Personal Note: Last minute things

[nebroadwe]

Tomorrow I'm off for a week of Rare Book School, so today I need to finish packing, cleaning the house, and rereading the required preliminary articles. Which meant that yesterday was for making and freezing dinner for when I return, laundry, and catching up on some of 2008's entertainment acquisitions. I finally made it to the end of the animated version of Le Chevalier d'Eon, which stopped being secret history a little over halfway through to become alternate history, which was marginally less intriguing to me, though still entertaining. It also morphed from The Three Musketeers into Hamlet or The Duchess of Malfi toward the end, which was ... unexpected. Kind of a downer, really, but a beautifully animated and mostly well-told downer, so I can't complain (though I think I will throw Cardcaptor Sakura into the player next).

I also caught myself up on the English translation of Sugar Sugar Rune through volume 6, to make sure it's suitable reading for my goddaughter's sister (it is). Oh, who am I kidding? It's a charming little fairy tale, once you adjust to Moyoco Anno's unique art style and intensely busy layouts (which do make the "clean" panels really stand out, though). I'm enjoying the Wizard of Oz sensibility to the magic, both in the domesticity of the spell-objects (bubble makers! nail polish! candy!) and in the cross-connections between magic, economics, celebrity and salesmanship (very L. Frank Baum!). The story is pitched at a young audience and its coziness sometimes prevents its thematic points from resonating as archetypes, but I'm still hooked. The Japanese version makes great practice reading, too.

Also steamed through Garth Nix's Superior Saturday, the latest in his Morrow Days series. I'm keeping up with this one mostly to see how the whole plot ends. Nix loves to create alternate worlds with complex hierarchies of creatures and realms, but he really went gonzo nuts with the House and its Denizens, to the point where I'm hard put to it to remember who's who from book to book. It's the archetypal substructure, again, that I'm really reading for: the Arthurian/Promethean question of who's really the Rightful Heir among the contenders and by what right ... and to what end? The last installment is due out sometime in the coming year, IIRC, and I'll be interested to see whether Nix manages to make a greater whole out of the sum of his parts.

Now, back to pastedowns!

Comments

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I've been having pre-departure dreams for the past two days, and last night you showed up with an enormous display of homemade jewelry that someone had sent you, which for some reason couldn't be delivered to your house. It was left on the porch at someone else's and you were bragging about the commando raid you'd carried out to retrieve it. Then, evidently, Rare Book School was being held at your institution of higher learning, and while I was getting ready for class, you were being harassed by the former co-instructor of a course you were now going to co-instruct. The other teacher, a mousy little woman, was completely under the thumb of the previous co-instructor and refusing to cooperate with your plans for revamping the course, and you were banging around your office in a high old state of fury. Then my alarm went off, so I have no idea how it all turned out.

Hope your week brings jewelry but not annoying co-instructors. :-)

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

hahaha that's funny. I could easily get homemade jewelry from various sources. I already have one irritating coworker who doesn't have me helping her in the lab this semester. God help us all