NOT DEAD, JUST CRAZY
Dec. 22nd, 2009 08:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizbeeI've had the internet back at home for a few days, but this is my first day off in forever five days (yes, like a normal grown up with a normal grown up job), which means it's also the first day I won't be slowly going mad with the strain of retail Christmas. I walked into the tea room yesterday afternoon, and one of the other girls said, "Watch out, Liz has crazy eyes." AND IT WAS TRUE.
My problem is that, in my day to day life, I can really only be social for short periods of time. RL friends have probably noticed that I eventually tune out for a bit, recharge, then return. (If I don't carry some project around with me -- embroidery, or a sketchbook - I'll inevitably cadge one off someone else.) At work, normally, there'd be time to breathe between customers, but right now, you deal with one, you turn around and three others are waiting. Or the phone is ringing. Or both. The other day, I was on the phone to a customer, and an older woman reached around me and snapped her fingers in front of my face. I'm very proud to say I didn't hit her.
So, yes, teh crazy. I've been crawling home, sort of grunting at the flatmates, then curling up in my armchair to watch The West Wing. You know, I love Donna a whole lot, but it annoys me when the script has her play dumb for exposition.
In the rest of my copious spare time, I've been re-reading the Benjamin January books by Barbara Hambly, about a free man of colour in 1830s New Orleans who develops a skill for solving tricky problems, in between his day to day activities of teaching music, occasionally practicing medicine, and avoiding the people who'd try and sell him back into slavery. I read the first five books a few years ago, and I was curious to see how they'd hold up post-racefail. The answer is: very well. A few more books have been added since I last checked, and I've now read all but one.
I should probably stop now, as last night I had a vivid dream that HBO did an adaptation of the series, with Avery Brooks as Janvier and Freema Agyeman as Rose Vitrac. This concept is obviously made of 100% pure win and should be brought into reality at once, but it's always a bad sign when I start having fannish dreams. But I don't actually want to stop, so I'm reading Sold Down the River (which I was going to skip, because it involves Janvier being blackmailed into posing as a slave to find out who would kill his former master, and it's just very harrowing. But I got it out from the library with the rest, so obviously I knew this was going to happen) and planning to find the last one I haven't read.
...I wonder if there's fic? Stupid Yuletide archive, being closed until this year's challenge goes live. One person requested it, five offered; I'd call those odds reasonable. I bet it'll be Janvier/Hannibal fic.
I also read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson a few weeks ago. If you've not heard of it, it's the first book in a Swedish trilogy that's currently taking over bookstores like it's Twilight for grown-ups. With all the positive attention it's getting, I assumed it was going to be at least readable. And, in fairness, it was difficult to put down. But that was partially because I was curious to see how blatant the info-dumping was going to get. When a character goes out to buy a new laptop, I don't really care about the processor specs, y'know? And later, one character goes to Australia, and there's a whole paragraph of statistics that looks like it was copied and pasted from the CIA Worldbook site.
Worse were the characters. The main character (male) is a middle-aged crusading left wing journalist. (Note: the author, who died before his trilogy was published, was a middle-aged crusading left wing journalist.) He's a bit of a clueless schlub, but women fall all over him. Conveniently, he's in an open relationship, so he gets to have a lot of sex.
That's just standard Gary-Stu stuff, though. More laughable is Lisbeth Salander, the female protagonist, and the girl of the title. She's a hardcore punk hacker. She's so hardcore, she has six small tattoos! And some piercings! And she wears a lot of leather, and studded belts, and t-shirts with slogans on them! She's so thin that everyone thinks she's anorexic! But she eats heaps! Everyone wants to have sex with her! She's so far outside the boundaries of society, she'll even sleep with women!
Yes, I lolled.
In the hands of a better writer, Lisbeth would be an amazing character. She's damaged, tenacious, witty and dangerous. The infodumps about her background in the Swedish foster system were positively quivering with rage, and if that's the passion Larsson brought to his journalism, it's easy to understand his reputation. But fiction != journalism, and this was just bad.
So the really sad thing is that the plot was a bit good. The title in Swedish translates to Men Who Hate Women, and misogyny is the underlying theme of the whole book. It's all very coincidence-driven, but it holds together. The problem is that Larsson's feminist ally credentials (and I've seen his novels described as feminist fiction) didn't stop him from writing not one, but two scenes in which Lisbeth is graphically raped. And then she turns around and uses sex toys to rape her rapist. Which was, let me say, problematic.
Actually, the saddest thing of all? Is that I'm actually keen to see the movie. It looks like a good adaptation, and I suspect that the story will be much better without the clunky narration.
My problem is that, in my day to day life, I can really only be social for short periods of time. RL friends have probably noticed that I eventually tune out for a bit, recharge, then return. (If I don't carry some project around with me -- embroidery, or a sketchbook - I'll inevitably cadge one off someone else.) At work, normally, there'd be time to breathe between customers, but right now, you deal with one, you turn around and three others are waiting. Or the phone is ringing. Or both. The other day, I was on the phone to a customer, and an older woman reached around me and snapped her fingers in front of my face. I'm very proud to say I didn't hit her.
So, yes, teh crazy. I've been crawling home, sort of grunting at the flatmates, then curling up in my armchair to watch The West Wing. You know, I love Donna a whole lot, but it annoys me when the script has her play dumb for exposition.
In the rest of my copious spare time, I've been re-reading the Benjamin January books by Barbara Hambly, about a free man of colour in 1830s New Orleans who develops a skill for solving tricky problems, in between his day to day activities of teaching music, occasionally practicing medicine, and avoiding the people who'd try and sell him back into slavery. I read the first five books a few years ago, and I was curious to see how they'd hold up post-racefail. The answer is: very well. A few more books have been added since I last checked, and I've now read all but one.
I should probably stop now, as last night I had a vivid dream that HBO did an adaptation of the series, with Avery Brooks as Janvier and Freema Agyeman as Rose Vitrac. This concept is obviously made of 100% pure win and should be brought into reality at once, but it's always a bad sign when I start having fannish dreams. But I don't actually want to stop, so I'm reading Sold Down the River (which I was going to skip, because it involves Janvier being blackmailed into posing as a slave to find out who would kill his former master, and it's just very harrowing. But I got it out from the library with the rest, so obviously I knew this was going to happen) and planning to find the last one I haven't read.
...I wonder if there's fic? Stupid Yuletide archive, being closed until this year's challenge goes live. One person requested it, five offered; I'd call those odds reasonable. I bet it'll be Janvier/Hannibal fic.
I also read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson a few weeks ago. If you've not heard of it, it's the first book in a Swedish trilogy that's currently taking over bookstores like it's Twilight for grown-ups. With all the positive attention it's getting, I assumed it was going to be at least readable. And, in fairness, it was difficult to put down. But that was partially because I was curious to see how blatant the info-dumping was going to get. When a character goes out to buy a new laptop, I don't really care about the processor specs, y'know? And later, one character goes to Australia, and there's a whole paragraph of statistics that looks like it was copied and pasted from the CIA Worldbook site.
Worse were the characters. The main character (male) is a middle-aged crusading left wing journalist. (Note: the author, who died before his trilogy was published, was a middle-aged crusading left wing journalist.) He's a bit of a clueless schlub, but women fall all over him. Conveniently, he's in an open relationship, so he gets to have a lot of sex.
That's just standard Gary-Stu stuff, though. More laughable is Lisbeth Salander, the female protagonist, and the girl of the title. She's a hardcore punk hacker. She's so hardcore, she has six small tattoos! And some piercings! And she wears a lot of leather, and studded belts, and t-shirts with slogans on them! She's so thin that everyone thinks she's anorexic! But she eats heaps! Everyone wants to have sex with her! She's so far outside the boundaries of society, she'll even sleep with women!
Yes, I lolled.
In the hands of a better writer, Lisbeth would be an amazing character. She's damaged, tenacious, witty and dangerous. The infodumps about her background in the Swedish foster system were positively quivering with rage, and if that's the passion Larsson brought to his journalism, it's easy to understand his reputation. But fiction != journalism, and this was just bad.
So the really sad thing is that the plot was a bit good. The title in Swedish translates to Men Who Hate Women, and misogyny is the underlying theme of the whole book. It's all very coincidence-driven, but it holds together. The problem is that Larsson's feminist ally credentials (and I've seen his novels described as feminist fiction) didn't stop him from writing not one, but two scenes in which Lisbeth is graphically raped. And then she turns around and uses sex toys to rape her rapist. Which was, let me say, problematic.
Actually, the saddest thing of all? Is that I'm actually keen to see the movie. It looks like a good adaptation, and I suspect that the story will be much better without the clunky narration.
