How to cook

The key, of course, is to not cook for several months between attempts. In this way it becomes possible to forget the abject, multilayered misery that happens when you cook a new thing. Like maybe wait three months. After three months it is possible for me to tell myself that I have been exaggerating my loathing for cooking. You know, for comedic effect. So today I cooked a new chicken spaghetti thing. It looked very easy. Ho, ho, ho.

I cut up the chicken first. This went really smoothly, despite my hatred for touching raw meat, and I was feeling fantastic about myself and my cooking abilities, so I bravely went ahead and put the olive oil on to heat up. I didn't know olive oil had to heat up. I would have totally dumped the chicken into the skillet first, piece by piece as I cut it up, and worried about the olive oil when I started cooking the chicken.

Then I chopped up the garlic. I figured, since I had already cut the chicken successfully, theoretically the most traumatic part of the process, I could now give myself a prize by doing something super easy and fun. My sister has recently discovered that she owns a vegetable chopper, and all you have to do to work it, is slam it up and down repeatedly, and the garlic becomes chopped automatically. Like magic!

First problem, of course: I didn't bring over the garlic I bought. Of course. I looked and looked all over for garlic and couldn't find any, and after three terrifying - because! the olive oil was already on the skillet which meant TOO LATE to go buy/pick up garlic - minutes I found some, and I got going with the chopping. V. easy and fun. I was feeling totally great, and then I took the chopper apart to wash it and couldn't get it back together again. Every time I tried, it started making horrifying noises SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK (sorry, Robyn!), and I couldn't get it to go back together. At all. It looked all broken and tragic, and after innumerable efforts to mend it while retaining my equanimity, I started to cry because not only was I failing at cooking, but I was also failing at being a good sister. Neither a borrower nor a lender be.

I know this is stupid, but I am writing this while the chicken is simmering in the kitchen, mostly to stave off the moment when I have to cook the pasta, and it still feels v. upsetting right now - anyway, I finally sorted the stupid chopper and carried on cooking the chicken, and I put too much goddamn spice on it. I put the right amount from the recipe, but I guess I had the wrong proportions, so the basil and blackened thingy were just way too much, and my whole house smells like basil. Way too much basil. I am gagging on basil right now. I poured in the tomatoes, covered it, and disconsolately wandered over to write a complainy blog post.

There always comes a time like this, when I am cooking something. I reach a point where I hate the food I am cooking, truly hate it, probably as much as Fred Phelps hates the gays - IF NOT MORE - and I can see why, if these are truly the emotions he possesses, he chooses to send his family out picketing all over the place with his hatred of the gays, and if I could do that with my hatred of the food and not be ridiculous (a challenge Fred Phelps faces too - and does not manage to surmount), I would totally do it at this point in the process. At this point I am ready to take the whole pan and pour it into the trash and sit down and cry for a little while, and ultimately go get take-out.

No idea how the food turned out. I haven't tasted it. The house smells like basil and I don't expect great things out of the chicken spaghetti. But I am going to go make pasta anyway, because I've started and it's too late to stop now.

Oh, Spike (a Torchwood update)

I started watching Torchwood for much the same reason that I started watching Angel – because I’d fallen in love with the show from which it had been spun off, and I wanted to make the original show last longer while still feeding my addiction. Torchwood isn’t as good a spin-off as Angel is. I think partly because Angel gets a little cheerier on his own show than he is on Buffy, but Captain Jack – who was cheeringly cheerful on Doctor Who – gets grimmer. And I like cheerful people. Part of the reason I like Doctor Who so much is that Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant are both really, really cheerful. Plus, to be frank, the cast of Torchwood isn’t a terribly good ensemble cast, whereas the cast of Angel is quite, quite superb. Like when they brought on Wesley, and he was a rogue demon hunter? Ah, the good old days. The Torchwood characters are less fully realized.

I only bring this up so that when I refer to Spike it’ll be clear that I’m not likening Torchwood to Buffy and Angel at all. It’s not as good. Sorry. Maybe because Steven Moffat wasn’t involved in Torchwood.

Spike is in love with Captain Jack. And, I mean, why not, right? All the people who meet Captain Jack seem to fall over themselves being in love with him. Something to do with 51st-century pheromones (don’t blame me, I didn’t make it up). There are confusing innuendos about stopwatches. There are gun-shootin’ lessons. There are dances atop invisible spaceships next to Big Ben. But today Spike won the being-in-love-with-Captain-Jack contest, because today Spike urged Captain Jack to sing along with the song that was playing, because (he said) “It’s our song”, and Captain Jack said, “We don’t have a song. And if we did have a song, it wouldn’t be that song.”

Referring to Sarah Brightman’s enduring classic “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper.”

I’ll give you that again. Spike told Captain Jack Harkness that “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper” was their song.

Mm. I guess this is so funny for me because Spike and Jack were already making me laugh by – well, just everything really. I mean Torchwood is drastically not as good as Doctor Who, I only carry on watching it because Welsh accents are funny, but it’s brilliant to have Spike show up and be in love with Jack. Their relationship is not unlike the one Spike and Buffy share. With the Spike liking the object of his affection a lot more than the object of his affection likes him, and with the beating each other up and trying to kill each other in between making out. And then just when I thought that there was no way at all for them to be any funnier, they toss in “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper” and call it their song.

And in case YouTube won’t load for you:

Tell me, Captain Strange, do you feel my devotion
Or are you like a droid, devoid of emotion
Encounters one and two are not enough for me
What my body needs is close encounter three

I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Flashing lights in hyper space
Fighting for the Federation
Hand in hand we’ll conquer space.

Another good thing

about Ben Barnes being Dorian Gray in a film of Dorian Gray. I do not need, of course, to say how perfect Ben Barnes is for this part, with his big serious black eyes and everything. Nor do I need to point out to you that films set in Victorian times are already good, even if they do not contain Ben Barnes and Colin Firth (as this one does). And I am optimistically hoping that Colin Firth's presence in the movie will make it flashy and high-profile. All these things can go without saying.

Here is something you may not have considered, but I have, because I'm a dork: If they are making a film based on one of Oscar Wilde's books, and Ben Barnes and Colin Firth have to go around promoting it all over the place, then do you know what that means? It means lots of extra people saying nice things about Oscar Wilde. They will be all like, And of course, Oscar Wilde was a genius. Absolutely unparalleled wit, that Oscar Wilde. They will be like, Now, Colin, you were in a film version of The Importance of Being Earnest - how does that compare? and Colin Firth will be all, Well, the source material is very different, and the interviewer will be like, Oscar Wilde was clever that way, writing different type things like a clever genius.

Because, yes. I light up like a Times Square Christmas tree when someone says something nice about Oscar Wilde. The other day at work I was talking with Carrie about books that are famous that we don't like, and I was pleased because I like trashing classic novels, and then Carrie said she didn't like The Picture of Dorian Gray! I am not even that in love with The Picture of Dorian Gray, but still my face fell and I said, "But - but Oscar Wilde wrote it," like that was going to hold sway over Carrie.

Whereas if you give Oscar Wilde a compliment in my presence, I will beam radiantly and agree with you, and tell you something else nice about Oscar Wilde that you might not have known. I feel very proud of Oscar Wilde when he gets compliments, because I love him so much. It is like I am his mama.

Also, I discovered last night that I care more about Oscar Wilde than about myself. I was taking a shower and trying to think whether, if I could go back in time to meet Oscar Wilde, I would go back in time to before his trials & disgrace, or after. Before the trials, he would be cheerier and funnier and cooler to hang out with, and he wouldn't make us both feel awkward by asking us for money. On the other hand if I went to meet him after the trials, I could tell him that I was from the future, and show him pennies, and tell him that in the future, everyone thinks he's brilliant and totally likes him and uses him as the gold standard for clever people, and I could tell him that his trial and downfall is considered by some to be a watershed in the construction of sexuality (well, I might leave that bit out and just tell him how everyone likes him in the future).

And although I would rather made cheerful fun cool Oscar Wilde, his happiness is more important than mine (I discovered). I would definitely go to after the trials. I would buy him tea and tell him flattering things, and that would cheer him up, poor thing.

You may have heard

about the fact that Amazon.com has a quote unquote "glitch" (yes, I said "quote unquote" and then used quotation marks - this is redundant but I do it to indicate my skepticism that "glitch" accurately describes what's going on there) which causes books with content relating to GLBT issues to suddenly not be ranked on the Amazon ranking system anymore! Which causes them to slide way, way down the page, so when I do a search for Fingersmith, which I just finished rereading and thoroughly enjoyed, Amazon is like, What book is that? Do you by any chance mean all these other books and films that are not Fingersmith at all?

I know it's Easter Monday, and Amazon is doing its best, and it can't solve everything right away. I know this. I still feel angry anyway. What is your problem, Amazon? Sarah Waters, really? Really? You need to protect the public from the adult content in the books of a woman who has been nominated for the Booker prize twice? Really? And Jeanette Winterson? I don't know what to say to you, Amazon. You have done so much for me over the years, sending me Christmas gifts for my loved ones, and books for me to gloat over, and the first series of Doctor Who, and I have loved all of these things greatly. But STRAIGHTEN THE HELL UP.

(Ha, ha, straighten up. See how I made a funny? How I can make a funny in the midst of being really irritated?)

Yeah, Amazon, straighten up and fly right. I don't want to hear about any more of your shenanigans.

My life reached total fulfillment the other day

My friend Laura rang me up because she had a question about Oscar Wilde and she knew I'd know the answer. This was flattering but nerve-wracking because it would be so unfortunate if she asked me something and I had no idea what the answer was. Much like that time that I told her I would recognize what Angel episode she had seen, if she told me one thing about it.

However, in both cases, I proved to know the answers. It was that episode in the second series where Angel uses Anne's homeless shelter to mess with Wolfram & Hart, which is sort of shady of him. And Oscar Wilde was convicted for two years on a charge of gross indecency between males under that crappy Section 11 part of a law that was really meant to prevent sex with underage girls. Rubbish Labouchere (he was the guy who introduced Section 11 into the law).

Well, of course, if you ask me one question about Oscar Wilde, it is not unlikely that I will tell you a whole lot of more information about him. So I told Laura all about how things would have been different if they had proved that sodomy took place, and then I told her about some of the evidence that was introduced against him. And instead of saying "That's gross, stop talking to me," she said "Oo, that's very helpful for my paper."

HA.

Oh, and then, and then? After I had continued telling her stories about Oscar Wilde and his ways and his family, she asked me what was a good book to read about Oscar Wilde, if a person was only going to read one book about Oscar Wilde? Not for her paper but just For Life? I assumed that she was teasing me, because I am a big Oscar Wilde dork, but no, indeed, she thought that he sounded interesting and wanted to read more about him.

I HAVE BEEN WAITING MY WHOLE LIFE FOR SOMEBODY TO SAY THIS TO ME.

In case you're wondering, the book to read is Gary Schmidgall's brilliant and insightful The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar. It's not a biography in the traditional sense, but it deals well with everything, and has lots of interesting information, and furthermore it talks in admiring terms about Ada Leverson, whom I love. Plus, if you ever get bored with one bit of it, you can just skip on to the next chapter, because each chapter deals with a different thing. The one about angels and demons was a particularly good one.

The Stranger Wilde. Gary Schmidgall. It's excellent.

Also, happy birthday to Laura! And Emily Dickinson!

Another of those signs that I'm a loser

Today I was reading about this book called The Dead Guy Interviews, which is these imagined interviews of 45 of the most interesting/important dead people out there. Of course I have no interest whatsoever in actually reading this book, because dude, they're dead, so it's 45 cases of the author interviewing himself. I don't even care enough to remember the author's name. What I do care enough about is whether Oscar Wilde was one of them. Turns out I care a lot about that. I care enough to go a-hunting to ascertain this information; while the Amazon page was failing to load, my brain was thinking, If the internet can't find this out for me, I guess I'll have to go to the library this afternoon and check in the book itself. And then I was like, Better yet, I'll swing by the university library right after work, and then if they don't have it there I'll just go to the public library on the way back from swimming (P.S., the public library is in no way "on the way back" from swimming), and if they don't have it there I'll just run by Bongs & Noodles...

Happily, the Amazon page finished loading before I could plan what I would do if the university library didn't have it, and the public library didn't have it, and Bongs & Noodles didn't have it. But it could easily have involved calling the publisher.

And yes, Oscar Wilde was one of the people.

Of course.

As if there was any doubt.

Cause, I mean, if the dude's interviewing interesting people, of course he must interview Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde was probably the first person he thought of when he conceived the idea for this book. I mean who wouldn't want to interview Oscar Wilde?

I'm very vain of Oscar Wilde. I'm always pleased when other people like him too. When I found this out from Amazon, I felt really proud, like the same way I feel when I'm showing people the South Bank of London. It's like, Yes, that's right, this is one of my things. Feel free to admire it at your leisure. Yes, yes, it is magnificent, isn't it? Oh, why, yes, thank you, I found it all by myself.

Nevertheless, taking an objective step back from this moment, I'm pretty sure it makes me not a cool person. I'm pretty sure this is one of those things about myself that I should keep to myself (but I don't because I want to brag about Oscar Wilde's ubiquity), like how I always, always flip straight to the indexes of nonfiction books to see if he's in the index, and then if he is I check out what they're saying about him and make judgments of the books on that basis. (Seriously, though, the man is in a lot of indexes. If it's a book about the gays, he's always in there. Him and Foucault.)

Am I in love with Daniel Craig?

Well, not really. But kinda. A very platonic kind of love.

To me Daniel Craig has always been like Pierce Brosnan and Patrick Dempsey -- everyone has the hugest crush on him and they go on and on about his sexiness, and I just don't find him even the tiniest bit attractive but instead I kind of dislike him.

(Seriously, people, what do you see in Patrick Dempsey?)

Now, in fairness, this may be because I saw him (Daniel Craig) first in a film about Sylvia Plath, and he played Ted Hughes and wasn't awfully nice to Gwyneth Paltrow (surprise, surprise), and it put me off him for life. I really have very unkind feelings toward Ted Unpleasant Wanker Hughes, so if you want me to fall in love with you, don't come to my Halloween party as Ted Hughes. However much you might be tempted to.

For the interested, Ted Hughes ditched Sylvia Plath for Assia Wevill, who was a refugee of Nazi Germany, and then after a while he kept cheating on her too, and she killed herself and their four-year-old daughter, whose name, I swear to God, was Alexandra Tatiana Elise. I could not make that shit up. Ted Hughes was such an unpleasant wanker. I always try and feel sorry for him because I know it must have been sad when his insane lover murdered their daughter, but I just can't make myself even the tiniest bit sorry for him because he was such a jackass.

So of course many of these feelings translated to anger with Daniel Craig and a total inability to find him in any way attractive. And he's old! Isn't he old? Is it just me, or does he look quite old?

But that's irrelevant now, because now Daniel Craig and I can be BFF if we ever meet.

This is what happened today. I was doing some research at work, and a fortunate combination of keywords (this often happens -- I learn so much from the brief excerpts of websites that turn up on Google) produced a page that seemed to suggest that Daniel Craig had proposed a slight break from tradition for the next James Bond film. And when I got home I looked it up on the internet to discover whether I had read it correctly.

And yes! I had! So, announcement:

Daniel Craig is pushing the producers to let James Bond experiment with his sexuality a little bit, and by "experiment with his sexuality", of course I mean HAVE SEX WITH DUDES. Daniel Craig is all, Well why not? I have gay fans too, yo! I'm up for it! Let's go!

HELL YEAH.

The Internet thinks this is a great idea or a disgusting perversion of a classic character and homosexuality is immoral. Which is fair enough. James Bond has always been all about sexual morality, and it would be an awful shame to change that now.

Some people called him shayachern-a-muffin

(Little trashy fantasy humor there for my two favorite sisters and Nezabeth if she ever heard that song we invented that time and sang it a lot really loudly at gas stations.)

Seriously, though, this whole Dumbledore being gay thing couldn't possibly make me happier, which I think is for several reasons, one being that oh my God, it's so true and thinking back on it, I can't believe I didn't think of that in the first place. I suppose because he was never awfully forthcoming about his personal life.

And another one is that now the Grindelwald story is a better story, because it's more poignant now, and I am all about poignancy. How sad. Poor Dumbledore, and then he had to go off and fight him and defeat him and send him to prison for the rest of his life. (I realize this was always the case, but now it's sadder.)

And another one is that she waited until now to tell everyone, so a bunch of Christian people are on record as saying that Dumbledore is a good role model, and HA HA HA, Christians, YOU CAN'T TAKE IT BACK. YOU LEFT A PAPER TRAIL. Silly fundamentalists; I would have told you to hold your praise until the series was over, if you'd asked me about it. Well, actually, because I think that people who hate Harry Potter for religious reasons are silly, I would probably have told you that you should go with your opinions, and parents couldn't wait until the books were all out to decide whether their children should read them, and really, the values that you saw were there no matter what happened in later books. But, y'know, if you'd gotten me drunk or something, or like made me vow to give my absolute honest opinion, then I would have told you to hold your praise until it was all, all, all over.

I wish she'd mentioned it in the books themselves, though I can see why she wouldn't. It wasn't germane until the seventh book, and if she'd mentioned it then, all anyone would have said about the seventh book would have been OH MY GOD DUMBLEDORE IS GAY and really, after working for seventeen years on the damn things, you can see how she would be disinclined to turn the finale into the Dumbledore Is Gay Show and would instead want people to focus on the actual plot about defeating Voldemort and Jenny being totally right about Snape. I can totally dig it.

In other news, nyah nyah to Plugged In Magazine, you cannot take it back now. I saw all that nice stuff you said about Dumbledore, and never once did you say one single word about Dumbledore-related hanky-panky, and now there is no way that you can go back and say that what you meant all along was that it was very alarming to have a gay man in charge of all these students teaching them Bad Values.

I especially love how people are saying she's doing it to sell more books. Right, yes. Because that's what the woman needs. More money. It's a very cunning publicity stunt to save her from financial ruin.

And finally, this pleases me because now everyone is saying (albeit for the wrong reasons) that they should've got Ian McKellan to play Dumbledore. Which I was always saying. Michael Gambon does not do Dumbledore justice in the slightest, because he fails to attain that combination of charming and kind and clever and witty and classy, and Ian McKellan would be perfect at it, and I know he would be perfect at it because he is so extremely excellent, and yes, okay, he was Gandalf already and maybe he doesn't want to be typecast, but TOO BAD, he would be the perfect Dumbledore. Which I have always said. From the very moment that I first saw Ian McKellan. And now lots and lots of people are telling the internet how much they agree with me.

(If only Michael Gambon were a hard-core religious nut who refused to play a gay character and then Ian McKellan could so step up for it. I will pray to God to make that happen.)

*cackles* How happy am I?

I have just gotten some news (from Laura, my favorite person ever) that just, wow, makes me happy on so very many levels.

I am not telling what it is here, because that would eliminate any chance I have of telling you in person, but let me just say that I expect to be having very serious discussions about the ramifications of this whole thing in my WGS class on Wednesday next. And I will probably be the only one as filled with glee as this.

It is such good news that I am getting up mad early tomorrow, depriving myself of sleep, in order that I may drive over to my house in the early morning, intercept the newspaper, and tell this news to my family first before they have the opportunity to read it in the newspaper. And I will also call my little sister in the morning and tell her not to go online or read a newspaper or talk to anyone until we can meet and I can inform her.

Wow. YAY.

Oscar Wilde month!

Woohoo! It's October!

October is my special Oscar Wilde month, partly because it has always been my second favorite month (May, of course, being my favorite, with March as a close third) and after I started learning about Oscar Wilde I realized that I had something to say about October, finally, and partly because it reminds me of Oscar Wilde.

16 October -- mark your calendars! -- is Oscar Wilde's birthday. He would have been, let's see, 153 this year, but tragically he died 107 years ago (wow, that's long). On Oscar Wilde's birthday I shall celebrate by telling everyone I see that it is OSCAR WILDE'S BIRTHDAY, and then I and the spirit of Oscar will share a private little giggle together as those I encounter exchange anxious glances and begin to back away from me slowly or turn and flee in abject terror. I will also share with those who do not flee interesting little facts that I enjoy, such as the fact that his full name was Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, which people don't usually know but which gives me such joy (his mother said, "Is it not grand, misty, and Ossianic?"), and the thing that he said that you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of little Nell (we are on the SAME WAVELENGTH, yo), and oo, about that time that he went abroad, after his very scandalous imprisonment, with Robbie Ross and Reginald Whatsit, and he wrote back and said that for their protection, Robbie was travelling as Reginald Whatsit and Reginald was traveling under Robbie Ross. "It is better that they not use their real names," he said.

Furthermore, 10 October is the birthday of my tied-for-favorite of all Oscar Wilde's friends, Ada Leverson. I like her a lot. She was funny, and she got tired when she was around a lot of people for a long time and had to go home and refuel, and she teased Oscar Wilde by writing spoofy articles making fun of him, which he liked, and he called her Sphinx and wrote a poem about her, and she and her husband went bail for him during his trial and then gave him a place to stay after he got out of jail, when nobody wanted to be his friend. I will celebrate this day by, um, I guess liking Ada Leverson a special lot. Anyway I feel sorry for her, because poor dear, she married this guy who didn't really get her, so she was unhappy a lot.

And I guess because it just wouldn't be okay with the gods of karma to have all that much related coolness born in one month of the year without balancing it out somehow, 22 October is the birthday of Lord Alfred Douglas, or as I like to call him, That Little Shit. I do try to be fair to him, except that fair sort of winds up with you totally despising him, because he was a really despicable person, and you know what he did, do you know? I mean, apart from hating Jews and telling everyone how Oscar Wilde was a big Mr. Gay McGayerston and he was SO GLAD that he had escaped from that FILTHY LIFESTYLE? He made it a deliberate point to destroy Robbie Ross, who was a sweetheart. And do you know why? Because he was jealous because everyone liked Robbie better than him. Which you couldn't help doing, because Robbie Ross was a sweetie-pie whose whole life was basically all about Oscar Wilde (he made particular arrangements to have his ashes interred in Oscar Wilde's tomb, and they didn't do it until like thirty years after he died), and Bosie was an unpleasant little tramp who went around ruining people's lives and then totally not even caring and also getting involved with xenophobic slime like Mr. Noel Pemberton-Billing.

Er, not that it matters. I don't care. I am not all worked up about it. Cause they are all dead and I am not silly enough to get all worked up about the morals of people who are long dead and who in some cases NOBODY HAS HEARD OF THEM.

P.S. Bosie, if you are reading this from down there in hell, HA HA HA, nobody has heard of you anymore, and if they have, it is only because of ALL THE SEX that you had with Oscar Wilde. I'm just saying. (And that dare not speak its name crap. You weren't that good a writer either.)

So, hey. Celebrate Oscar Wilde month. I believe that my church is calling it Respect Life month, but I think a lot of pro-lifers are big crazy shits, so instead of that, I am changing it to Oscar Wilde Is Cool month. I think that's better. In order to celebrate this month, you can go crazy with the saying witty things. You can get yourself into massive trouble for having sex with young gentlemen and live the rest of your life in miserable exile. Whatever you want. Go wild.

Edit: SHIT. No GODDAMN PUN INTENDED.

Delaying gratification, and those dreams you sometimes have that are so fantastic and then you wake up and you're like, Oh. And now for real life.

That post title is only three characters (four characters?) shy of being too long for a post title.

I went to the library today to get, I swear, two books, just two, no more than two, a mere two. All I wanted was The Mysteries of Udolpho, which I've been meaning to read for untold ages, and The Monk, which sounds hilarious. The thing was (this was the thing) that as I was turning down the R aisle to fetch Udolpho, my eye was caught by The Persian Boy, which is an excellent book and one that I haven't read for absolutely untold ages – like, seriously, a year and a half – so I paused to eye it affectionately, and then I also spotted The Praise Singer, which is a book by Mary Renault that I have not read.

This is something I do quite frequently with authors I like. Basically if I read two books by an author that I like quite a lot, or one book that I adore and one book that I quite enjoy (not in that order though. It has to be I read one that I quite enjoy and then one that I adore, or otherwise I will think that the author didn't live up to his or her potential in the second book of theirs I read), the Rule of Delayed Author Gratification comes into play. This is the rule whereby I choose one book by a given author of whom I am fond, and I just don't read it. For instance, I am not reading The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie. I am not reading Persuasion by Jane Austen (I have read it before, but not for ages, even longer than I haven't read The Persian Boy). I am not reading The Praise Singer by Mary Renault. For the longest time I didn't read Archer's Goon by Diana Wynne Jones, or Beau Ideal by P.C. Wren, or Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card (that one was SO not worth it), or Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy Sayers (ditto. shut UP, Peter Wimsey, ya pussy. The guy was a MURDERER. Quit CRYING.)

I have other delaying gratification tactics too, with authors I actually can't bear not to read. When Diana Wynne Jones wrote Conrad's Fate, I read it to my little sister, and I didn't read ahead. As I read it aloud chapter by chapter, I was reading it for the very first time. When I first got all of the Sandman (I got ALL of them, because my lovely godmother gave me a big gift card to Bongs & Noodles for my birthday), after I decided they were pretty much the best thing ever, I only read one issue a day. And appreciate: I did that for Season of Mists and A Game of You and Brief Lives, not just like Fables and Reflections and World's End, where it wouldn't have made any difference. I began to fail at this when I got to The Kindly Ones, though. I gave in and read them all in one gobble. I had to! Lyta was a CRAZY PERSON!

I know that you are probably thinking this is an insane Rule, but you are totally wrong. Sometimes it's a let-down, but sometimes it's very very worth it. Archer's Goon? Beau Ideal? Can't even express how worth it. And just think if I'd had the luck to save The Ground Beneath Her Feet instead of The Moor's Last Sigh (I almost did this! The only only reason I didn't was that The Moor's Last Sigh was checked out!). And just think how brilliant it would be if I'd reserved Fire and Hemlock for last, or Neverwhere. It is just a question of guessing the right book to read.

Anyway, so I stopped to look at The Praise Singer, to decide if the Time Was Ripe for ending the delaying of my gratification, and what do you think? There were all these books by Mary Renault I'd never heard of before! Like four of them! And one about after Alexander died (poor Bagoas), which I'm assuming isn't very good or else my mum would have recommended it to me and owned it, but still! Hey!

This is like those dreams that everyone who likes books a lot seems to have, where you go to the library and there is a whole shelf of hitherto unknown books by an author you really like, or you go to a book sale and they have all the books you like, or you discover a new wondrous author who has written ten thousand books.

But this is real. Indeed Mary Renault does have a whole bunch of books I haven't read before. Eeee! I'm trying not to get my hopes up though, because I know that many times an author does not reach his or her writing peak right away, and there are consequently a vast number of books by them that are not very good at all, even though their later books are excellent, and other times an author is just all over the place and sometimes her books are very, very good and sometimes they are boring shite (I'm looking at you, Rumer Godden).

Addendum: I looked up Mary Renault on Wikipedia to make sure that these were indeed her books, and do you know what I discovered? I discovered that she and her partner that she was with her whole life moved to South Africa where there was apparently a lovely and accepting expatriate gay community, and they joined the anti-apartheid movement. In the 1950s. And hardly any white people were in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1950s. Yay for Mary Renault. It is pleasant to discover that one's favorite authors were also nice people. Usually I look people up on the internet and discover unpleasant things about them, like Sean Connery thinking women needed to be smacked and kept in their places, and Nabokov being all, you know, snobby and uppity, and, ugh, Rumer Godden refused to give medicine to a little dying girl who then died, and things like that. But Mary Renault was a righteous lady, and The Persian Boy particularly is an extremely well-written and touching book; and I think more people should know about her, because she was a good writer and it sounds to me like a good person.

My new classes

A sum-up of my new semester:

One of my professors came to class wearing a canary-yellow shirt with a white jacket and a yellow bow-tie with red polka dots, and referred to his antique collection as his children. As in: "I often talk to my children--" (Jenny, in her mind: Children? Really? Well, I guess Oscar Wilde had children also) "--and pick them up, but I use the kind of care one should always use when handling antiques." (Jenny, in her mind: Ah yes. I was right.)

Another of my professors was exactly like Ben Fong-Torres ("Craaazy") in Almost Famous, and he patronized me for saying something actually perfectly intelligent and also correct and believed by many theologian people. He asked us why we thought there weren't a bunch of depictions of the crucifixion in very early Christian art (the first one (HE SAYS but we plainly can't trust him) being from A.D. 450), and I said that crucifixion was a shameful criminal death to die and it was an embarrassment to the religion, and he said, "Hm. Good guess. But no" and explained that in fact it was because nobody in the early years of the religion cared about the crucifixion, and it only became important later on. So I think he is full of shit, and I shall drop his class if possible, even though I would love to learn about illuminated manuscripts and so forth.

My parapsychology teacher can see auras. He can see auras. I love this class. We are going to study UFO abductions and angels, and my professor can see auras. In the evening he sees them best (he says). I wanted to go find him and be like, "Um, my father is friends with a dude you work with" and then, having established my credentials, "WHAT COLOR IS MY AURA?"

And my queer theory class is perfect. It's perfect. It's the way I imagined college would be, back when I was a wee high schooler. We are reading a bunch of cool articles about all different things, and the people in the class are interesting and they answer when the professor asks questions and like say intelligent things.

Incidentally, there was a girl there and she was from England (she went to Swansea uni, but she didn't sound the least bit Welsh, and I don't know where she was from originally), and she was a Ph.D. student and very smart and oh my God, so posh. She was like terrifyingly posh, even more posh than my poshest flatmate, plum in her mouth and everything; which is funny because back in the day I wouldn't have noticed a thing (that's how British people talk), but after living with people from East London and Southend and Shropshire, I really really really noticed. Ah to be in England now that summer's here.

P.S. I miss London. Lovely London.

My schedule is extremely busy this semester, which means that I'll be doing a lot of work in the evenings and a lot of work in the mornings kind of early, and I have already turned to coffee. I made it through years and years of getting up at five-thirty for school, and never once did I drink coffee to keep myself going, because I don't like the taste, even when you mix in sugar and milk. Apparently all it took was giving me school plus a job, plus the notion that you don't have to have cream in your coffee. I drank two cups this morning at work, and I usually don't even make it through one. No cream, three sugars. My poor teeth.

In recreational news, there is a very cute movie of Northanger Abbey that was made by, I believe, the BBC earlier this year. The girl who plays Catherine is adorable and very sweet and innocent-looking, and the guy who plays Henry Tilney (my favorite Jane Austen hero, incidentally, by a lot, and please don't shoot me, Laura, this only means more Mr. Darcy for you) looks like Lee Pace, whom I adore, and announces his smirks in advance. I love it. Marry me, Henry Tilney.

My favorite movie review of all time. Ever. Seriously. Even better than the Rent ones.

It is this review of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang over at Plugged In Online, which (and God knows I quote) “bring[s] to your doorstep penetrating editorials and cutting-edge analysis of entertainment and cultural trends, along with first-run music and television reviews.”

(Hang on; just then while I was over at the About Us section of Plugged In Online, I found the most excellent thing ever in their FAQ section. You know what one of the questions is? It’s “Do you have any articles or know of good Scripture passages that can help hone my family’s media discernment skills?” I swear. It says that. That is one of their frequently asked questions. Help hone my family’s media discernment skills. You can say it’s frequently asked, Plugged In Online, but I DOUBT IT. )

Okay, back to my main point, which is about Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (le very funny flim Steve and I just watched). Here is the link to the full review, but just to give you an idea, here’s an excerpt about the Dirty Homosexual Content:

To distract police from a corpse they’re loading in the trunk, Perry grabs Harry and gives him a lingering kiss. (Harry is disgusted, however, and there’s never any hint that he’s now interested in exploring his latent homosexual feelings.)

Awright. That was my favorite part. But the whole thing’s good, really. The flim exploits is R-rating, you know. It exploits it. If only there were a higher rating for families to shun even MORE. That’d really be better.

Yeah, so Steve and I just watched this flim, and we totally failed at figuring out what was going on in advance, except I did guess what was up with the panties only I thought it was too obvious and not clever enough so I didn’t say anything to Steve, and it turned out I was right, and then I told Steve I was right but there’s no reason for him to believe me because it’s soooo easy to say it after it’s been Revealed, and I should have said it in the first place and he would have known that I was a genius.

I was going to say something else that was very funny indeed about this flim, and it would have made you all laugh, but now I’ve totally forgotten what it was. Sorry. I guess all this honing of my media discernment skills (thanks, Plugged In Online!) has distracted me to the point that I can no longer remember the (probably impious) comment I was going to make. That’s what happens when you hone your media discernment skills. (I have now written “skillers” for “skills” like six times. I have no idea what’s up with this.)

I’ll just leave you with this thought: Robert Downey Jr., presumably angry at the world for his drug issues, named his son INDIO FALCONER. Indio. Falconer. Downey. That really is the kid’s name. So if you ever think about calling your son Indio, please remember the following two things: 1) only druggies do that; and 2) Just add a G! And you’ll have the lovely, lovely, lovely name of Indigo! Indigo! Doesn’t it feel pleasing on your tongue? Innnnnnn-digo! DO NOT STEAL THAT NAME IT IS MINE.

Ouch.

I wanted to create a whole new category to put this post in, and I would call it, Very Reasonable Crankiness Indeed! because I think I am thoroughly justified in overthrowing God and all the saints after what has happened. And now I will relate it to you.

Last night I did a thing that wasn’t terribly smart, which was to give my best shot at opening the door and walking through it simultaneously. If this had worked, it would have been an absolutely prodigious display of smoothness and grace; but actually what happened was I walked straight into the door with my face, and all around my eye puffed up a lot (but there was no one around to see), and I thought: Oh well, I will have a really magnificent bruise in the morning. That’s what I thought.

But did I? No. I do not have a bruise this morning. Not even vague discoloration, so I can’t even corner people and force them to stare really hard at my eye until they notice the slightly purple tinge to it. It is totally normal looking. It makes me angry because MY FACE HURTS, and people should know about it. Damn it.

On a cheerier topic, Steve and I had a nice dinner last night at the home of a nice Irish girl he carried groceries for and her friends. (That sentence did not work out as well as I think it might have.) She said “youze” and other Irish things, and her Irish friend, upon hearing that I was interested in Oscar Wilde, said, “Bit of a batty boy, wasn’t he?” and although I did not know what that meant, it is usually pretty safe to assume, when you mention Oscar Wilde to people and they say he was a something you do not catch or do not understand, that the something means Gay Gay Gay Gay Gay. And I was quite right.

Also, here is an Interesting Fact for you: Lithuanians have a very bad reputation in Ireland. They are supposed to be shiftless and lazy, in sharp contrast to the Poles, who are hard-working upright citizens whom Ireland is glad to have immigrate to them. It’s true. All three of the Irish people present confirmed this.

Also, do not tell Irish people that you are Irish (I didn’t because I knew better). They do not like it. People in Britain do not want people in America to have European ancestors, even though that is in many cases inevitable.

False religion tolerates immoral sex.

Just wanted to let you know.

Don’t even try to tell me I can’t get in touch with Merlin Holland if I feel like it

Because I CAN. I have his fax number. That’s RIGHT. I have Merlin Holland’s fax number. Don’t mess with me because I can just fax Merlin Holland whenever I want to.

Although I acquired it on a public website, I feel empowered now that I’ve got it, like now that I have this public-access fax number I totally have an in with Merlin Holland and I can just fax him whenever and be all, Hey, dude, what’s going on? Not much here, just doing some research on your grandfather’s reputation and whatnot. Hope the book’s going well!

But seriously. Don’t let me near a fax machine. I am not confident in my ability to refrain from faxing Merlin Holland like a big Oscar Wilde groupie and telling him I wanna be friends.

One of my quiet obsessions

I love movie reviews. But most especially I love movie reviews written by Religious People. I would wash dishes on a night that wasn’t my night to wash dishes if someone promised me an endless supply of movie reviews written by Religious People. But now I have discovered Plugged In Online, and my dear dear father has sent me a link to the Catholic movie reviews page, so I will not have to wash dishes on a night that wasn’t my night.

Okay. So being also Rent-obsessed, I very sensibly looked up reviews of it, and in this case the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is cooler than Focus on Family because the Catholics say this:

Director Chris Columbus has remained largely faithful to the original — and many of the original cast members reprise their roles here — while the dissolute lifestyles of some of the characters take second place to the overriding themes of love, connection and fellowship.

Yeah, that’s right. You heard them. Fel-low-ship. (I hate that word actually.) I’ve left out the part that comes after it because really why bother? I will just say that it mentions that there is “suggestive dancing and movement”. Suggestive movement. Watch out for the movement! It’s suggestive!

Focus on Family, however, does not beat around the bush. (Teehee.) They say:

Mimi performs an extremely suggestive dance in a skimpy leather bikini. She rubs her crotch [are they allowed to say crotch?] when a patron offers her a tip. (Similarly dressed women dance in the background.) During the musical number “Light My Candle” she makes a sexual come-on to Roger. (The song is full of sexual double entendres.)

(I like their parenthetical asides the best.)

Actually I like their sum-up the best. Ready for it?

There's no doubt that Larson (who died unexpectedly shortly before Rent premiered Off Broadway in 1996) was a skilled writer, and the music of Rent is particularly good. The lyrics, on the other hand, are often questionable, and Larson sneaks a degenerate worldview past undiscerning viewers by means of that great songwriting. Whether moviegoers are aware of it or not, they're being preached at. And this sermon contains a romanticized glorification of a lifestyle -- be if homosexuality or what should now be called neobohemianism -- that despite the movie's upbeat conclusions ends ultimately in hopelessness.

Ultimately in hopelessness. Focus on Family does not love the gays. You can read the review in full (and many more!) at Plugged In Online (here) or the Catholic one (here). Hurrah! Movie reviews are glorious!

Oh I think I have died and gone to heaven

Or, I know what I’ll be reading over spring break.

God’s like trying to cheer me up about the whole favorite class dropping thing. LOOK at all those BOOKS about GAYS. There are so many! They are on so many topics! There are history ones and theory ones and ones about different countries and ones about different times and ones about different times and different countries and ones by Anita Bryant (query: why has Anita Bryant written a book? Why is that?) and one called (my personal favorite) Hello sailor!: The Hidden History of Gay Life at Sea.

If you’ve just read that and realized to yourself that in order to find that book I’d have had to go through 12 pages of results to get to H, you’re quite right, I did just that, and in fact I went all the way through all 41 pages because I am just that interested.

Hello sailor!

Mwahahahahahaha. Add one more thing that makes the Essex library better than the Middleton library. I love browsing.

Harvard says that I am not a homophobe

So don’t anyone even try to tell me I don’t love the gays. I totally love the gays. I even love them subconsciously. I took an Implicit Association Test, and it turns out that I have a slight automatic preference for gay people over straight people (although this would be more accurate, I think, if they flashed pictures of gay people and straight people doing smoochies, rather than just flashing symbols, but it would not make any difference to me). Here is the link, for your delectation and delight.

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/measureyourattitudes.html

In other news, South Africa is going to legalize gay marriage before we do. Just to remind you, this is the same South Africa that only got rid of apartheid twelve years ago, and they love the gays more than we (but not I) do.

25 August 2006