"i love deadlines. i love the 'whoosh!'-ing sound they make as they go by."

notes from a tuesday-that-really-really-really-feels-like-a-monday.

why is it that all deadlines -- no matter how far in advance you knew about them or how well prepared you really are -- hit like bricks? is this some cosmic rule of which i was not informed? if so, i would like to call a foul. or at least an inconvenient. the latest brick to hit are the end-of-term thesis deadlines. argh. two weeks. argh. i realise that i had to be finished editing it and coddling it at some point, but does it have to be so soon? *sniff* (and did it really have to be when i had editing to do on another paper and a paper not included post to write and...and...and...? and the answer to all that is "yes," 'cause that's how life works.) i'm trying very hard to see all these scary deadlines and not-having-a-full-time-job-yet-ness as being opportunities to learn to deal with the universe on a different level -- challenges being handed out by a good teacher, so to speak, to make you stretch a bit -- but minus a good night of sleep in several weeks and plus stress, it's hard. not impossible, but hard.

i'm still determined to keep up my every-other-day posting routine here; i don't really know why since it's a totally arbitrary schedule i thought up more or less at random, but it's something that isn't school- or work-related and i figure it's important to have a couple of those type of things floating around.

i don't have any neat short book reviews for today, but i do have some unconnected thoughts i was hoping to work into something more major later. i picked up hilary mantel's wolf hall from the library the other day and so far it's slightly bizarre but very good. i don't normally care for historical fiction very much -- not for a.s. byatt's self-serving and whiny reasons ("they don't do it good like me!") -- but because i get too caught up in my own speculation about what happened and whether i like how the writer is writing the person and whether i happen to know that an actual historical detail is being elided for the sake of a good story. (okay, maybe that is kind of like what byatt says but, damn, that woman annoys me.) i don't necessarily object if this happens, but it does tend to bump the book further down the "must read now!" list.

i have read and enjoyed more "historical" mystery series than anything else: laurie king's mary russell novels; elizabeth peters' amelia peabody series (colorfully described by my mother as "bonking all over upper egypt"); and c.j. sansom's matthew shardlake books, of which there are only four at the minute, though i hope for more!

i also have eoin colfer's and another thing..., but i haven't been able to bring myself to crack the covers yet. i wouldn't say that i hold the original guide trilogy (in five books) particularly sacred, but i really do love them and i disliked the idea of a "ghostwritten" sequel as soon as i heard about it. nothing i've heard about it since has made me feel any better about it and i just don't have the energy to read one of my treasured pre-adolescent literary memories being done badly.

and now off to write part 2 of my pni post about the internet archive and the wonders of the bookserver project. i won't put any links so you'll all have to head over to pni and increase our traffic!

"i'm agent ford and he's...uh...agent hamill."

working on the first few posts for the paper not included ebooks blog -- my second one accidentally turned into a 2-parter -- and reading frantically to figure out what happened to the ira between partition in the '20s and sean mcstiofain in the '60s didn't leave me with any brain left to come up with a post for this morning, but i do have a couple of things to throw out there.

1. gillian flynn's dark places. i tried. it looked like a promising kind of dark murder thriller and then just went boring by about chapter 4. the narrator was a compelling voice -- the grown-up survivor of the in cold blood-style murder of her family by her elder brother (she thinks) -- but it quickly became apparent, to me at least, that the only way i was going to be happy with the book was going to be if the narrator turned out to be the killer and flynn clearly wasn't going to take it in that direction. the writing was good; the voices of the characters very clear and distinct; but i was looking for something a little more twisted and this wasn't going to do it. sorry, ms. flynn.

2. supernatural. i've been drifting in and out of wanting to sit down and actually watch this show for quite a while; i keep channel-flipping through random episodes and, whenever i do, i tend to sit and watch the rest of the show which means i have a really weird view of what's going on. i then got put off the idea of netflixing the early seasons by the fact that every story i saw about the show for awhile referenced the fact that the two lead actors are really hot and therefore girls obviously loved the show. uh-huh. yeah, 'cause that's clearly the only-- oh, why bother. moving on.

two things -- technically three, i guess -- got me back into the idea of watching it again. one was the episode i flicked into last week which was a very clever self-parody featuring the two main characters, dean and sam winchester, being invited to a fan conference for themselves. supernatural has been turned into a popular book and comic series in their universe and guess what? they have fan boys. lots of them.

the second was a post on scifiwire -- has anyone else noticed that the wire has gone kinda weird since the sci-fi/syfy (shudder) rebranding? -- about the colt. now, i have no idea what this is meant to mean other than a prop colt pistol which probably has some uber-nifty demon-killing and/or spirit-banishing significance. but they happened to mention that the gun had only 13 bullets. :) this probably has absolutely nothing at all to do with david wellington's 13 bullets, but the mere possibility made me happy. and then, last but not least, there was a sale at best buy -- the first full season of the show was only $15.

so far, it's a not badly spent $15. i've watched the first eight episodes -- the first four back to back last saturday afternoon in a desperate attempt at decompressing after a stressful morning. i can say with some certainty that:
a) i like their car:

and b) i like dean's jacket.

i think i'm going to start calling it dean's amazing indestructible self-cleaning jacket, in fact. and i'm hoping that the necklace he wears so prominently turns out to be important in some way. i'd take either important to the character or the actor.

it's funny that i watched the first episode or two thinking, 'wow, this really looks like it was filmed in x-files country' and then noticed that, in fact, john shiban is one of the writers/executive producers for the show. i used to have a better grip on who the various x-files writers were and whether they produced reasonably coherent shows -- within chris carter's somewhat...shall we say flexible universe rules -- or whether they just came out with incoherent crap. there are a couple of supernatural episodes that are very x-files: "wendigo" and "skin" particularly. "skin" reminds me so much of an old x-files that i've been tempted to go back and figure out which one but, really, it's one of the weaker of the eight episodes i've seen, so i'm letting it just fade into distant memory.

if the show has an overarching weakness so far, it's that all the female character are the same. they're either motherly and null or teenaged, hot, and damaged. and they all wear too much lipgloss. i mean, really. every woman in this show is addicted to collagen lip injections and revlon gloss. but i have hope this will improve; i mean, you can't run a show for 5 seasons, keep a solid fanbase, and fairly good critical reception entirely with the same two guys in a car. no matter how good the leather is.

"i'm taking you home."

to wake you up this monday morning, we have another five-minute book review! oh, and when you're looking for a way to procrastinate later, why not head over to the paper not included blog and check out our first posts? i'm one of the five writers in the project which will, of course, be awesome. :)

but to return to the subject of the moment which is christopher ransom's the birthing house. it's mr. ransom's first novel which makes it respectable in and of itself. while i have written novel-length files -- go, nanowrimo! -- i can't say any of them are wildly coherent or meaningful to anyone other than myself.

and the birthing house isn't bad. but it's not one of those first novels that's going to make you want to go out and buttonhole people on the street and insist that they read it. the set-up is the classic horror trope: bright young couple moves into house with (possibly) twisted past. weird shit begins to happen. weird shit continues to happen and gets worse. bright young couple descend into weird shit and emerge/don't emerge/emerge in a different dimension on the other side. tah-dah.

in this case, the bright young couple isn't all that bright or young -- in fact, the husband of the pair makes the house purchase on his own with money received from the estate of a recently deceased estranged father. the wife isn't consulted and, when told, isn't entirely wild about the idea of moving from l.a. to the wilds of the midwest. but the move is accomplished; the first conversations about neighbors that feature dialogue like, "so how do you like your house? y'know, the last people who lived there--- well, i really shouldn't say--" happen; the family pets start to behave in freaky ways and so on.

the dark secret in the house's past is that it was a birthing house -- a phrase that ransom throws around unexplained for most of the book. i guess, largely from what i gathered through the novel itself, that it was some kind of home for unwed mothers run by a single male doctor and -- maybe? -- staffed by a couple of permanent female nurses. i think that's what he was getting at anyway. a little more explanation and detailed historical background would not have gone amiss.

there are a lot of first novel mistakes made here; one of the worst is that, for no good reason, about 2/3rds of the way through the book, one chapter is written in first person singular while the rest of the book is written either in straightforward third person or from an omniscient point of view. the one chapter is a clanger; a wrench straight onto the foot of the unsuspecting, trusting reader. i assume its effect was meant to be to make the narrator more untrustworthy than he already was and it sort of works, but it's mostly just annoying and feels like an author who suddenly lost confidence in himself and resorted to a hack trick to get out of what he thought was a bad corner. kage baker -- an author i absolutely adore -- has a similar slip in her first novel, garden of iden; there's this one weird section towards the end of the book that, in order to make the action work, changes point of view abruptly in the middle of the action. it makes the last bit of the book run smoothly, yeah, but it's also really annoying.

to be fair, there are also some genuinely creepy moments: the chapters that are flashback or waking dreams explaining the haunting of the house by an abused daughter of one of the unwed mothers are really unsettling and twisted. there's the sense of the narrator tracking the ghosts -- there may be only one, there may be many, he isn't really sure although by the end it's made mindbogglingly clear -- through the house to try and figure out what's going wrong. there's a moment about halfway through the book where our narrator, the husband, isn't sure if he's looking at and talking to his semi-estranged wife or the ghost of one of the house's old inhabitants which is quite frightening, not least because the woman in question opens the conversation with, "the baby is dead." oooh-kay. we'll just be leaving you alone to have that moment, then.

there are probably whole shelves of books out there written about the use of pregnancy and birth metaphors -- and real pregnancies and births -- in horror fiction and i'm not going to try to make some sort of wild intellectual argument here without really knowing what i'm talking about. i'll just borrow a phrase one of my college friends used as her sig file for a long time: "get pregnant? i saw alien. i ain't doin' that."

the book is creepy; the birthing house concept veers from the mildly unsettling to the deeply disgusting; and, in the end, there's a kind of tommyknockers-style conclusion. it works -- but a second novel will probably be better.

a sort of fly-by post...

taking a brief blogging break between writing blog post -- hah! -- for ebooks blog and working on the brandy-new context chapter for the thesis; i promised two highly intelligent professors that i could summarize approximately 200 years of irish history in something under 20-25 pages. hm. perhaps this was not a good idea? too late now!

but i have "in a nutshell" thoughts about a few recently watched/read things that i thought i'd toss up here for your amusement.

1. terry pratchett, unseen academicals. i posted a review of this earlier from the tor.com blog and i'm pleased to support pretty much everything that ms. jericho wrote. academicals is awesome. while i agree wholeheartedly with the idea that pratchett is, at his best, a whip-smart social commentator, i really don't think this is the best way to read his books. in fact, i think it might rank with the worst ways to read them -- right up there with trying to read them back-to-front or through a reversing mirror. going into a discworld novel looking for comment on earthly events is really not a good idea. the best discworld novels -- jingo, maskerade, the truth, thief of time -- are so clever and slick at making their points that, honestly, it's just better to take a deep breath, get some tea, and enjoy the lunacy. academicals is like that, too; the ending is great -- pratchett back in his proper form again after the somewhat leaden thud! and overly polemical monstrous regiment which is fun until you start to realise you've been hit over the head with the same damn joke 15 times and you're starting to get sore. my only piece of advice with academicals is keep your eye on nutt, glenda, and the patrician. keeping your eye on the patrician is always good advice, by the way. :)

2. iron man. i had a whole extra-ranty-goodness post all ready to go about the waste of space iron man turned out to be...and i just don't have the heart to go through with it. it wasn't that bad -- but it wasn't that good, either. i was thinking about it while walking to class the other day and i figure they could have done the film an immeasurable amount of good by doing a couple of simple things:

1. fire gwyneth paltrow. the woman is a black hole and not in a fun way. she comes on screen -- and the scene turns up its toes and dies because it knows nothing is going to happen. at all. ever.
2. give jeff bridges more to do. the man can be brilliant, but you need to give him something to work with
3. decide who your villain is.
4. oh, and please don't nick scenes directly from anime series (i'm thinking of vision of escaflowne here) 'cause, y'know, some of us have seen them.

3. the cave. i got this for halloween 'cause...well, i could. and it took me a minute to remember why on earth i thought it was a good idea -- it's because cole hauser is in it. and, on the whole, it wasn't a bad flick. predictable -- as all 'b' grade horror movies are -- but fun. the monster was -- okay. too obviously influenced by the alien in its first scenes but, on the whole, how is a creature designer going to step out from under that as a shadow? and the designer did go on to do the underworld films and those are really quite nice, so we'll forgive a momentary early slip. ;)

okay, back to describing the central importance of the rising of the united irishmen in 1798 to the later generations of irish republican nationalists. i'm considering setting up a macro to automatically fill in "Irish Republican nationalists" because, wow, am i tired of typing it!

random items

as you read this, i will (most likely) be at a new england historical association session in burlington, vt. i'm not presenting at this conference so my ego is safe; i just get to sit back, relax, and enjoy what everyone else has to say. and then cross my fingers and hope that the restaurants i remember as being good are still good so that anna and i don't have to wander around too much looking for somewhere to eat!

this is, of course, assuming that we get there at all -- i keep getting weather update alerts (from my mother, mostly) telling me about all the horrible things that are due to happen in the next 24-36 hours.

anyway, there are a few things i've got starred on my greader list that i wanted to put up here in case anyone else found them interesting, too.

hillary clinton was in belfast this past week. i haven't had time to go looking for any irish coverage of her talks, but there is some coverage from the guardian here. i've never been wildly impressed by hillary clinton, honestly; if a clinton had to continue to be involved in the government on an international level, i would've voted for her husband, but no-one asked me. in this case, i think her talk -- at least the excerpts i've seen -- sounded more condescending than friendly or helpful: "okay, kids, if you all learn to play together real nice, we'll give you some candy!" in this case, the candy being international investment by american corporations in northern ireland. just in case you can't get your own banks to fail on time, let the americans show you how to do it!

as a sidelight, there was also a report this morning of another car bomb in belfast. i doubt it has anything to do with clinton's visit, but there it is.

also this week was an "anniversary" of an attempt by the ira to bomb the grand hotel in brighton 25 years ago -- at the time, a political conference was being held there. if i remember rightly, the actual aim of the bomb was to kill margaret thatcher. no comment but anyway, they missed thatcher, killed four other people. the article here discusses the odd relationship that has built up between the ira bomber, patrick magee, and the daughter of one of the men killed as well as loosely commenting on the aftermath of the bombing itself. what gets me is the last sentence or two:

After all Patrick Magee couldn't bring himself to say sorry for the suffering he caused either.

"Pat, I find that quite hard," said Berry. She emerges as the bigger person.

my only thought on reading this the first time -- and i've read it several times since and i think it will find a home in the conclusion to my thesis -- was, 'well, no, of course he won't apologise. what did you expect?' if you're waiting for a hearts-and-flowers-style apology from a still-living ira paramilitary, complete with bended knee and hand on heart, i'd suggest you're going to be waiting a long damned time.

and this i saw this morning and couldn't quite believe: apparently a judge in louisiana totally missed the odd supreme court case or two in his legal training, like, say, "loving v. virginina." small details!

on a less political note, apparently vampires and zombies also reflect a "sexual divide" in mainstream culture. (and, while we're at it, does anyone want to have a stab at explaining what "post-scifi" might mean?)well, damn. apparently i don't like 28 days later and resident evil after all -- i actually like twilight. who knew! and i haven't even read/seen it. i've tried to put together a more reasonable comment on this article but i just can't. it makes me boggle -- i probably would have put this guy's book on the list to read had i not read this first. but, y'know, i have david wellington's 99 coffins on hand and, really, anyone who wants to snog one of his vampires needs their head examining. (and don't forget wellington's ongoing 30 [free] stories in 30 days at dailylit.com!)

if you're looking for a reason to make a list, i found this via imdb.com: what movies have you "rolled the dice" to see?

for those of you waiting with bated breath for the appearance of this ebooks blog i keep talking about, paper not included will be starting up sometime in the next few weeks; we're busily trying to work out stylesheet and other such-like formal issues on the discussion board.

i got sucked in by the "new books" shelves at the coolidge corner library the other day, so instead of walking out with two books which had been the plan (robert w. chambers's the king in yellow and patrick messert's literature of the occult which is less exciting than it sounds), i walked out with four, including dark places and prospero lost which has gorgeous cover art -- as well as a highly complimentary blurb from kage baker. i'm also looking forward to finishing wellington's 99 coffins this weekend and to the arrival of jonathan maberry's bad moon rising at the library so i can finish that series. more 5-cent book reviews in a few weeks!

and, as a final note, i offer this video clip (only the first 8 minutes of a longer show, sadly) from a charity "children in need" concert -- you've always wanted to see david tennant work a crowd, haven't you?

Doctor Who - A Celebration
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