Magic Moments

I flew a plane. Sort of. For a short while. In circles. And always turning in the direction of the crimson setting sun. Well I turned from bearing south to north via the west and then from north to south also via the west. A few times. And I tried to go groundwards but my friend advised me not to. I didn't get to take off or land of course. Or fiddle with any of the switches or levers.

We set off around 5 and got back gone 7. So it was a long flight. And I wasn't ill. The weather was good- very few clouds except to the west, over the Pacific, to capture the sun's rays. We went north some 80 miles or so over the east bay (Oakland) and saw the Golden Gate Bridge and the bay from that direction. Then landed at Santa Rosa and went up straight away to some open airspace where I could have the controls. I was rather timid I guess but hey, I just can't yank the plane around and not panic. But anyway. Did a load of 180 degree turns and watched the sun go down before Jo took back control and flew back home to Palo Alto. This time we flew down the coast (actually got quite far into the Pacific at one point) and went just west of San Francisco. It was so beautiful. Like Christmas. Like someone had spilled a million Quality Streets! So many amber lights and a few white and red particularly along the roads- ribbons of colour. The lights were so small and perfect and extended so far into the distance. Absolutely stunning.

Duchess

Oh and I must mention the delicious vertigo. Wow I have never felt so disorientated. You know the odd feeling you get after fainting when you are convinced you should be somewhere else, anywhere but where you actually are? Oooh.

Shaman's Critiquing

Shaman's Crossing

I read this book pretty swiftly for me. Only... three weeks? And I only read two other books at the same time. Go me! Seriously, I looked forward to picking it up and didn't like to put it down. The last couple of hundred pages were devoured in just a couple of days (which to me sounds amazingly fast). I enjoyed it a lot. Slipping into a Hobb book is so easy and delightful.

Of course I can't say that I loved it to bits and cried and laughed and went through a rollercoaster of emotions. It was just nice to read.

The main thing that struck me about this book was the poor standard of writing. The question is in my mind whether this was intentional or just a poor piece of work on her Hobbness' part. As the book wore on, I began thinking that it was more the former- that she intentionally wrote badly as that is how Nevare, not her brightest creation, would write.

At the beginning I was struck by the number of tautologies and useless paragraphs. It isn't like her Hobbness to waste words and I feared that she had started to just write for the sake of it- because a bestselling author need not worry about being concise anymore and besides, the longer a book is the better, right? I maybe should have made notes as I read it and so I could stun you all a la Myopia with examples but the idea didn't occur to me until I had got past the worst cases.

Vocabulary also started off as tiresome. He said "behoove" twice in one page. Once was more than enough for such an odd word. Twice says "I learnt a new word today, see me use it and be in awe".

Nevare has favourite topics to wax lyrical about including being a Soldier Son and being semi-promised to Carsina and how fat Gord was. I often had deja vu while reading this book wondering whether her Hobbness was just padding while she worked out where to go next... though it dawned on me on the umpteenth repetition that Nevare was just a bit stupid.

This was reinforced by him "learning" new things and being all excited about learning them and then when it crops up again, he acts as if it is all fresh and new (Gord not being a glutton, Trist not being a good leader, the political situation, Epiny's seances for crying out loud...). And of course ignoring the blatently obvious such as Caulder talking about the stone after it was stolen and Spink talking about "we" when he claimed not to meet with Epiny.

So I have a lot of things here, the bad writing and repetition and Nevare's stupidity, which together imply that her Hobbness has not lost the knack to write well, she was doing it on purpose. Which is genius- to alter your own level of writing to reflect character.

Except... is it really a good idea to have such a dumbass as your lead?

As I read, I was always thinking "when and why is this being written?". The tone is supercilious. A Gentleman Diaryist that thinks too much of his own importance and tells you nothing. I think that Nevare thinks more of himself than he should. He thinks he has skill and the ability to write and be published. I got the impression that he was writing this at a future date but not for the same reasons as Fitz wrote his biography- not to heal and purge himself of a great hurt- but to show off. He was not impressed with his father's diaries. He thought he could do better. Nevarre is a hopeless romantic with the emphasis on hopeless and I can see him fancying himself as a bit of a writer (who was it that said a Soldier Son was lucky that he could be both a fighter and an artist?).

Of course much of what he wrote would harm his and his family's reputation so I find myself more wondering how the country could have got to a place where it was socially acceptable for Nevarre to put such things onto paper. Even if he was meant to be the only audience, he shows no guilt at what he writes and I think he would if society hadn't changed (or his society changed). And there is no doubt in my mind that this is a retrospective telling not a simple story told in the first person. It is often far too removed and... romanticised... not to be his own piece of work.

Throughout, I had a problem with the women in Shaman's Crossing. I kept on waiting for a knowing wink or rolling of the eyes and yet none of the nice and subservient women ever gave me a clue that they were play-acting. How could Carsina actually go along with dumb and bland Nevare? Flirt with him in the garden and not find his naivete completely irritating. I thought that we were only getting half the story thanks to Nevare's biased retelling and behind closed doors she and his sister would bitch about the stupidity of boys and the inconvenience of skirts.

But no. The book made it quite clear that it wasn't just Nevare not reading the girls properly. It was a real Stepford Wives attitude.

Sure on the flip-side we had Epiny and her mother (and the peach lady... who for all we know could be Epiny's mum as that would serve the Uncle right for laughing at the notion of women being on the street...) but in general we were presented with limp, ineffective female figures with absolutlely no evidence that they are anything to the contrary. They are the mothers. The sisters. The sweethearts. Utterly sexless and totally simpering.

What is going on here?

Oh there was an utterly priceless quote that just made me mad... near the end I think Nevare says something like he didn't think women were stupid... just that they were like dogs or horses.

I wouldn't mind if there was a hint that this wasn't true. But it seems to be true in that world.

I was struck by how this book was a lot like Harry Potter with the mind-numbingly tedious school system but then I realised it was worse- it was Americans Only. Hazing is American. It feels distinctly wrong... rather unnerving... to have it in a fantasy book. I almost felt like I was being told "sorry- this book isn't for you. No book please, you're British".

Fair enough, we have many series of books about schooling and it is distinctly British and maybe other nationalities feel like we are excluding them... But I didn't expect to feel left in the cold by her Hobbness.

But other than that, I thought it didn't work well. We rarely got to step outside the year-group/house Nevare was in and so the "bad doers" of the book were strangely faceless (if not nameless). Without seeing the other half, I grew to doubt that they existed and I didn't care about why they were doing it and how they were motivated by outside politics... It was all tell and no show. I didn't care about his subjects especially not bloody "exponents". Really, did anyone need a few pages lecturing us about the basics of mathematics? Is anyone fooled into believing that Gord had a magical way of viewing it so suddenly it was beautiful? Worst of all the description of cramming for exams and taking them. Not really an entertaining experience. Next thing you know we'll be told all about Nevare's bowel movements.

So as something interesting to read about, the Academy failed me. As something to make me feel included in his life/world, the Academy failed me.

But even though I complain, it was a nice read.

When we were five

(Post 8000)

Happy birthday to me. I am five years old today.

I haven’t a clue how to mark this properly. I seem to lack inspiration for this milestone. But I could not let this anniversary pass and not post! So fate has forced my hand.

What I think I will do is talk about the real five year old me. On the 7th January 1987 I celebrated my real fifth birthday. It was also the first day of school. I don’t have many memories prior to school (unlike my sis I can’t remember things from when I was 9 months old… weird girl) but I distinctly remember small things from my first day like the way I arrived with my mum and the teacher said that my mum could stay or take me away before the day completed but as it happened I slipped into the class quite easily and my mum left without me noticing. As it was my birthday, there was a cake. It was white and had a little name-card in front with my name in bold letters. The class sang Happy Birthday to me. Alas the “cake” was a biscuit tin with white paper covering it so we didn’t get any cake.

The next day the “cake” was there but the name-card had someone else’s name on it. I remember a sense of regret and yet understanding. It seems odd to me now that I felt like that rather than upset.

I was a quiet five year old. So quiet that my teacher took my mother aside and asked her whether I had leaned to speak yet.

But soon I took a shine to my teacher and her to me. She was Christian and I remember many of our classes being about Bible stories. I wrote a song about loving God (and still have it written down somewhere…) and she adored me for it.

We grew cress as a project and made cress sandwiches at the end. I liked them and demanded of my mum that she get the teacher to let us take all the remaining cress home. I was confident in my right to have all the class' cress and got my way as I so often did.

It amazes me to think of how much I leant in two terms of schooling. I learnt to draw with only slightly less skill than I have today. I learnt to read and I learnt to write. Has there been a year since then that I have learnt so much?

I think I probably learnt some multiplication tables too that year but I could not swear to it. It seems quite likely that I entered schooling already knowing my tables up to 12 and yet not knowing a single word. I distinctly remember not being able to recognise my own name when I was 4. I argued with one of the play-school leaders about whether my name had an “n” or not. I learnt my times tables through bathtimes with my mum. We’d take a bath together and my hands would be two child-spiders called Timmy (the naughty one) and Susie (the good one). One of her hands would be the teacher-spider.

So I learnt a lot when I was five at school but I didn’t learn how to make friends with anyone but the teacher. Playtimes were painful. I was alone with my gloves during the winter. They had pigs on them with the middle and ring finger being their legs. The pigs and I played many games quietly in the corner of the playground. I managed to gain one friend: Laura. She was a fan of Black Beauty and would rush at me during playtime crying “let’s play horsie”. I was always the horse. She tugged at the hood of my coat, pushing and pulling me around the playground. Sometimes she’d abandon me mid-“game” and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.

By the third year at school, and I realise that I am overstepping the remit here by talking about when I was 7 but forgive me please, Laura left the school and I had a new friend called Melanie. She would wear a woolly hat to school with a tail where the bobble would be on a bobble-hat. I would tug the tail of the hat and pull it off and fling it to the floor chanting “Ding dong bell”. I wonder whether I bullied her doing this. I can’t tell.

I have a memory of smashing a kid’s head against a brick wall but I also have a memory of watching another kid smashing a kid’s head against a brick wall and doing nothing. I wonder which memory is true.

I don’t quite know how to finish this off. I guess I will just say that I was not a happy five year old in reality. But Keppet is a happy five year old. She has discovered how to talk and not be used by others crying horsie. She tries not to bully and I hope has been successful recently. It took a long time for the person behind Keppet to work out how to make friends and keep them, how to listen and respond, and Keppet is proud of the network she has found herself in today.

Can't take the sky from me

Posted today on the Board. There are SPOILERS. I can't be bothered to black them out. You have been warned.

Serenity

Wow.

It was everything it could have been. That isn't to say that it is perfect- the large cast and sweeping plot that works well in a tv show don't work so well in a movie. But that just makes it even more astounding that it works at all. Somehow they do manage to recreate the back-story in a not too clumsy way and all the past relationships (although I note that Inara was just a mysterious lady with a thing for Mal and poor Book never rekindled his friendship with Jayne and speaking of Jayne, his character was a little different in that he checked that the crew was buckled in before he was and his River-fear wasn't as strong).

So in answer to emano, it is easy enough for someone to jump in. But you won't already be involved with the characters. You won't immediately fear for them and cry with them...

And boy did I cry for Wash. I wouldn't have minded if the ending was a tad more sentimental to be honest! A few tear-jerking moments to fully purge me of my grief would have been great. I needed to bawl and the action and very real fear for the rest of the crew (and the rest of the franchise to be a tad more selfish!) wouldn't let up and let me.

So the start of the film felt a tad drawn out with explanation of the story so far (particularly the long Simon/Mal conversation) but it quickly became a fast-paced and high-larious action-fest with hi-jinks and misbehaving a-plenty. The audience though small (it was the morning... normal people do not go to the cinema in the morning) laughed long and hard- the biggest laugh going to Kaylee's battery comment.

The crux of the film was in my opinion a little weak. As the Bad Guy said, revealing that the Alliance Parliament created the Reavers by accident really won't harm anyone. As far as sticking it to the Alliance goes, it really wasn't worth it. Kind of like the end to Angel to be honest. It isn't even that horrific for an audience viewer. Far better that they would be created on purpose. But anyway... I was emotionally caught up more than Zoe appeared to be at Wash's death *sob* and so worried for the rest of them. The very ending was done well with Kaylee and Simon getting together but just for sex- I feared that Simon was going to get into a long poetic speech about love at one point but Kaylee turned it around into something a tad more believable. Though I do wonder at the drop of the incest idea. Not even a flicker of guilt on Simon's part that his true love was not a part of his new relationship (though she clearly was, hee hee). It was fitting that River should pilot the ship she once became and the very ending felt good and right and it ended on a laugh. Which is the best way to end. Personally I would have liked to see Jayne get some or at least be in his bunk but I accept that some cast members had to take a back-seat or the ending would go on forever.

I think that is all I wanted to say. It has taken me longer than I thought to say it all (okay, mainly because I was talking on the phone at the same time). After seeing Serenity I was a little depressed so I went to see Corpse Bride which was a good pick-me-up.