amelia_petkova

Okay, my self-control is just about gone. I had a lengthy entry in mind that boiled down to how you can track the level of the Dean's control over Perry in Season 2 through costuming. I'm also wondering, since in the Season 2 finale the Dean specifically mentions having to find "alternate accomodations" after getting shoved into the pit, does this mean Perry has been unknowingly possessed since the last episodes of Season 1? She doesn't show any signs of it during the Christmas Special, which raises the possibility that the Dean could only be in control while at the Silas campus. If our heroes had managed to stay away from Silas University, would the Dean have been forced to remain dormant?

One of my goals this year has been to read and cross off books from my To Read list. Since The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins has been on my list so long that I didn't remember what it's about or why I put it on my list, I had to read it. I'm about 30 pages in and want to write down what I think so far before any plot twists turn up. This novel started its publication as a serial in 1859 and I haven't read a lot of Victorian literature, so I'm not sure how it might turn out.

Walter Hartright is a drawing instructor in his late 20s who has just applied to and accepted a job posting of tutor for several months to two young women at an estate in Cumbria (northern England). On the night that he's thinking about the job offer and walking home to London, he meets a nervous woman all in white who makes him promise multiple times to escort her safely to London and leave her when she asks, and she's very relieved when he doesn't know a certain nobleman. He overhears several men after he leaves her and discovers she has escaped from...an asylum!

So far he's met only one of the young ladies who's described as being the most ladylike and wonderful person from the back, then when she turns around..."Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted--never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it." Marian Halcombe is described as "almost swarthy" with brown eyes and "thick, coal-black hair growing unusually low down on her forehead." Is she meant to be of partial African or southern European descent? We haven't met her half-sister yet but I have a feeling she'll be blonde and blue-eyed, or otherwise a stereotypically beautiful Englishwoman.

They also have an invalid uncle, no companions other than servants, and two female companions who left recently due to the presence of too many women and not enough social activities.

I don't have many guesses as to what will happen next, but there are almost 600 pages to go and I look forward to shenanigans.

The medievalists on my friends list are gonna like this. (My apologies for leaving off the accent mark--I don't know how to add it when typing online.)

For a brief overview, "Pangur Ban" is a poem that was written by an Irish monk in the 9th century C.E. What is it about? It's about the monk's white cat who shares his room and chases mice while the monk focuses on his studies.

Now for the fun part: my new favorite book at work is a children's picture book titled The White Cat and the Monk. It's a sweet book that retells the poem with wonderful illustrations showing the cat and monk at their duties throughout the monastery at night until dawn arrives. It even has a historical note at the end!

I love that people were writing poems about their cats over 1,200 years ago; I love that the monk basically named his pet "White Cat"; I love that the monk's poem about his cat has survived all that time; and above all, I love that somebody in the present day thought it was worth making into a book for children. When I'm having a rough day, all of this makes me smile.

You can read the poem itself here.

I have had this book on my To Read list for years and I finally borrowed it from the library. Shirley Jackson is the master of slow-reveal, creeping horror and I LOVE IT. The only other works of hers I've read so far are "The Lottery" and "The Haunting of Hill House."

I knew absolutely nothing about it going in, and I think that's the best way to go because it made even the beginning reveals a surprise. I'm only four chapters in and I want to make some notes on my observations and predictions before I get too farther in. Spoilers for only the beginning of the novel at this point

( Read more... )

Something horrible is definitely going to happen in the book and I can't wait to find out how it all goes down.

I can't believe I haven't posted about this yet. For the 30th anniversary of Labyrinth this year, it's being shown in theaters on 9/11 and 9/14. You can find more information about it at Fathom Events. The link to buy tickets is live on the page now, but you can also click on the FAQ on their website for links to other sites where you can buy tickets.

I literally stayed up late so that I could buy a ticket right away because I didn't know how limited availability would be. That's probably the most fannish thing I've ever done. I can't wait!

Well, I finally stopped being lazy and created a DW account! Let's see how this goes. I plan to continue cross-posting everything to LJ at this time. Of course, I have to figure out how to enable comments in both places first. I can't figure out if I have to add the DW post url to the footer every time? This is why I hate doing tech stuff.

I just read a review of "Sisi", the newest novel about Empress Elisabeth by Allison Pataki. Near the beginning, the review says, "She was the Princess Diana of her time, a storied beauty who longed for more than the trappings of royalty. So why has Sisi been largely lost to history?"

Um.

The musical "Elisabeth" has been around since 1992, it's been translated into multiple languages so that it can be performed in multiple countries, and has been seen by millions of people. I wouldn't consider Sisi as being "largely lost to history".

2015 was good to me in a lot of ways but one of the things I want to do differently this year is post here more often. I check my Friends page just about every day but almost never posted last year because I felt like I didn't have anything to say. Which is ridiculous, because I still have plenty of fannish thoughts. I mean to sign up on DW and cross-post too, since people are more active there than on LJ. (I've known that for ages, I've just resisted doing it because I'm lazy and don't want to deal with creating YET ANOTHER online account.) Maybe I'll set a goal of posting at least once a month.

But I still have a lot to say about Season 2 of Carmilla, and I want to write more fanfiction this year (though I'm not exactly complaining, I got a hell of a lot of original writing done last year!), and I finally own a copy of Sioned Davies's translation of the Mabinogion, which I am super excited about. Bring on the Welsh mythology and medieval lit! I've made it through the various Introductions and now I can get to the stories themselves. Maybe I'll liveblog my reading, I haven't decided.

Laura Mixon's report on RH/BS won a Hugo!!! HELL YES!!!