Ludivine has just called saying “Do I want to join her over at Les Halles to eat out?” As I had planned to write tonight—she being out with a girl friend—I had to say ‘no’. Well, I didn’t have to and I did have to hesitate a lot, but I want to advance, and I have been thinking and planning stuff in my head and particularly I can see a twist at the end of Juliet that I would rather like to try out… So I will put aside the apples and cheese and stuff that I bought to do some cooking. (This being an activity unlike work but like washing-up that is condusive to thinking.) I will sandwich instead.

Apart from that, I have decided that my mind has liquified (all is the fault of the mindnumbing stuff at work). And now it seems that I have been working on revising Juliet for what feels like months. This story is supposed to be finished. I want to get on with Died and the Pirates. Small argh.

We rented 2 DVDs this weekend: Donnie Darko and Ring (or Ringu for the purists). It was curious (and Ludivine noticed this, not me) that they both used a countdown as their dramatic device. In DD, he is told the world will end in 28 days, in R the protagonists have 7 days after watching the cassette. And, of course, they were both films that played on our fears somewhere. DD also allowed me to hear that lovely rendition of Mad World (as well as Killing Moon and LWTUA) they comes up on Into the Mystic quite often.

Both films were pretty much what I expected (which doesn’t mean that I was disappointed, far from it). DD was polished, referential, pleasantly cyclic (and there was Carter as a bonus). R was japanese, i.e. the titles were both kitsch and amateur (really weird, it seems that either they don’t have title designers in Japan or they just have a totally different conception of what they should be.) Also the editing was shakey in one or two places (And I don’t mean bad, just shakey, as if the DVD was made from a slightly-used film copy and that some of the edits had busted and been hastily repaired—this is not the first time I have noticed this in Japanese films. See the car driving away, and when it arrives in Izu the first time.)

Anyway, I found the scene with the well most touching and very un-western— it reminded me of the River God scene in Chihiro (Spirited Away I believe that this is called in English). And I thought that it was the end… but this was when it got scarey…

Philip José Farmer
Le Fleuve de l’éternité, tome 1 : Le Monde du fleuve
T2 : Le Bateau fabuleux
T3 : Le Noir dessein
T4 : Le Labyrinthe magique
T5 : Les Dieux du fleuve

Started reading the first Riverworld book when I was a teenager. And put it down then. I couldn’t remember why—fair enough, this was 30 years ago. So I carted these out of the library. I don’t think the fact that they were a translation was the problem. I think that the polite way of saying things is that these are a little dated. Had these five tomes been a short story (30000 words?) then I think this would have been an intriguing and thought-provoking moment. Stretched over five volumes of deeply introspective (and painful) prose from the mouths of ‘reconstitued’ figures like Mark Twain or Richard Burton (the explorer/translater, not the Welsh actor)... It was painful.

Neil Gaiman
Stardust
Miroirs et fumées
American Gods
De bons presages (Gaiman / Pratchett)
Des loups dans les murs (Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean (Illustrations))

‘Wolves in the Walls’ was read with and for Kim. We both loved it. Perhaps we should read ‘Coraline’ together… Beware of ‘Stardust’ in French, the translation seems a bit off, the story appears to flag at moments (gets sort of threadbare, curious). I will read this in English sometime and see.
‘Good Omens’, ‘American Gods’ and ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ are all wonderful. I didn’t see any artefacts of translation. The diable vauvert is a wonderful print house (Note. I read American Gods first. I thought that the trident-holding devil with the floppy willy was a special version of their logo for the book… No. It is the ‘official’ logo. Any publishing house whose logo is a devil with a dangling & floppy willy, can’t be entirely bad!)
These books are now very high on my wishlist of books to get in English.

Terry Pratchett
Le Dernier continent : Les Annales du Disque-monde
My first dip into the Discworlds… Curious. Very, very funny. But curious. I will undoubtably be reading more as this is the twenty-somethingishith tome.

Jonathan Carroll
Le pays du fou rire
Very curious (I think that I have already said that somewhere). It starts out deceptively pleasant with enough curious/strange happenings to lead you in (I have the impression that we never get all the story about her burns—and does this explain/call up the fire?). Then this gets progressivley stranger, but steadily and logically so. And then the end is fast and frightening. Brr. I will undoubtably be reading more of Jonathan Carroll.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Terremer
La Main gauche de la nuit
Le Monde de Rocannon
Le Dit d’Aka, suivi de Le nom du monde est forêt
I think that there were at least two other of her books, but the titles escape me for the moment. These were everything that the Philip José Farmer were not. And the Earthsea books (the French Edition that was as fat as a pregnant phonebook had all but one in there I think), were an eye-opener to a world where magic was a tissue and a force like the wind or gravity in this one.

J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
I re-read this as I wanted to see if it was as flatly written as I remembered. It was. I found this the most disappointing one in the series so far. The others, even if they were written with a blunt crayon did have good yarns and ripping adventures. This one bumbled on through the most boring school year ever (and it was so predicatable that the Dolores Umbridge would be a… well a pain in your Umbridge, dear) and then when you could see that the last few pages were arriving and you suspected that nothing was going to happen, suddenly something happened. I didn’t find Sirius’ death moving. I just found it botched. Am I the only person who thinks that the films are in fact better than the books?

And a bunch of other stuff {mainly short stories} online. I must remember to note titles and links.

Let it be absolutely clear. Ludivine is out swimming and I thought to do a roquefort and apple tart. This is a variation on the roquefort and pear tart which is even better. Or should be, providing that the apple variation comes out as planned. Everything is in the beating of the egg whites.

A quick note. Ludivine has protested that I arrange the ‘truth’. She claims that in the ‘hair’ incident, for example, she actually said that I ressembled Han Solo. Not Chewbacca. That is as maybe, but the way I wrote it makes for a better story. And everyone who knows me, knows that I ressemble more Chewbacca than Harrison Ford.

I am currently reading Jonathan Carroll’s Land of Laughs (in French). The translation appears wonderful, the book is most captivating as it slowly leads you in, casting out little remarks that make you think hey, that’s odd, and then forgetting, and then, having slipped that past you, it inches further along… The speaking dog has just been mostly cruelly rubbed out, and the story is slowly and eerily sliding sideways. I picked this title up because I stumbled on it at the public library and because of the recommendation by the lovely Mr Gaiman.

What disturbs me—and this is not the first time—is that this was on the SF shelves. And, in case I missed that, it has the words Science Fiction writ large on the cover. As I read a lot of SF this doesn’t put me off. But, as I read a lot of SF, I get to see the reactions of other, non-SF readers (if I may temporarily label them as such—WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE!). This comes down to comments like: Oh, you like reading stuff like that? i.e. You are still stuck in some sub-literature zone, fit only for the likes of mal-adjusted spotty adolescent boys with a severe deficit on the social skills front^{[see below]}.

There is some cause for question with the library’s classification system as I also came across Pushkin’s Queen of Spades in the SF section, but perhaps this was a ploy by a russian-literature-adoring librarian to get people to borrow the book… In recent times I have borrowed Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (wonderful), Stardust (Good but not as good—and some problems with the translation in places), the Gaiman/Pratchett opus Good Omens (wonderful and hilarious, but AG definately tops this bunch). Other books that fall into this all previous stuff by this author was classified as SF so let’s just not think and put this one in there too category are Pattern Recognition (his best yet) by William Gibson, or Cryptonomicon (more than a bit Biggles and the Cable Around the World, but still fun) by Neal Stephenson (aside: just don’t get me started on the French translation of this. I read the book in English fortunately, but, besides the mean trick of publishing this in 3 separate books in French, they also published them in three expensive and crappily-translated-by-someone-who-had-no-idea-what-he-was-talking-about tomes).

For me these are all Fiction, period.

<rant>

Perhaps some are Fairy Stories, Moral Tales, Adventure Thrillers and all sorts of capitalised genres within that all-englobing Fiction category. So why not put them there (BTW, the French don’t have a Fiction area, they have sheleves labelled Literature and then Genre shelves, like for SF. Is SF not literature?] Put them on the Fiction shelves and the readers who have followed them from more canonical SF writings (except for Gaiman—I’m pretty sure that he has never done a pure SF work anyway) will find them anyway, but so will thousands of other readers who would never think of getting lost near the SF shelves.

</rant>

[the below] as I am a mal-adjusted spotty 40-something with a middling deficit on the social-skills side, I don’t intend this description to be insulting. Just factual.

Last summer I got my hair severely cut. It was just in the nick of time to get my famous sheepdog-like locks out of the way because a few days after the heatwave declared itself with a vengeance. Anyway, my hair is now growing back to its normal mass and length. This morning Ludivine remarked on it.
—Hey, you know that you look like the guy in the Millenium Falcon with Luke Skywalker, what’s his name?
—Han Solo?
—No. The other one, Chewbacca.

The Aspirin has done its thing and I appear to be in a state to drag the flesh back to the salt mines tomorrow morn. With a box of KleenexiTM in tow, n’est-ce pas.
Got precisely no, none, nada, zilch work done today. Most depressing. In fact all I have to show for the whole day is half a box of tissues and and a very sore nose.

Still have my doubts about this blogging system. I don’t feel happy. There are too many little things that don’t feel natural, I have to write some new styles to take into account the lists in the body, and the calendar, and what do the colours look like on a CRT? Oh, and I seem to have busted the comments, so nothing happens if you click on the socks.

I have however managed to add a small javascript that opens in a new window for offsite links while opening onsite ones in the current window. Pivot seems to have an ‘all or nothing’ setup for this… but there again, it’s probably me who has understood nothing.

& off 2 bed.

...if what is currently dripping out of my nose is bad for the trackpad… {note to myself: buy more loo rolls tomorrow – have exhausted all the Kleenexi, and if anything, productivity of nose is increasing.}