Hodgepodge
May. 9th, 2011 08:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieAaaaaahhhhhh it's a cicada year aaaaaahhhhhh. There are brown bug husks all over, and it's only going to get worse for the next six weeks or so. (For the record, the last cicada year down here was 1998, when both the 13- and 17-year broods emerged. Musicians actually had to stop recording for a couple weeks at the height of it because the racket the bugs made penetrated the soundproofed studios. I trust this year will not be quite so bad.)
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I finished Middlemarch! I...find myself with little to say on it, actually. It was worth reading, but I think I liked Mill on the Floss better. My problem while I was reading it was that I was most interested in Dorothea's story, but the entire last third of the book is centered mostly on Bulstrode and to a lesser extent Lydgate. I read the introduction to my edition afterward, though, and Felecia Bonaparte wrote about their storyline in a way that convinced me of its importance to the work as a whole.
I do like the flashes of Modernist thought you get in Eliot's work, particularly in the way she starts to represent consciousnesses, as opposed to just characters. Rosamund especially got that treatment; she was like Mr. Dalloway's statement about everyone being solitary little icebergs on the sea in Woolf's Voyage Out taken to an almost ridiculous extreme, she was so trapped in her own little half-made-up world.
This novel highlighted a quality of Eliot's writing that I find both amusing and intriguing: she has this way of writing about provincial life that's simultaneously cutting and loving, sort of like the sentiment of "No one can insult my family but me." For biographical reasons, I get the impression that she really loathed large swathes of her past in the Midlands, such as the resistance to new ideas, gossipy tendencies, and hypocrisy, but at the same time, if I remember correctly she set everything she wrote in that area of the country, and even her most annoying, judgmental characters have their good sides.
I have to say that I thought the prelude portended much more death and destruction than actually occurred in the novel. I figured Dorothea would never make it out alive after that cheerful little comparison to St. Theresa.
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In further media commentary, I recently watched two excellent films: The King's Speech and Copenhagen. Much has been written on the exemplary qualities of The King's Speech, so I'll just say that it's ALL TRUE and leave it at that.
Copenhagen (2002) is a BBC version of a play from...I think 1998? Nineties, anyway. It centers on a meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941, of which there is no definitive record besides of the fact that it occurred. (Most people think they discussed the possibility of using nuclear fission to create a weapon.) The film depicts several "drafts" of how the conversation might have gone, all tied together by the ghosts of the three characters commenting on the, uh, draftiness of them in an extradiegetic sort of way. Each version of the conversation touches on quantum physics, the morality of scientists working for war efforts, nuclear bombs, and all sorts of other interesting topics. It reminded me a good deal of Wit, because so much of the characters' human experience was filtered through an academic understanding of a particular field, and if there's one trope I love, it's that one. Not a lot happens, in a plot summary sense, in this movie, but it still fascinated me. Highly recommended.
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Fringe fans, I need fic recs! I usually don't read fic for this show; for whatever reason, it's just one of those shows (like BSG and Castle) that I don't feel the need for fanfic of. However, with S4 some four months away, I'm definitely feeling the need now, so if you've got favorites, lay them on me. I'm partial to Peter/Olivia, and after last week, I'd love some kidfic, but I'll happily read gen and other pairings that don't break them up. (Um, okay, I won't read Astrid/Walter. Not unless the writer can sell it amazingly well.)
I finished Middlemarch! I...find myself with little to say on it, actually. It was worth reading, but I think I liked Mill on the Floss better. My problem while I was reading it was that I was most interested in Dorothea's story, but the entire last third of the book is centered mostly on Bulstrode and to a lesser extent Lydgate. I read the introduction to my edition afterward, though, and Felecia Bonaparte wrote about their storyline in a way that convinced me of its importance to the work as a whole.
I do like the flashes of Modernist thought you get in Eliot's work, particularly in the way she starts to represent consciousnesses, as opposed to just characters. Rosamund especially got that treatment; she was like Mr. Dalloway's statement about everyone being solitary little icebergs on the sea in Woolf's Voyage Out taken to an almost ridiculous extreme, she was so trapped in her own little half-made-up world.
This novel highlighted a quality of Eliot's writing that I find both amusing and intriguing: she has this way of writing about provincial life that's simultaneously cutting and loving, sort of like the sentiment of "No one can insult my family but me." For biographical reasons, I get the impression that she really loathed large swathes of her past in the Midlands, such as the resistance to new ideas, gossipy tendencies, and hypocrisy, but at the same time, if I remember correctly she set everything she wrote in that area of the country, and even her most annoying, judgmental characters have their good sides.
I have to say that I thought the prelude portended much more death and destruction than actually occurred in the novel. I figured Dorothea would never make it out alive after that cheerful little comparison to St. Theresa.
In further media commentary, I recently watched two excellent films: The King's Speech and Copenhagen. Much has been written on the exemplary qualities of The King's Speech, so I'll just say that it's ALL TRUE and leave it at that.
Copenhagen (2002) is a BBC version of a play from...I think 1998? Nineties, anyway. It centers on a meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941, of which there is no definitive record besides of the fact that it occurred. (Most people think they discussed the possibility of using nuclear fission to create a weapon.) The film depicts several "drafts" of how the conversation might have gone, all tied together by the ghosts of the three characters commenting on the, uh, draftiness of them in an extradiegetic sort of way. Each version of the conversation touches on quantum physics, the morality of scientists working for war efforts, nuclear bombs, and all sorts of other interesting topics. It reminded me a good deal of Wit, because so much of the characters' human experience was filtered through an academic understanding of a particular field, and if there's one trope I love, it's that one. Not a lot happens, in a plot summary sense, in this movie, but it still fascinated me. Highly recommended.
Fringe fans, I need fic recs! I usually don't read fic for this show; for whatever reason, it's just one of those shows (like BSG and Castle) that I don't feel the need for fanfic of. However, with S4 some four months away, I'm definitely feeling the need now, so if you've got favorites, lay them on me. I'm partial to Peter/Olivia, and after last week, I'd love some kidfic, but I'll happily read gen and other pairings that don't break them up. (Um, okay, I won't read Astrid/Walter. Not unless the writer can sell it amazingly well.)
