Kitten Scribbles

The second of the Lymond Chronicles is nowhere near as annoying as it could have been. The book that preceded this one, The Game of Kings, unleashed Francis Crawford of Lymond upon an unprepared world. Readers (specifically, me) were confused and taken aback by Lymond's polyglot erudition, his constant references to obscure literature, and his seemingly endless skill in all sorts of armed and unarmed combat, not to mention his near-godlike powers of manipulation over others. He was too perfect, and even when Dunnett had him publicly humiliated at the end of the first book, it didn't quite feel like enough. Besides, he bounced back; Dunnett clearly loved him too much to break him completely.

But aside from her main character, Dunnett's writing style is wonderful. Her conversations are effortless and easy to follow (when not sprinkled with quotations in Latin or French, not to mention the ever-present Scots), and her characters (excepting Lymond) are generally believable. Once I had recovered sufficiently from the first book, I braced myself against Lymond's inevitable pedantry and began the second.

( more on Queen's Play )

All in all, quite a good read, much more fast-moving than the first book. The plot is complex and exciting, and the characters have believable motivations. Although Lymond continues to be irritatingly good at everything he does, Dunnett provides plenty of other details to distract the reader. Definitely looking forward to reading the third.

From Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover:

You are a passenger. We are all, often, passengers. The boat, history, is going somewhere. You are not the captain. But you have excellent accommodations.

Of course, down there in the hold are famished immigrants or enslaved Africans or press-ganged tars. You can't help them - you do feel sorry for them - and you can't control the captain, either. Cosseted though you may be, you are actually quite powerless. A gesture on your part might relieve your bad conscience, if you have a bad conscience, but would not materially improve their situation. How would it help them to give up your own spacious cabin, with the room you require for your copious belongings, since, although those below have very few belongings, there are so many of them? The food you are eating would never be enough to feed all of them; indeed, if prepared with them in mind as well, it would no longer be as refined; and of course the view would be spoiled (crowds spoil a view, crowds litter, etc.). So you have no choice but to enjoy the excellent food and the view.

Nevertheless, assuming you are not indifferent, you think a lot about what is going on. Even if it is not your responsibility, how can it be your responsibility, you are still a participant and a witness. (First- or second-class passengers, these are the points of view from which most accounts of history are written.) And if those being persecuted are those who might have had accommodations as agreeable as your own, people of your own rank or who have your interests, you are far less likely to be indifferent to their present distress. Of course, you cannot prevent them from being punished if they are in fact guilty. But, assuming you are not indifferent, that you are a decent person, you will try to intervene when you can. Counsel leniency. Or at least prudence.

...just wanted to share.

(I sometimes feel like this -- defensive, helpless, vaguely disapproving but unable to effect change. It's nice to see it all laid out in pretty metaphor form.)

Anyone who's willing to pay money to see Umberto Eco should know that he'll be in the area.

Also, I just finished reading a good short by Neil Gaiman, A Study in Emerald, which manages to mix Sherlock Holmes with H.P. Lovecraft.

hilarity of the moment: De clunibus magnis amandis oratio, a Latin translation of a well-known rap song.

also, I love Daylight Savings Time. Driving home during sunlight hours does amazing things for my mood.

Sometimes I'm reluctant to see a movie when I've already read the book. Not because I think that the book would be in any way diminished, but because I don't want to ruin my mental images. I was hesitant to see the Harry Potter films, but fortunately neither Daniel Radcliffe nor Alan Rickman have stuck in my head as illustrations. On the other hand, I can't get rid of that guy who plays Hagrid, and Dame Maggie Smith has completely displaced my McGonagall. I also don't like the fact that I tend to forgive movies for structural or artistic faults that I would never forgive in a book, sometimes simply because the actor is cute. (Yes, I'm weak.)

At any rate. I really enjoyed Finding Neverland as a movie -- good acting, good transitions between Barrie's fantasy world and the real one, kids that weren't overly annoying. It's been at least a month since I saw it, and I thought I'd managed to forget the details. But apparently not, because Johnny Depp is now the voice of J.M. Barrie in my head.

I mean... when I read this, I'm imagining it in Depp's faux-Scottish accent, picturing him telling a story to those little freckled kids: Cosmo is a cadet at Osborne, and properly proud of his station, but just now he looks proud of nothing. He is plunged in gloom. The cause of his woe is a telegram, which he is regarding from all points of the compass, as if in hopes of making it send him better news. At last he gives expression to his feelings. 'All I can say,' he sums up in the first words of the play, 'is that if father tries to kiss me, I shall kick him.'

( more on the play 'Alice Sit-By-The-Fire' )

Saint Augustine is hilarious. He really can't deal with children.

Most of us conceive of children as cutely self-centered little beings; we forgive them their faults because they're adorable. St. A, on the other hand, sees all their faults and finds nothing lovable in them. He judges their actions by what he sees is right, and condemns them as nasty, amoral creatures.

At first I thought that the child-lambasting was a reflection on the ill he thought of himself; after all, the volume is titled Confessions. He begins the litany of his sins at his own conception, sparing his young self nothing. He relives all of his childhood misdeeds, from throwing baby tantrums to not paying attention in class to his regret that he enjoyed the tales of Dido and Aeneas as opposed to the words of God. His words may strike sympathetic guilty chords in his readers:

I even stole from my parents' larder and from their table, either from greed or to get something to give to other boys in exchange for their favourite toys, which they were willing to barter with me. And in the games I played with them I often cheated in order to come off the better, simply because the desire to win had got the better of me. And yet there was nothing I could less easily endure, nothing that made me quarrel more bitterly, than to find others cheating me as I cheated them. All the same, if they found me out and blamed me for it, I would lose my temper rather than give in.

He then bemoans the fact that these faults followed him to adulthood, as they do all men. (This is where he goes from specific to general, condemning all children and not just his past self.) If his own childhood is any example, then children are selfish, arrogant beings; where is their purity, their much-lauded innocence? How are they any better than the adults who admire them? Upon which he addresses God, and this is where it gets really funny:

Can this be the innocence of childhood? Far from it, O Lord! ... It was, then, simply because they are small that you used children to symbolize humility when, as our King, you commended it by saying that the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.

"simply because they are small"! He's trying to find some justification for the widely accepted goodness of children, but with no logical proof at hand, he falls back on their size. "I guess God only likes them because... they're cute."

It must have been a terribly unsatisfying conclusion for poor St A.