Vivian > Recent Status Updates

[Agrippina] It is about a woman who ran the Roman Empire for longer than a lot of male emperors, and about how the men who controlled the world reacted to that. It is about, at the centre of it all, power.

*Chortling* Southon does a nice job addressing how problematic source material is, its limitations.

So, as Charles recently pointed out to me: "I need more sex, drugs, and samba." Hoping for 3/3.

A wee bit YA for my taste, but since I'm at loose ends I'll wander onwards.

What is too much to bear? Not being alive is too much to bear. We kept being alive even as they destroyed us. We kept our secrets though they tried to extinguish our secrets with us. Still we died. Still we lived. Up until this day.

At what point during lockdown does letting your husband/fellow quarantine buddy cut your hair suddenly become a good idea?

The constraint of the practical fell away and the idea of "experiment" became instead the idea of "art form," and as little morality attached to "product," Moss and Chen had both discovered in their separate ways that "art' had even less.

Second book by VanderMeer and I'm beginning to understand why I like the style of his writing so much; he writes the way I dream.

"Are you sure? She doesn't look too bright."
"If she was, the others wouldn't follow her," I said.


<<>> This is actually hysterical. So terrifyingly true that I can't laugh, but so funny

It would look up from feasting with mechanical grace and hunger, as if lusting for meat in a way that festered. Fostered the impression screams were more important than hunger.

Nothing else meant very much anymore, except the love between them. For glory was wasteful, Grayson believed, and Chen cared nothing for beauty that declared itself, for beauty had no morality, and Moss had already given herself over to a cause beyond or above the human.

How I feel about Flip:

I've finished this and it was good, but my brain is really not focused right now, tbh. I promise to get one up when I can wrangle it.

Young and stupidly naive heroines are not my favorite. I know they grew up under rocks, but still.

(\_/)
(O.O)

I guess I'm trying to understand the mindset of I'm not capable of being responsible for anything since I'm a delicate female, but I'm totally going to be responsible for pulling my profligate brother out of his debts, time and time again. Wtf?! This book makes me want to hit characters with a stick.

Omg. Not sure how I express how much I detest Flip. At this point, I'd teach Bennet's macques to rip Flip's face off. Lock your office door, dumbass.

For me, it was a point of pride to keep riding a shortboard as I staggered into my forties. Reverting to a longboard would be, I thought, like using a geriatric walker--your dancing days were over. I planned to put it off as long as possible.

From the water's edge, looking out across a stepladder of six or seven walls of cold, growling, onrushing whitewater, the idea of paddling out actually carried with it the whiff of lunacy. The project looked impossible, like trying to swim up a waterfall. It took a literal leap of faith to start.

Waves are not stationary objects in nature like roses or diamonds. They're quick, violent events at the end of a long chain of storm action and ocean reaction. Even the most symmetrical breaks have quirks and a totally specific, local character changing with every shift in the tide and wind and swell. The best days at the best days have a Platonic aspect--they begin to embody a model of what surfers want waves to be.

Caryn liked to say, quoting Walpole, that life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. That pretty well nailed my problem with LSD. The cerebral part was terrific; the emotional part, not so much.

Yes, carry on. I am past caring now. I shall even find a faint interest in seeing into what darker and profounder abysses of hell you can plunge this home

He sprang from the bed, and for an instant stood looking exactly like a picture my Aunt Agatha has in her dining-room—The Stag at Bay—Landseer.

Surfing is a secret garden, not easily entered. My memory of learning a spot, of coming to know and understand a wave, is usually inseparable from the friend with whom I tried to climb its walls.

You have not been through the experience of starting to ask the girl you love to marry you and then suddenly finding yourself talking about the plumlike external gills of the newly-born newt. It's not a thing you can do twice.

Kick It Down

Hawaiian culture had been destroyed, and the people decimated by European diseases; between 1778 and 1893, the Hawaiian population shrank form an estimated eight hundred thousand to forty thousand, and by the end of the nineteenth century surfing had all but disappeared.

"It is not always a simple matter to gauge the effect of alcohol on a subject unaccustomed to such stimulant. I have known it to have distressing results in the case of parrots."

'Every time a fairy sheds a tear, a wee bit star is born in the Milky Way.' Have you ever thought that, Mr. Wooster?"

I never had. Most improbable, I considered, and it didn't seem to me to check up with her statement that the stars were God's daisy chain. I mean, you can't have it both ways.

Reading these as I like, out of order. Geometry of Love caught my eye as I was waiting in line to vote.

"In a striking costume like Mephistopheles, I might quite easily pull off something pretty impressive. Colour does make a difference. Look at newts. During the courting season the male newt is brilliantly coloured. It helps him a lot."

"But you aren't a male newt."

Me: Who chooses to play the viola?
DH: People who want to get hit.
*mutual laughing*

I am a giant jerk, but it really keeps rolling around in my head.

In this life, you can choose between two courses. You can either shut yourself up in a country house and stare into tanks, or you can be a dasher with the sex. You can't do both.

Bosch had spoken the word love. He knew now that he must make it either ugly or beautiful.