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petroniaBooks:
Tanith Lee, The Book of the Dead (Secret Books of Paradys #3). Found used, chowed through these stories in short order. Going for, I don't know, not Poe but Poe as translated by Baudelaire back-translated into English, or some of the weirder efforts by Maupassant or Wilde or Henry James. Uncritical wholesale adoption of 19th century racial imagery makes Joseph Conrad look like Jean Rhys, but otherwise a good read.
Marta Acosta, The She-Hulk Diaries. Read about half of this in July; it was the only book I was up for. If you Google it, the first hit that comes up is The Mary Sue's review, which seems roughly to be the intended audience. Is a well-written genre exercise that, well, exists in its entirety as the reification of a Borgesian one-liner joke ("female attorney lives in NYC, has adventures with wacky friends, used to date character played by Robert Downey Jr. -- Ally McBeal, AMIRITE"). I like how Marvel occasionally greenlights corny genre exercises, though ("Spider-Man from Mary Jane's perspective is basically a shoujo manga, AMIRITE"): one thing I like about the universe is that it's shaggy and riotous enough to potentially swallow or be shoehorned into any genre. It shouldn't actually matter that the genre is ostensibly "female-oriented", because girls also like these character, right? Right? I did wander away from it halfway through, though, because I like Jen Walters considerably more than I like chick-lit.
Marguerite Yourcenar, Sous bénéfice d'inventaire. Critical essays published in 1962. One is on Cavafy, which I should probably read again with the poems in hand. The best one is the Red Violin-esque history of the château of Chenonceaux. And from the essay on Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons: the image of Piranesi sleeping rough in the ruins of Hadrian's villa, sketching by sun and moonlight and surviving on cold rice, catching malaria and ensuing fever dreams of endless enclosed architecture... The nonexistent Escher drawing that was De Quincey's (opium-addled) report of Coleridge's (faulty) memory of said engravings. Morpheus's realm... Got a used copy of The Memoirs of Hadrian in the same lot.
Movies:
A whole list from Fantasia I'll address separately. Also went down to the Bryan Singer event for a lark, as I passingly mentioned on Tumblr. That moved me to actually go see The Wolverine, which... I'll also address later since I have to get out of here. XD; I will say that I liked the scene in Nagasaki when the obasan came around the house and was like, Mariko-sama! A tree fell over and is blocking the road! But word went around that you brought a superpowered gaijin lumberjack down with you from Tokyo! I mean, that is what Wolverine-in-Japan should be about, what it would actually be about to the Japanese, rather than what comic writers keep trying to make it be about. Tragically however there is no scene of Wolverine in a yukata eating odango off his adamantium claws, which is all I ever wanted out of the operation. Close, but still no cigar.
Tanith Lee, The Book of the Dead (Secret Books of Paradys #3). Found used, chowed through these stories in short order. Going for, I don't know, not Poe but Poe as translated by Baudelaire back-translated into English, or some of the weirder efforts by Maupassant or Wilde or Henry James. Uncritical wholesale adoption of 19th century racial imagery makes Joseph Conrad look like Jean Rhys, but otherwise a good read.
Marta Acosta, The She-Hulk Diaries. Read about half of this in July; it was the only book I was up for. If you Google it, the first hit that comes up is The Mary Sue's review, which seems roughly to be the intended audience. Is a well-written genre exercise that, well, exists in its entirety as the reification of a Borgesian one-liner joke ("female attorney lives in NYC, has adventures with wacky friends, used to date character played by Robert Downey Jr. -- Ally McBeal, AMIRITE"). I like how Marvel occasionally greenlights corny genre exercises, though ("Spider-Man from Mary Jane's perspective is basically a shoujo manga, AMIRITE"): one thing I like about the universe is that it's shaggy and riotous enough to potentially swallow or be shoehorned into any genre. It shouldn't actually matter that the genre is ostensibly "female-oriented", because girls also like these character, right? Right? I did wander away from it halfway through, though, because I like Jen Walters considerably more than I like chick-lit.
Marguerite Yourcenar, Sous bénéfice d'inventaire. Critical essays published in 1962. One is on Cavafy, which I should probably read again with the poems in hand. The best one is the Red Violin-esque history of the château of Chenonceaux. And from the essay on Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons: the image of Piranesi sleeping rough in the ruins of Hadrian's villa, sketching by sun and moonlight and surviving on cold rice, catching malaria and ensuing fever dreams of endless enclosed architecture... The nonexistent Escher drawing that was De Quincey's (opium-addled) report of Coleridge's (faulty) memory of said engravings. Morpheus's realm... Got a used copy of The Memoirs of Hadrian in the same lot.
Movies:
A whole list from Fantasia I'll address separately. Also went down to the Bryan Singer event for a lark, as I passingly mentioned on Tumblr. That moved me to actually go see The Wolverine, which... I'll also address later since I have to get out of here. XD; I will say that I liked the scene in Nagasaki when the obasan came around the house and was like, Mariko-sama! A tree fell over and is blocking the road! But word went around that you brought a superpowered gaijin lumberjack down with you from Tokyo! I mean, that is what Wolverine-in-Japan should be about, what it would actually be about to the Japanese, rather than what comic writers keep trying to make it be about. Tragically however there is no scene of Wolverine in a yukata eating odango off his adamantium claws, which is all I ever wanted out of the operation. Close, but still no cigar.
