

Kloester, a thorough researcher, cites one of Heyer's childhood favorites, The Red Deer.

But the Hind looked grave. "We are never unkind to the Trout, she said, for they belong to the peat stream but you must never become familiar with them. Fallow Deer, I believe, treat them as equals," and here she looked very proud, "but we do not. They are a lazy lot of fellows whose forefathers would not take the trouble to go down to the sea, whereby they might have grown into noble fish with a coat as bright as the moon on the water. But they would not, and so they have remained small and ugly, and they never lose their spots. You must never be rude to them, for that would be unworthy of a Red Deer, but you must never make great friends with them ."

In short, the tobacconist's family should have swum ... I don't know, into somebody else's oviduct?

Two generations previously, Heyer's paternal ancestors had been peasants in Russia; her mother's family owned tugboats; and yet she considered herself infinitely above a tobacconist. She had a similar pull-the-rope-up attitude toward feminism. Although Heyer spent most of her life supporting her husband, her widowed mother, and her brothers, she was firmly convinced that women were less intelligent and less competent than men. She thoroughly disliked Dorothy Sutherland, the editor of Woman's Journal, for the very good reason that Sutherland rewrote and retitled Heyer's novels, without consulting the author, when she serialized. Whenever Heyer spoke of Sutherland in her letters, she referred to Sutherland as "that Sutherland Bitch" or "the S.B." So far, so normal; a bad or unsympathetic editor is a nightmare for any writer. When Heyer wrote to a friend after Sutherland refused to buy a novel Heyer had edited to Sutherland's request, she commented "Saving your presence, she is treating me to a startling example of the folly of Woman at the Helm."

Seen from the outside, Heyer's personal life is as unfair as most Victorian authoresses' [term deliberate]. Heyer's beloved father, collaborator, and friend dropped dead of a heart attack in 1925, when he was 56 and she was 23 . He didn't leave much money; Kloester doesn't address why there was no insurance. Heyer's mother made no attempt to support herself. Heyer's eldest brother, Boris, then 18, had both hemophilia and what was perceived as pure irresponsibility (but sounds, from a distance, like mild bipolar; he had mood swings). Both of them had to be supported -- in a separate household, because Heyer didn't get along with her mother -- for the remainder of their lives. (Heyer's youngest brother, Frank, was thirteen when his father died, and did grow up to be an independent adult.) Furthermore, Heyer's husband, Ronald Rougier, had a great deal of trouble finding a career that would support his own family, far less his in-laws. Rougier had been trained as a mining engineer, but he never made the big strike. He then invested in two different businesses that didn't go much of anywhere. Unlike Boris, Rougier wasn't irresponsible; he was simply, like thousands of other returned veterans, struggling in the postwar economy. In 1936, when Rougier himself was 36, he decided to try for the career he had wanted as a young man and began reading for the Bar; this meant three years without any income at all, and with heavy additional expenses. (He eventually became a very successful barrister and was made a Queen's Counsel in 1959, so the studies for the bar were a wise investment.) Heyer spent more than a decade as the principal support for six people, all the while ardently supporting the idea that women were innately less competent than men. Not surprisingly, she had a nervous breakdown in 1935; in the three years since her only child's birth she had "moved house twice, written six books, endured periods without domestic support, suffered several episodes of severe financial strain, and committed herself to writing seven new novels." She was carrying immense burdens, including trying to pay the expenses of an upper-middle-class household on a middle-class income, while writing frothy comedies of manners.

My fundamental problem when reading Heyer's letters is that I just don't like her, and I'm quite confident that she wouldn't have liked me.

Crossposts: http://mme-hardy.livejournal.com/286236.html

I had much more fun than last week.

( spoilers )

Crossposts: http://mme-hardy.livejournal.com/284546.html

God that was stupid. STUPID STUPID STUPID. STUPID AGAIN. And the Doctor went from simply rude to actually cruel.

( spoilers )

Pfeh.

Crossposts: http://mme-hardy.livejournal.com/283501.html

To begin with, this is Not My Period; I know nothing at all about 18th-century Scotland. That means that most historical errors will whiz straight over my head, as will errors in dialect and setting. These are the things that I did notice, and that annoyed me enough to annotate. Entries are in unpunctuated lower case, as I was pecking away tediously on the Kindle app.

"the runcible spoon had not been invented yet ..."

wtf does she think "runcible" means?

"he smashed the quivering trunk [of a cherry tree] several times more, causing a delirious shower of pale-pink petals to rain down upon his head"

a month ago they were picking cherries

"noticing details of my surroundings with a peculiar intensity: the small stained-glass inset over the bar, casting colored shadows over the ruffianly proprietor [innkeeper] and his wares,"

as if

"a low-necked gown of heavy cream-colored satin, with a separate bodice that buttoned with dozens of tiny cloth-covered buttons, each embroidered with a gold fleur-de-lis. The neckline and the belled sleeves were heavily ruched with lace, as was the embroidered overskirt of chocolate-brown velvet. The innkeeper was half-buried in the petticoats he carried, his bristling whiskers barely visible over the foamy layers."

no nonon [Words failed me.]

"complete to white asters and yellow roses pinned in my hair"

not in 1745 [Note: All yellow garden roses descend from rosa foetida and other Mideastern and Asian imports. Although rosa foetida was kept in botanical specimen gardens, 18th-century garden roses are -- duh -- rose-colored, in shades from pale pink to pink to cherry. I am also suspicious of asters blooming in midsummer, as they're a purple fall flower here, but it's a big ol' genus.]

[Claire and her Highlander are being married by a priest] "I take thee, Claire, to be my wife ..." "... to love, honor and protect ..."

should be in Latin you moron

Tansy and eglantine had taken root in the cracks, and waved in precarious yellow flags against the stone

eglantine is a shrubby white rose

bottles of ale that Jamie had thoughtfully lifted from the well in the inn yard as we left.

doubtful [surely at this period ale would be in casks in the cellar; no innkeeper would be bottling his own and leaving it unattended]

had already found the pile of starched handkerchiefs

? [the one piece of body linen it's very uncomfortable to starch]

slowly drew the knife in a semicircle under one breast. The homespun came free and fell away with a flutter of white chemise, and my breast sprung out

stays [says it all, really]

[18th-century Scot] "I don't run either, Sassenach," he said gruffly. "Now, then. What does 'fucking' mean?"

seriously?

There was one flower in the bouquet, a crushed primrose, whose thorny stem had pricked my thumb.

er, no.

[same Scot, of his older brother] "I thought he was God, or at least Christ."

heresy

argyle socks revealed.

I doubt it. [socks weren't knitted in fancy patterns at this period, other than stripes and, for formal wear, clocks at the ankles.]

L'Grimoire d'le Comte St. Germain

de + le = du [Furthermore, you don't need to elide "le" in front of a hard consonant].

"Watercress,", he answered, voice slightly muffled by the leavers in his mouth. He spat them out and applied them to my back. ... "How-how does it taste?" I asked, gulping back the sobs. "Fair nasty," he replied laconically.

I quite like it myself.

[heroine is in the chapel of a French monastery] "I rose and got the Bible, bringing it back to the prie-dieu with me. I was hardly the first person to have recourse to the sortes Virgilianae in time of confusion or trouble. ... "and he smote them with emerods, and they were very sore." No doubt they were, I thought. What in hell were emerods? Try Psalms, instead.

English bible? [WTF is the King James Bible, that emblem of Protestantism, doing in a French Catholic monastery chapel?]

But how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln? It's actually very more-ish, and I keep trying to figure out why. For me, it's the sensual detail -- even when I'm jarred by details, the sights, scents, and textures are vividly conveyed. The heroine is sharp-tongued, and not in an adorably feisty way; when she's cross, the people around her know it. It's fun, mostly, being in her head. It is actually more fun being in her head during the plot than during the sex scenes, which is saying something. She's an interesting narrator.

Do I recommend it? Well...

( really really triggery rape stuff, I'm not kidding )

If you can get past that, and past the historical errors, and if you in general like sprawling novels with the occasional sex scene, you'll probably have fun. It is much, much more competently written than such best-selling id novels as Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey. If you can, check your critical brain at the door.

Edit: Comments include discussion of the triggery bit.

Current Music: Barenaked Ladies, "One Week"
Crossposts: http://mme-hardy.livejournal.com/279071.html

I came to mock; I stayed to mock and have fun. The best way to watch this is with a friend so that you can mock together. That way you can wallow in the occasional good or at least libido-friendly bits while having a jolly MST3K and demonstrate your moral superiority.

High points:

The acting's pretty good.
The actors are pretty.
The countryside is pretty.
~~Even the orchestra is pretty.~~

Low points: (or high, depending on how you look at it.)

The relative present (immediate post-WWII Scotland) is graded so that it's damn near black and white, with only the characters in color.
There's one hilarious scene where the heroine is about to interact with a Standing Stone (don't try this ~~at home~~ on vacation, kids). This entire scene is graded black-and-white while one forget-me-not is a brilliant digital blue .... that wobbles.
The immediate past (the heroine's past as a child being raised by an archaeologist) is sepia.
The true past/present (The Hiiiiiighlands and the post-Jacobite retaliation) is in glorious -- not Technicolor, but Kodachrome. Saturation, man.
The heroine runs around in a modern -and I don't mean 1940s- cream shiftdress. When she first leaps into the past she's in the shiftdress, a practical plaid shawl, a leather belt, and shoes. Within the first 5 minutes of running around being chased she's lost the shawl -- somewhat plausible -- and the belt, and I have no idea how she managed that. Nobody ever comments on the lady running around a knee-length filthy shift, which would be underwear by 18th-century standards. They call her a whore for swearing (something I find somewhat implausible in the 18th century), but apparently her dress is just one of those things.
Our heroine is not only a war nurse but has been studying up on herbal remedies as a hobby. As one does, when one needs a profession should one be swept into the past at any moment.
Enya-in-a-blenda soundtrack.

My absolute favorite moment, though, was when the heroine, demonstrating her leet healing skills, demanded that her grubby Scots captors surrender something to use as a sling for Soon To Be Love Interest's dislocated shoulder. They didn't move, so she demanded a belt. Much to my disappointment, the Scot who surrenders his belt did not end up with his entire great kilt (more commonly known as a "belted plaid" for very good structural reasons) in a tidy torus around his ankles.

Crossposts: http://mme-hardy.livejournal.com/278817.html

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Page Summary

Lee Jackson, Palaces of Pleasure, a mini-review
Victoria Goddard, The Hands of the Emperor
The Secret History: a rant (spoilers)
The Rook: But wait, there's more!
Daniel O'Malley, The Rook (preliminary note)
Charlotte Nicole Davis, The Good Luck Girls (spoilers, tw:rape)
Miss Sherlock (2018)
If I suffer, you suffer
"A Conspiracy of Whispers": an extremely cranky review
I have become a podcast addict
Book rec: Sebastien de Castell, Spellslinger
Bright Young People: a biased and superficial review
Ernst Lubitsch, "The Love Parade", 1929
Knit Your Own Kama Sutra: what it says on the tin (picture-free review)
Doctor Who Season 8 Finale (Spoilers)
Georgette Heyer: isn't it a pity
Doctor Who: Mummy on the Orient Express (spoilers)
Doctor Who: Kill The Moon (spoilers)
Margin notes from Diana Gabaldon's OUTLANDER
OUTLANDER (TV adaptation)

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Rosemary for Remembrance

Entries tagged with reviews

Lee Jackson, Palaces of Pleasure, a mini-review

Victoria Goddard, The Hands of the Emperor

The Secret History: a rant (spoilers)

The Rook: But wait, there's more!

Daniel O'Malley, The Rook (preliminary note)

Charlotte Nicole Davis, The Good Luck Girls (spoilers, tw:rape)

Miss Sherlock (2018)

If I suffer, you suffer

"A Conspiracy of Whispers": an extremely cranky review

I have become a podcast addict

Book rec: Sebastien de Castell, Spellslinger

Bright Young People: a biased and superficial review

Ernst Lubitsch, "The Love Parade", 1929

Knit Your Own Kama Sutra: what it says on the tin (picture-free review)

Doctor Who Season 8 Finale (Spoilers)

Georgette Heyer: isn't it a pity

Doctor Who: Mummy on the Orient Express (spoilers)

Doctor Who: Kill The Moon (spoilers)

Margin notes from Diana Gabaldon's OUTLANDER

OUTLANDER (TV adaptation)