![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altarielI just wrote a long entry, forgot to copy'n'paste, and LJ munched it.
Short version: brilliant weekend, loads of books bought, countryside nice and want to live in place where it is extremely quiet indeed, email has been fried since yesterday afternoon until this afternoon, got several rather crushing deadlines at end of the month so may well disappear for a couple of weeks or else will be procrastinating wildly and constantly online.
And here's an article by A.S. Byatt about Harry Potter.
Short version: brilliant weekend, loads of books bought, countryside nice and want to live in place where it is extremely quiet indeed, email has been fried since yesterday afternoon until this afternoon, got several rather crushing deadlines at end of the month so may well disappear for a couple of weeks or else will be procrastinating wildly and constantly online.
And here's an article by A.S. Byatt about Harry Potter.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-07-08 11:43 am (UTC)Aaaargh! :-( :-( You could look at downloading a Windows client? I use the Semagic client. Don't know whether it's the best, but it's dead easy to install and use.
Glad you had a good weekend! E-mail to follow at some point in the near-ish future.
Re:
Date: 2003-07-08 11:54 am (UTC)I owe you an email anyway, so don't stress about it.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-08 11:53 am (UTC)Ha, can feel your pain.
And here's an article by A.S. Byatt about Harry Potter.
Mmm, can't access it (am not a registered user), but since I've never read the books, I shouldn't complain. (although, as a phenomenon of postmodern culture, on which I'm writing my dissertation... LoL)
no subject
Date: 2003-07-08 11:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-09 03:06 am (UTC)I was all with her, when she mentioned the real magic of LeGuin. (why, I just found out what I'll read next week, during my trip home! :D You told me to read the short-stories before the 5th book, right?)
(I don't like registering, because even though they say the info is 'confidential', they send you a ton of junk mail, or pass your e-addy around so that others can send you a ton of junk mail)
no subject
Date: 2003-07-09 04:21 am (UTC)I'm registered at so many sites now for work and other purposes that I've given up on not receiving junk mail (I think ff.net is probably the worst offender). But if you're relatively spam-free I can certainly understand you wanting to remain that way!
no subject
Date: 2003-07-08 12:17 pm (UTC)Sorry to hear that RL is likely to force you into lurkdom for a bit. But it's better to face up to the nasty deadlines earlier rather than later, at least if you value your emotional equilibrium!
no subject
Date: 2003-07-09 09:10 am (UTC)You'd probably find some of them interesting, if you haven't read them already: Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West, about a man returning from the trenches with shellshock and memory loss. How Many Miles to Babylon by Jennifer Johnston, about the effect of the Great War on two Irish boys. And there was a book about Percy Toplis, The Monocled Mutineer. Looks like someone was clearing out the WW1 shelf on their bookcase.
it's better to face up to the nasty deadlines earlier rather than later, at least if you value your emotional equilibrium!
You're right of course! And I was already getting a bit jittery about the deadline convergence!
no subject
Date: 2003-07-09 02:07 pm (UTC)As for my advice - I'm definitely better at giving it than following it myself!
no subject
Date: 2003-07-11 03:22 am (UTC)I particularly recommed The Return of the Soldier (turns out, from buying this copy, that it was made into a film, with Glenda Jackson, Alan Bates, Ian Holm, in the early 80s, so I'll had to track that down). The Jennifer Johnston book I think I read a while ago, but I don't remember much about it.
I bought Prodigal Summer last week, btw - the weather has just got hot again, so I'll finish my current reading group book (Cold Mountain - it's very good), and then turn to the Kingsolver, I reckon.
Byatt's article
Date: 2003-07-09 05:09 am (UTC)Articles that I have read lately on Harry Potter drive home to me the degree to which people's reading pleasure is ruined by self-consciousness and one-up-manship.
Reading, or going to the theatre, or whatever has become a peformance. I am performing 'Reading Poetry' but you are merely performing 'Reading Children's Books' so you are inferior to me.
Byatt herself says 'being taught literature often destroys the life of books', and yet I think articles like this one are part of that desructive process, which centre on what reading something says about you, not what it gives to you.
Re: Byatt's article
Date: 2003-07-09 05:31 am (UTC)- I find Tolkien restful
- You are comfort reading
- She engages in regressive latency-period fantasies
Myself, I read Georgette Heyer novels because I think they crack along at a smashing old pace and are really well-executed, researched and characterized. And because secretly I want to be able to write books like that when I grow up, only with guns and spaceships.
On the other hand, I do think that the Harry Potter books aren't that great and that there are much better children's fantasy writers out there - like Susan Cooper or Diana Wynne Jones. But if one child has started reading just because of Harry Potter, that alone justifies their existence. And of course I'll keep on reading them.
Plus there are those of us who can still feel that 'shiver of awe' she describes at Tolkien. But that's just a regressive latency-period fantasy, I guess. Excuse me while I go and watch some DS9 over lunch. Guns - *and* spaceships!
no subject
Date: 2003-07-12 12:51 am (UTC)OK, I haven't read this article (I got suspicious when the site required salary information) but I've read some of the reactions to the article, and I wonder why on earth do people persist in treating Rowling's books as exemplars of the fantasy genre when they're not?
They are, primarily, boarding school stories and they are much more in the tradition of Blyton and Brent-Dyer, and probably Oxenham, Fairlie Bruce and Brazil. There is very little point in continuing to compare Rowling to Tolkien, Pratchett and LeGuin when she's writing in a quite different tradition. Indeed, the reaction to Rowling is so similar to Blyton, it's scary - children love them, the establishment (in Blyton's case teachers and librarians, in Rowling's, the literary (both mainstream and genre, judging by the SF lit con I went to earlier this year) looks down on them.
Now Wynne Jones has written a couple of fantasy boarding school stories (Witch Week and The Year of the Griffin are two that I've read) and </>DragonSinger:Harper of Pern is also classic boarding school stuff but these aren't the books that most people are using for comparison.
Maybe this is because most of the critics doing lit-snob comparisons haven't read that widely in genre. (Oh look, Tolkien and Pratchett have elves, LeGuin has wizards, and Rowling has elves and wizards, therefore they are writing the same sort of book. That is not lit crit - that's just bloody lazy.) LeGuin's Earthsea writing might happen to involve a school of wizardry but she most emphatically is not writing a boarding school story.
Examples? Well, Rowling's Potions classes match so well to Domestic Science classes, it's uncanny. The scene where Ron chops up Malfoy's roots roughly and is then made to exchange them with his own neatly cut ones is pure Chalet School. Quidditch, while mapping on to football in the wider world, within the context of the school correlates to lacrosse (even to the risk of injury).
This isn't to say that the fantasy element is not important, I just don't think it's central.
I also think there's a fair bit of Grange Hill in there too. (Harry, Ron and Hermione versus Tucker, Alan and Benny).
I am also wondering if the later books will become closer to the boarding school stories written for adults (such as White's Frost In May and Lambert's No Talking After Lights
So until the lit critics start reviewing this books in the context of the genre to which they truly belong, I for one, am not going to consider their opinions as worth it.
So there.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-12 06:39 am (UTC)You patiently keep on saying this to me and I keep being incredibly thick-skulled about it, but you're completely right. Be patient with me! *g*
I've been reading OotP this weekend, and thinking more and more in terms of The Naughtiest Girl books. And Grange Hill.
I've copied'n'pasted the Byatt article and emailed it to you. (I couldn't find the Marina Warner articles in the Guardian, but I did find this, which is about one of Tove Jansson's novels for adults coming back into print - don't know if you've seen this already.)
Indeed, the reaction to Rowling is so similar to Blyton, it's scary - children love them, the establishment [snip] looks down on them.
I so much want you to research and write about this: "(Un)Receptive Audiences: children's and literary readings of Blyton and Rowling."
Perhaps one of the most significant aspects of the fantasy element in the Harry Potter books is that it gives the literary establishment an 'easy target' at which to direct its complaints? Thinking out loud. Or in text, anyway.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-12 07:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-13 03:16 am (UTC)Here's the Marina Warner one:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,10761,996243,00.html
The words altariel1 and thick-skulled just do not belong in the same sentence, unless separated by is the opposite of. I'm just harping on - thank you for your patience.
Thanks for the link to the Jansson one - that sounds like a must-read to me.
I think you're probably right about the fantasy element making it an easier target for some.
Sigh. I enjoy the HP books, I think they're a great read, but I don't love them as much as many others. I'm just narked at all the stone-throwing. Oh well, apparently everyone has to despise someone.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-13 09:16 am (UTC)I can be extremely pig-headed at times - it's that inferior Se.
Sigh. I enjoy the HP books, I think they're a great read, but I don't love them as much as many others. I'm just narked at all the stone-throwing. Oh well, apparently everyone has to despise someone.
I read the first three incredibly rapidly, and I loved the third one, particularly when Harry sees the stag. The fourth needed a good edit.
I'm enjoying OotP a great deal, actually - thought it was slow starting, but I've been cracking through it today.
I don't know what it is about them that keeps on making me feel so ambivalent towards them - well, I do know, it's the amount of hype and my deep envy of her vast fortune. Mr Altariel really can't abide them.
Mr Altariel... I should just call him Celeborn and have done, for he is surely accounted wise, and I have indeed dwelt with him years uncounted (well, ten), and together through ages of the world (it seems) we have fought the long defeat (little bit of politics).
Grate Minez
Date: 2003-07-12 02:28 pm (UTC)http://www.alice.dryden.com/uk/ho_for_hoggwarts.htm
Brilliant!
Grate Minez
Date: 2003-07-12 02:29 pm (UTC)http://www.alice.dryden.co.uk/ho_for_hoggwarts.htm
Brilliant!
Re: Grate Minez
Date: 2003-07-12 02:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-13 03:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-09 04:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-10 12:25 am (UTC)I've no doubt the loo will get cleaned several times before the end of the month. I doubt I'll be driven to ringing my mother, though.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-11 03:27 am (UTC)Thank you! :-) I hit one interim deadline yesterday: I'm developing a website guide to conducting web surveys. I sent out the pilot version to the guy running the project yesterday, and he's really pleased with it, which is a relief! So I can carry on with what I had planned rather than having to make massive structural alterations. There'll be a bit of a technical learning curve by the end of the month (i.e. - learning how to do web surveys, LOL!), but that should be interesting, I hope!
Next week will be stressful, but after that the deadlines all involve fun and creative stuff.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-12 12:55 am (UTC)Excellent!
got several rather crushing deadlines at end of the month so may well disappear for a couple of weeks or else will be procrastinating wildly and constantly online.
Good luck with the deadlines and enjoy the procrastination.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-12 06:41 am (UTC)Excellent!
Found a copy of The Nonesuch for 20p - that was on your Heyer list.
may well disappear for a couple of weeks or else will be procrastinating wildly and constantly online.
Good luck with the deadlines and enjoy the procrastination.
I intend too! :-D
no subject
Date: 2003-07-13 03:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-13 02:40 am (UTC)I'm just shy of halfway through OotP, and it had very much begun to remind me of the seasons of Babylon 5 where President Clark is starting to take control on Earth. Which is very Orwellian.
I'll think of you while I sip a daiquiri beneath some palm trees. I'm evil like that.
:-P Have an excellent time!
Incidentally, do you still want the ToG synopsis?
Absolutely! Send it across! I might even have time to read it - probably in August!
no subject
Date: 2003-07-13 03:20 am (UTC)Sugoll is with you on that one. I think he links it explicitly to season 3.
Re:
Date: 2003-07-15 04:35 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-07-15 08:14 am (UTC)