Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 98

La Belle Sauvage (The Book of Dust), by Philip Pullman

This is an extremely weird book. The first half reminded me of some of my favorite parts of The Golden Compass, and the second half reminded me of some of my least favorite parts of The Amber Spyglass.

I was in the series for daemons, armored bears, dimensional travel, Lyra lying, the alethiometer, witches, and Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter as fascinating bad guys. But mostly I was in it for daemons. I was not in the series for theology, politics, the Magisterium, God, angels, the weird surreal tone of the last book, Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter as heroic antiheroes, or Dust. I feel like Dust got explained about a billion times and every time it was explained, I understood it less.

In La Belle Sauvage, Malcolm is an eleven-year-old boy who’s the child of innkeepers on a river by a nunnery. When he finds a secret message, he befriends Hannah Relf, a scholar of the alethiometer who is also a spy, and begins working in her spy network. Meanwhile, his school is getting taken over by the religious equivalent of the Hitler Youth, and the nuns take in a baby named Lyra. Malcolm, who is friendly with the nuns (they’re very nice nuns) adores baby Lyra and vows to do anything to protect her.

La Belle Sauvage is his canoe, which a local boy kept repainting as La Belle Sausage until Malcolm beat him up. IMO, the book would have been greatly improved if 1) they had been forced to have their dramatic adventures in La Belle Sausage since that is literally the only funny moment in the entire book, and 2) Malcolm never hits anyone ever.

Everything involving him and violence is supposed to be deep but ends up your basic "in hard times hard men must make hard choices which are always violent, and that's totally fine because their violence is always necessary to protect helpless females and also they feel bad about the ~violence within them~."

Remember the other thing I really liked about The Golden Compass? Lyra getting to be a weird little girl who's semi-feral and lies and doesn't get punished for it and is the heroine? And then in later books, she gets tamed and a boy appears to do manly stuff? Yeah. We're now three to one on books in the series which are all about heroic manly boys protecting girls vs books about weird feral girls protecting themselves.

This book is very difficult to discuss without spoilers for the second book, The Secret Commonwealth, which I'd already heard about and which literally did spoil a significant aspect of the book for me. If you want to know…

( Read more... )

That being said, I really enjoyed the first half of the book. It’s got a leisurely pace but I found it very compelling reading. Then a flood occurs, and the book goes from pastoral/political fantasy to a kind of surreal fever dream interspersed with lots and lots of diaper changes. (Teenage Lyra would be so embarassed by the existence of this book.)

It also completely drops most of the characters and plotlines from the first half with no closure whatsoever, to the point of never learning whether major characters survived or not. Book 2 takes place 20 years later, so it’s not a cliffhanger that will pick up in the next book, it’s a “you might or might not get some kind of summarized version of what happened to them” in the next book.

There is a lot of unpleasant sexual violence against adults and children in this book, including my least favorite thing, a completely gratuitous rape that serves only to motivate a male character. The rest of my complaints are spoilery.

( Read more... )

This book was so frustrating. A lot of the early parts were really very good. And then there was the rest of it. Just what this series and fiction in general really needed: more rape.

The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage (Book of Dust, Volume 1)[image error]

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Double Indemnity, by James M. Cain

I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn’t have the money and I didn’t have the woman.

A life insurance salesman meets a woman who wants to get rid of her husband; they concoct a perfect plan; God laughs.

This was an odd book to read as it was generally very faithfully adapted into one of my all-time favorite noir movies, so while it’s a very good book it’s impossible not to miss the movie’s performances and direction and dialogue while reading it. Also, even the small changes have a touch of genius; Walter Huff, which is already a good name for the character, is lifted into iconic with the two-letter change into Walter Neff.

( Spoilers )

Double Indemnity[image error]

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Dear Chocolate Box Writer

Dear Chocolatier,

Thank you for writing for me! If you have any questions, please check with the mods. I am a very easy recipient and will be delighted with whatever you write for me. I have no special requirements beyond what's specifically stated in my DNWs. I'm fine with all POVs (i.e., first, second, third), tenses, ratings, etc.

I would enjoy any art treats if any of my prompts inspire you visually.

My AO3 name is Edonohana.

I like hurt-comfort, action/adventure, domestic life, worldbuilding, evocative descriptions, camaraderie, loyalty, trauma recovery, learning to love again or trust again or enjoy life again, miniature things, and animals.

I have requested a bunch of these canons before. All prompts in previous exchanges are still valid and welcomed. You can find them by clicking on the "fic exchange letter" tag.

NOTE: I have placed Watchmen last (everything else is in alphabetical order) due to massive spoilers for the TV series, which is fantastic but best watched unspoiled. Don't click on those prompts unless you want to be spoiled.

( General DNWs )

( Dark Tower - Stephen King )

( The Defenders (Marvel TV) (The Punisher) )

( Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin )

( The Leftovers )

( Original Works )

( The Stand - Stephen King )

( Star Trek - Various Authors  )

( Wiseguy )

( Watchmen TV )

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My Yuletide Stories

This Yuletide I wrote six stories, five in the main collection and one in Madness. The fandoms are, in alphabetical order, "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" - Ursula K. Le Guin, Dark Tower - Stephen King, Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey,Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Michael Swanwick, and Sandman - Neil Gaiman.

The Quiet Rebellion of Tardigrade Sela Writings, for lady_ragnell . "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" - Ursula K. Le Guin. You are no doubt familiar with the major genres of tardigrade literature.

I was absolutely delighted to see someone prompt for this wonderful story which can be read online. I immediately vowed to write for it, and hoped others would too. I was rewarded with two other excellent stories, both of which you should read if you haven't already.

lady_ragnell mentioned her favorite animals and made a passing reference to tardigrade opera. I have always loved tardigrades, so I chose them though I gave them written works instead. They are famous for survival, and I love survival narratives, which is how I came up with the mainstream of their literature and their titles. But the title part of Le Guin's original story isn't about the mainstream of Ant literature, but about an unusual manuscript which appears to be either a manifesto or memoir of rebellion. So I decided to make the apparent focus of my article be on the little-known counterculture of tardigrade literature.

What is countercultural to survival? While I was thinking about that, I was also thinking about words for cultural concepts - mono no aware, saudade, panache. They often get absolutely terrible articles written about them, like "Ten Ways To Embrace Hygge in Your Home," which briefly made me consider writing one of those. But while deciding not to do that, I did land on something a bit like hygge (Danish) as the inspiration for sela. And yes, sisu (which I think I first heard about in connection with the WWII Finnish sniper Simo Hayha) was the inspiration for ela.

I now really wish I had access to a library of translated tardigrade manuscripts.

Feverblossom, for sasha_b . Dark Tower - Stephen King. The ka-tet prepares a surprise for Jake while he's recovering from being poisoned.

sasha_b wrote me a delightful Dark Tower story a while back, Once and Future, so I was excited to get the chance to return the favor. I adore Mid-World and it was great to delve into its weirdness and the love of the ka-tet, plus one of my favorite aspects of the book, which is the different times the characters come from. Thanks to scioscribe for suggesting both the concept and Susannah's gift.

A Hatching at Half-Circle Sea Hold, for chess (Kastaka). Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey. “That’s a rather extraordinary proposal, Menolly,” said the Masterharper.

I love McCaffrey's dragons and fire lizards, and was delighted to see a prompt to write about my favorite thing - a Hatching! I'd also wanted for a while to write a story about Menolly returning to Half-Circle Sea Hold. Fire lizards for EVERYONE!

The Colors of Lorbanery, for penintime . Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin. The woman who had once been Akaren stayed inside her house for several days, changing.

The brief scene in The Farthest Shore with Akaren, the dyer of Lorbanery, is one of the most haunting moments in the entire series. I'd wanted for a while to write about her, and what happens to her afterward. I chose to set it before the end of the book because hope is a choice we make as well as an emotion that we feel, and as a choice, it's most meaningful and important when we have no idea how things will turn out but they're not looking good.

Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth

To See a World in a Grain of Sand, for Northland. The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Michael Swanwick. Jane was the first to notice that a ragtag band of refugee meryons had made a camp behind a sofa in the student lounge.

This is one of my favorite books and I was thrilled to see it requested for Yuletide. I shamelessly indulged myself by choosing to write about the canon tiny people and their tiny worlds. I had an absolute blast detailing their projects, and also Jane's awful/hilarious roommate situation. I think you can read this without knowing canon, but if you've read the book, you'll catch certain parallels between the meryons in the story and Jane's arc in the book.

An Explorer of Delirium, for scioscribe . Sandman - Neil Gaiman. Delirium gets a visitor.

There's not much I can say about this one without spoiling it, but I had so much fun writing it. SO MUCH FUN.

I enjoyed doing canon review for all these, I was really happy with how my stories came out, and I absolutely loved the stories I got, and I had a marvelous time reading the collection, and I have a ton of stories yet to read. In short, I had a wonderful Yuletide this year, and I hope you did too.

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Cats: The Movie

I’ve never seen the play Cats, but I know the concept and I’ve heard the songs. Halle and I rushed to see the movie before it vanished from theatres, on the theory that a CATastrophe like this may come but once in a lifetime.

Regrettably, we did not see the original version. We saw the one that was “fixed” so now all the cats have human hands. All the moments where they make gestures on the clear assumption that their hands will be CG’d into paws look incredibly bizarre. We saw it with a very small audience that did not react much, except when a small child ran madly out of the theatre with a parent in hot pursuit. Neither of them returned.

I brought a canned mango margarita, which was a good choice. I think weed would have been an even better one. This was a stoner movie if I ever saw one, a movie made for murmurs of “Whoa” and lengthy fits of hysterical laughter. And now that I have seen Rebel Wilson unzip her cat suit, step out wearing another cat suit which is wearing a bikini, display her tiny cabaret in which she forces slave mice with CG’d child faces to perform, and then bring out a parade of cockroaches which are chorus girls with CG roach wings wearing Star Trek swim caps with antennae attached, make them march upside down on the underside of a table, and then graphically crunch them between her teeth and eat them, I feel that I have no need to ever take LSD.

The story, such as it is, begins when a white spotted cat named Victoria gets abandoned in a sack and found by the Jellicle Cats. They explain that they all want to be taken to the Heaviside Layer, which is Heaven, but only one can be chosen. They audition by singing. That’s when Rebel Wilson unzips herself and a bunch of chorus dancing cockroaches spin around on a strawberry cake and also there’s a lot of fat jokes. Macavity (Idris Elba in a flasher coat and glowing CG green eyes) vaporizes her to get rid of the competition and she materializes on a ship in the middle of the Thames.

This scene repeats about six times: a cat sings, then Macavity vaporizes them and they materialize on his boat. No one seems at all bothered by this until he vaporizes Judi Dench. Judi Dench has CG cat fur AND a giant fur coat the same color as her cat fur, so it looks like she made a coat out of her own clone, Buffalo Bill-style. A cat rubs against her and it is so creepy.

A lot of the movie seemed weirdly sexual, especially since some cats wore clothes, which made the ones who didn’t seem naked and the ones who only wore shirts to seem to be naked from the waist down. Every time a clothed cat disrobes, which occurs frequently, it not only makes them seem naked, it makes all the cats seem naked.

Ian McKellen has perhaps the most bizarre performance in the entire movie. It starts with him assiduously licking a shelf and just goes on from there. He defeats the bad guy by shouting “Feefiddlefuzzle!” and I was still having hysterics ten minutes later.

The play is infamous for having virtually no plot and for what plot there is to be nonsensical. However, the same can be said about some ballets. If you’re basically there for singing and dancing, you don’t necessarily need a plot. Movies, however, typically do add plot when adapting plotless materials. It’s not inherently a problem that this movie doesn’t, but it makes zero effort to consider that what works onstage may not work onscreen.

The movie is full of random cuts to new locations, which were probably done onstage with set or light changes and worked fine, but in the movie feel like the characters teleported. It also uses the same location, a street corner, about a bazillion times for no reason. Onstage the reason is that it’s the main set; in a movie, there’s no clear reason and it seems weird.

Which, of course, is not even close to being the weirdest thing about this movie. Onstage, people wearing cat suits and cat makeup and dancing is at worst cheesy and at best fun. If they’d just done this for the movie, it would have been a huge improvement over what they actually did, which was to CG fur and cat parts on to actors in bodysuits. If you’ve seen photos, you can get some sense of just how Uncanny Valley this is, but having it in motion makes it so much worse. There’s a grey cat who introduces a bunch of cats, and every time he turned around so you get a look at his pasted-on-yay face head-on, I recoiled back into my seat.

The tails are CG animated and move like dancing cobras, not cat tails. At one point Rebel Wilson uses a tail as a microphone and you can still see her own tail and there is no other cat nearby.

The scale is completely inconsistent, even within the same scene. The cats are as tall as garbage cans, then they fall into one and suddenly five of them can easily fit inside and a champagne bottle is as long as they are. The prop food is very clearly fake, but fake like a bad attempt at realism, not cartoon-like.

Every time the actors drop down on all fours and scuttle around, the effect is less graceful and cool than horrifying. It looks exactly like every horror movie ever where people crawl toward you because they’re possessed and then their heads spin around or they lift their heads and you see that their eyes are upside down or made of teeth. It doesn’t help that there’s a scene where all the cats get possessed by the moon or something and fall down and then act post-coital, like they had a giant orgy with the cat devil on the astral plane.

At some point, to indicate that Magic is Happening, gravity turns off and everything floats around for a while.

Jennifer Hudson plays Grizabella, an aging cat prostitute who is now a bag lady. She has shiny lines of snot below each nostril for the entire movie. Since her whole face was CG’d, someone made a conscious decision to put that snot in and make sure it’s there consistently and has just the right gleam.

Except for “Mungojerrie and Rumpleteaser,” which was surprisingly actually good, the songs were all pretty bad versions of them. The sound mixing was off in “Memory,” so you couldn’t understand most of the words. There were clearly good dancers in the cast, but it’s not directed so you can appreciate it or even see it well. Except for some excellent tap dancing. Only the actor looked almost totally human including his tap shoes, so it was basically a tap dancing sequence by a dude in a giant cat head. For the record, this was where Halle completely lost it.

I almost forgot to mention that Taylor Swift shows up randomly and noncon drugs all the cats with glowing catnip that is clearly meant to be cocaine. She has breasts, unlike the other cats. At this point Idris Elba throws off his flasher coat and is clearly naked beneath it, with visible human muscles. So if you’ve ever wanted to see Taylor Swift and Idris Elba dance naked in fur suits, this is your chance.

At some point after this, Jennifer Hudson ascends to Heaven in a chandelier attached to a hot air balloon. Hopefully Heaven has Kleenex.

And then Dami Judi Dench stares directly into the camera and forcefully informs us that cats are not dogs while holding her human hand, which bears a wedding ring, over her heart. The camera focuses on her mouth and it is very noticeable that her teeth look terrible.

Me (whispers): “Do you think they fix up her teeth for all her other movies?”

Halle (whispers): “Maybe they deliberately made her teeth look like that for this one.”

Me: “Why would they do that?”

Halle: “Why would they do anything in this movie?”

The camera then goes lower, so we can see that they have CG’d giant wads of orange fur to her very human bare feet so they look like Bigfoot feet.

And with that, the movie unceremoniously ends.

I looked up Dame Judi’s teeth afterward. They look fine in photos. So either something went horribly wrong with makeup, CG, or lighting and nobody noticed or fixed it, or else someone decided she really needed to look like she had decayed and missing teeth to go with her Bigfoot feet. I don’t understand how either scenario could occur, but as Halle pointed out, “Why would they do anything in this movie?”

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Yuletide Recs, Part 3

Need to Know Canon

4.66920[...]. Arcadia - Tom Stoppard. An alternate ending in script format, full of sparkling wordplay, absurdity, profundity, mathematics, and love.

A Long Way from the Cromwell Road. Ballet Shoes - Noel Streatfeild. Petrova visits Pauline in Hollywood after the war ends. This story has beautiful imagery and a lot of heart, and brings the characters up to the postwar era in a way that's realistic without being depressing.

The Desert Dreams of a River. The Darkangel - Meredith Ann Pierce. Gorgeous post-series series story that fits with canon while cleverly coming up with ways to undo the more depressing aspects of the actual ending. It has the lush fairy tale atmosphere and style down to a T.

a burning coal of comfort. The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison. When Maia is kidnapped by a faction hoping to halt the construction of Wisdom Bridge, Beshelar, gravely injured, is by his side. It might just be their undoing. A lovely touching story, full of feeling, about friendship, duty, honor, and love.

What's Real. The Wind in the Door - Madeleine L'Engle. Proginoskes has been lost to Meg. She has to find him. A moving look at love and loss, and what is never lost.

What have you enjoyed this Yuletide?

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See Cats with me tomorrow?

Me and some friends are seeing CATS at 2:00 at the Culver Arclight tomorrow (Sunday). Meet us at the theatre if you want to experience the CATastrophe!

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Yuletide Recs, Part 2

Here are more stories I enjoyed; hopefully you will enjoy some of them too.

Don't Need to Know Canon

An Orchid Keeps Its Secrets. "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" - Ursula K. Le Guin. An insect linguist discusses a case study in orchid linguistics and defends the concept of plant art, with an aside about wasp love poetry. What it says on the can. If this is the sort of thing you enjoy, you will enjoy this.

If you've never encountered the charmingly spooky one-panel webcomic Behind You, oh boy are you in for a treat. It's drawings and animations of people with creepy things behind them; you'd think this would get receptive quickly but it's so inventive that it doesn't. Here's one of my favorites. This one is animated so keep watching.

The Rotten Heart - Behind You is essentially original fiction inspired by the webcomic. It's halfway between urban fantasy and the spooky (as opposed to gory) sort of horror, loosely inspired by the legend of Bloody Mary, and is great fun.

Feathers and Whiskers. MOJO Magical Horses. Art! A black, winged horse meets a black, un-winged cat.

Knowing Canon Would Be Helpful But is Maybe Not Necessary.

Flora's Adventures in Ghostland. The Turn of the Screw - Henry James. This weird and charming story re-imagines the original as if it was a children's book written at the same time. Truly the sort of thing Yuletide is for.

Sugar Lumps - The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison. Maia gets a horse, and they both get a little sweetness in their lives.

Need to Know Canon

A Light to Guide You Home. Dark Tower - Stephen King. Roland's spirit is lost after Mejis; Cuthbert plays Scheherazade to bring him back. A clever, touching, and metafictional love story about the power of love and story.

Ars Longa. In This House of Brede - Rumer Godden. Two of my favorite supporting characters from the novel, Abbess Hester and the sculptor Stefan Duranski, in a beautiful look at art and faith, perfectly in tune with the book.

upside down from the moon. The Long Walk - Stephen King. There were two stories this Yuletide about Ray and Pete escaping the Walk and holing up in a motel. I recced one last post, and now I've read the other and I'm reccing it too. They're both terrific, and together they make a neat look at two takes on a similar idea can be both similar and very different, which is something I always enjoy seeing when it happens in exchanges.

Please comment if you can, it makes the authors' day.

What have you been enjoying this Yuletide?

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Yuletide Recs: Part 1

I read very much on whim, so if I recced one story from a fandom which has two or three or six stories in it, it doesn't mean I didn't like the others, but rather that I haven't read them yet and will come back to them later.

So far, I have been delighted with the following stories:

Don't Need to Know Canon

"The Author of the Acacia Seeds," by Ursula K. Le Guin, is a wonderful story which can be read online. It's a set of academic journal articles on art and literature by animals. Mother Bonesplitter's Children is a Yuletide story about a groundbreaking presentation on Written Hyena. It starts out a bit dense, but gets more conversational quickly and ends up genuinely mind-blowing. It's a wonderful work of original fantasy.

Rest Stop. This story, a gift for me, is actually in Happy Belated Treatmas, which opened on the same day as Yuletide. It's F/F original fiction, an utterly delightful short story about an adrenaline junkie hyperspace test pilot and her beloved AI hyperspace ship. I can't tell you how much I appreciated someone picking up that weird prompt of mine and writing exactly what I wanted but couldn't write myself. The story is archive-locked, so you need to be a member of AO3 to read it.

Knowing canon is nice but not necessary

Dream Shadow. The Sandman - Neil Gaiman. Another gift for me, this delightful story combines dreamlike imagery, wish-fulfillment, and fantasy in the best possible ways. Zillah escaped an abusive marriage but is still emotionally struggling; in the realm of dreams, she has another identity with a mission. I think all you need to know to read this is that Morpheus is the lord and embodiment of dreams: literal dreams, daydreams, and imagination.

Probably Should Know Canon, but Who Knows, You Might Enjoy Anyway.

The Gift of the Healers. Clan of the Cave Bear - Jean Auel. If what you really loved was the first book's characters, cultural worldbuilding, and herb lore, HOO BOY is this story for you. The tone and content is dead-on for the book, it features all my favorite characters, it's full of cool worldbuilding, and the premise is a really clever and unexpected riff on one of my favorite elements in the book. Note: contains some graphic descriptions of injuries and Neanderthal surgery.

Wiseguy

I recently got addicted to this hugely enjoyable 80s show about Vinnie Terranova, an undercover cop with a tendency to get emotionally compromised, and his handlers with whom he has a sometimes prickly but very intense emotional bond, "Lifeguard" (Dan), who is played by an actor who is a real life double amputee, and Frank McPike, played by Jonathan Banks (Mike Ermentrout on Breaking Bad. That's really all you need to know to read these stories, and if you enjoy them, you would probably enjoy the show because the show is just like that. Except for the werewolves in the story that has werewolves.

Champagne Crazy. My wonderful, wonderful gift! Mel drags Vinnie out of the hospital for a fun day of errands, bizarre rants, and increasingly more difficult struggles to not pass out. I think all you need to know is Vinnie got shot while undercover with a manic criminal billionaire played by Kevin Spacey; if you do know the show, wow is the dialogue dead-on. This story is the most delicious blend of dark comedy and hurt-comfort.

Nobody Ever Made You a Monster. This one requires even less canon knowledge, as it's a case that didn't happen in canon. It's also got dead-on and often very funny dialogue, excellent hurt-comfort and angst, and WEREWOLVES.

Paz. So, after season three the network relaunched the show with a new lead. This is an alternate season four with the original characters, angsty and emotional and satisfying.

These Won't Make Sense Unless You Know Canon

convalescent. Benjamin January - Barbara Hambly. It was going on three in the morning when Benjamin January, heart in his throat, answered the banging on the jalousies at the front of his house on the Rue Esplanade to find a constable of the New Orleans City Guards he vaguely recognized—Boechter, he thought—as one of Shaw's men barely supporting said near-six-and-a-half feet of dripping wet, bleeding, unconscious Kaintuck scarecrow. This is everything you've ever wanted out of "Shaw is forced to recover at Ben and Rose's house," and really funny too.

When is a Train Not a Train? Dark Tower - Stephen King. Really cool, eerie, clever story about Blaine the Mono, interweaving all sorts of canon elements in startling and illuminating ways.

A Tomorrow at the End of the World. The Long Walk - Stephen King. A vivid, beautiful, heartbreaking look at Garraty and McVries and a moment of peace within the storm.

If you enjoyed these stories or other, please comment and let the author know!

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Happy Yuletide!

The Yuletide Archive is open, with 2075 stories in 1181 fandoms! Good work, Yuletide writers!

I received two absolutely marvelous stories for Yuletide, and one for Happy Belated Treatmas. I'll rec them tomorrow, when I make up a longer rec list.

Reccing and rec lists is one of the most fun aspects of Yuletide - I always find great stories to read that I would have otherwise missed. I hope you'll rec your favorites too. Link to your lists at yuletide , so everyone can enjoy them.

I've only had time to read my own gift stories so far, but browsing through the fandom lists, I'm very intrigued to see three articles on hyena, tardigrade, orchid, and wasp literature and linguistics (The Author of the Acacia Seeds - Ursula K. Le Guin, six stories about four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence (4'33" - John Cage (Song)), and three stories in an old favorite book of mine which I've never read fic for, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld - Patricia A. McKillip .

What looks intriguing so far? What have you enjoyed? Are you going to read and rec with me?

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