It's Always More Complicated

What I read

Finished Poor Caroline which is one of those novels - ?I think they went on being a thing beyond the period when this was written? - where you have several ill-assorted people's stories through them being brought together through some reason cutting across their usual associations, in this case, via the eponymous Caroline who is a dotty and determined ageing spinster who is trying to set up a Christian film company. And everyone has their own motivations, and so on, which have little or nothing to do with any stated purpose. Not a top Holtby but has its moments.

Re-read of NK Jemisin, The City We Became (Great Cities, #1) (2020) and The World We Make (Great Cities #2) (2022) - slightly less whelmed by the first perhaps but still gripped by the second.

Started to re-read KJ Charles, Copper Script (2025) and realised why it had not made much impression upon me. Well off-form - clunky, sluggish and has a lot of one of my pet peeves, very distinctively of-the-present-day expressions and word-usage in a period setting. Decided not to continue.

On the go

Foluso Agbaje, The Talk of the Party (2026) a mystery/thriller about wealthy socialite family in Lagos. Just started.

Up next

Have not yet got to Literary Review.

From crossedwires

1. COMMENT WITH A MYSTERIOUS COMMENT OF YOUR CHOICE.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Post the names of five fictional characters and your thoughts on each.

First up, Brush the Wandering Hedgehog from the Little Grey Rabbit books by Alison Uttley, about whom I have expatiated heretofore and whose likeness (by Margaret Tempest) features in my current default icon.

I couldn't choose between these two, because, really, they go together like going-together things: Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing, which is a (possibly pernicious) example of the 'they hate each other so really they're in lurrrve' trope that actually works. And how is awesome Beatrice in any way not awesome?

I did wonder about Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch, but since she changed her name once within the novel and is in prospect of changing it again (in both cases to names that Victorianists can spend many hours debating the correct pronunciation of), I decided to go with her uncle, Mr Brooke, who is a wonderful character study though, do admit, one would hate to live with him and he was hardly the man to provide adequate guardianship to his orphaned nieces. Brilliantly done by Robert Hardy in the TV version.

The entire Beetle family in Cold Comfort Farm: the patriarch Agony Beetle, his sensible and forthright wife (''Tes flying in the face of nature!' - 'All the same, it might be worth tryin'.') who is not from darkest Sussex, their daughter Merriam the hired girl at the farm, with her fatal habit of succumbing to seduction when the sukebind blooms, and her four offspring, who are being brought up to be a jazz-band in one o' they West End nightclubs.

And the very uncanonical Belinda in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (though Purcell clearly has a casual attitude to canonicity generally, with the witches in Dido and Aeneas and the numerous interpolations into A Midsummer Night's Dream, and let's just not go there with what he did with King Arthur). I was wondering: what happens to Belinda after Dido dies of grief following Aeneas's abandonment? She seems a sensible type (if perhaps failing to see what a bad idea Aeneas was as a lover for Dido), so I don't see her doing an Charmain-and-Iras act. Maybe she takes up the reigns of state in her competent hands? Maybe that was the plan? - Dido generally moping around was perhaps not the best thing for Carthage. I think there's a story there.

Five questions from frankie_ecap:

(1) ( How did you and partner meet and how did you know he was the one? )

(2) ( Would you describe yourself as an optimist or a pessimist, and why? )

(3) ( If you weren't an archivist, what would you be, and why? )

(4) ( What things do you think that people ought to understand about sex, that would be helpful to them? )

(5) ( What do you like best about yourself? )

Five things from forthwritten:
( Disease Underexplored topics Archives Grayshott Being More Complicated )

and five from intertext:
( Proust bread crabby old bats partner health spas )

via wordweaverlynn: when you see this, post a poem you like.

Two poems which seem resonant for me at the moment about the strangeness within day-to-day life:

Louis MacNeice, Snow:

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes–
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands–
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

William Empson, Let It Go:

It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
The more things happen to you the more you can't
Tell or remember even what they were.

The contradictions cover such a range.
The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there.

Triumph of niceness: reader, I did not murder or even commit GBH upon either annoying readers/particularly clueless colleages/random twittery on the Tube.

WIN.

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I diskard utterly that meme thinggy that is going around about because I think its basic premises are flawed. I.e. writing in a blog is not like 'writing for the Web', and that using 'I' and 'me' doesn't necessarily it's All About The Ego. Plus, on different tests, I got 'verbose' (because I could put in a chunk of text) and 'simplistic' - because, I think it was using just my most recent entry, which was a birthday wish. Duh. Also, I am apparently mostly male and 'When it comes to friends you are a total whore' - even though 'In terms of the way you relate to people, you are wary of trusting strangers': WTF. I am '40% peculiar' and '39.3% interesting' and my overall weirdness level is 32% - weirder than the average ljer. I restrain myself from expressing an opinion on the Bollox Level of these tests.

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Living goddess gets an education.

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I was emptying a drawer which was coming adrift so that partner could fix it, and among the interesting things I turned up was my mother's elephant necklace. My father bought it for her when he was in India during the war.
( To save your friends page from a couple of rather blurry photos taken with my mobile just now )

I am trying to think what to do with it - at the very least it needs a clasp, and possibly the pendant reattaching.

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Also turned up during this exercise, some old contact lens cases complete with old contact lenses (which is going back a very long way). Plus a couple of pairs of glasses, which is odd, because I took quite a substantial bagful to drop off for charity at an opticians some years ago, and these look to be from before that time. Anyway, I do know there are places to give old spex to charity: does anyone know if one can do the same with contact lenses? Or should I just discard them?

If you read this, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a memory of you and me. It can be anything you want -- good or bad. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people remember about you.

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We all have things about our friends that make us slightly envious.

Not in a bad way, but in a 'Wow! I wish I had that person's hair/eyes/money/relationship/toenails/whatever.'

So tell me what about me makes you envy me. . . then if you feel like it, post this in your LJ and see what makes me envious of you.

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( Does this colour green sound anything like me at all?? )

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( No surprises here, haven't I done this one before? )

ironed_orchid has asked me for 'top five actors (stage or screen)'. I am taking the term as gender neutral, whether or not that was the intention, and confining myself to thesps whom I have seen in the flesh as well as on the screen. Not numbering because this isn't an absolute ranking:
Sir Ian McKellen
Glenda Jackson
Imelda Staunton
Simon Russell Beale
and then I am havering between Penelope Wilton and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
I did think about whether to include Peter O'Toole, on the grounds that when I was young I would have gone to see a movie of him reading the telephone directory. But when I did finally see him onstage (as Henry Higgins in Pygmalion) I was not terribly impressed.

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Tagged by daegaer: To play, start by listing 10 weird things/habits/little known facts about yourself. When this is done, choose 10 people to be tagged and write their names at the bottom of your list. No tag backs! Those who get tagged then write their own 10-item list in their own journals. Be sure to include this set of rules. And anyone who cares to may consider themselves tagged.
( The trouble with this is that I don't know what weird things of mine are things everyone does, and what things I think normal are really peculiar... )

I found the questions on the Brutally Honest Personality Test that's going around so meh (don't care either way for several, plus the assumption that one actually watches television...) that I decided the result was probably not going to be particularly valid or interesting.

I started to do the Personality DNA one and stopped when it tried to download Flash to me. I do not like this sort of thing.

So I will just do '10 things I like that begin with L' (letter donated by callunav). If you would like a letter, just ask.

( All manner of things beginning with an L )

And while I'm at it, why not do ( the Year in Review in the form of the first line from each month? )

This seems a virtuous and well-meaning thing, but it still manages to irk me in several ways. I for one (and maybe this is an English thing?) really cringe from these 'post [precrafted noble sentiment] in your lj', where the purpose seems to be 'show what a right-on okay person you are' with the corollary that 'if you don't do it, you're not'.

I also (as a non-USAian person) get possibly disproportionately niggled at invocation of 'our culture' when (even if statement in question could plausibly be generalised to The Western World as a whole) it's actually about US (I nearly put 'Amerikka'), or if not, I think it requires stating in more explicit terms.

I also find myself feeling scrawly-in-the-margins ('What does this mean?' 'Define, please!') about the use of the term 'Gay Rights'.

Anyway, I don't think you find out anything by asking people to post these sort of things in their ljs. Or at least, what you do find out may be stuff about social dynamics and overlapping circles of connection, if anything.

So, while I would concur generally with the intention behind these sentiments, I wouldn't want to post them as presently expressed, and I certainly flinch from guilt-tripping other people into doing anything.*

Would agree that I am crotchety and pedantic old bat.

*Except, of course, when by my frosty and disgusted demeanour, and muttered imprecations, I endeavour to prevail upon them not to block escalators.