You guys! I have a new author I can add to my list of ‘Authors I really like’! I read the Europeans by Henry James over the weekend and I really loved the multi-layered character sketches he gave for his heroine and hero, the brother and sister.
August 17th, 2008
So, if an Englishman said to an American “We have regular trains here”, would the American think they meant they were standard/average trains? Let’s ignore context giving him cues and prompts as to the real meaning as well.
May 3rd, 2008
Oh wow, I love this book so much. I’ve pretty much read it cover to cover with no breaks, just carried away by the amazing language. It made me laugh, at the end, Nabokov lamenting his “second-rate” brand of English (he’s Russian of course, I seem to have a weakness for these Russian writers).
If only 3D didn’t exist and I had, well, more money than I do now - I could buy all of his books and just indulge in them forever. So now I’ve been inside the head of a paedophile and inside the head of a murderer. I keep wanting to try and put down in this post a few of my favourite phrases that he uses, but as I go through a few randomly opened pages I’m just noting everything down which is of course no good at all. The imagery is so evocative, and of course I love him as well for in his notes (”On a book entitled Lolita”) asserting that Lolita has no moral in tow (yay! take that english teachers who make us pick at books ’till they fall apart at the seams). Nabokov says Lolita exists for the purpose of creating “aesthetic bliss” and oh it really really delivers.
Well anyway, random bit :
“She was all rose and honey, dressed in her brightest gingham with a pattern of little red apples, and her arms and legs were of a deep golden brown, with scratches like tiny dotted lines of coagulated rubies, and the rubbed cuffs of her white socks were turned down at the remembered level…”
Edit: Although I’m never going to be able to read about Annabel Lee and her kingdom by the sea again without thinking of Humbert and paedophilia and Poe having a 13 year old wife…
March 25th, 2008
Is it an idiotic idea to add a seperate framed portrait painting to encompass Cezanne’s long grey beard in the artist profiles bit of my documentation (at the moment they are all headshots, but a seperate painting could very easily go underneath Cezanne’s head for his beard!), or is it the best idea I’ve ever had and one of great genius whose like we shall never see again? I think writing for the past 4 days solid has either driven me insane or brought out the da Vinci in me. Or both!
Oh also, I love writing evaluations
Edit 3 hours later: I hate writing evaluations
Edit many many hours later: No really. And another thing :
“temporarily collapsing boundaries between subject and object, interior and exterior, self and world - in order to facilitate a refreshing change of perception, thereby potentially resensitizing participants to the extraordinariness of being alive, sentient, and embodied, here now, among all this, briefly immersed in the flow of life through space and time.”
Who would have thought it was possible to use 8 commas in a block of text like that without the idea of anything so frivolous as, oh, I don’t know, a full stop maybe springing to mind. Man. (Not my writing by the way, it’s in one of the books I’m trying to decipher). My poor beautiful english, raped by pompous academics 
March 11th, 2008
I wonder why it seems so much easier to write straight into an html file without wordwrap than to write a proper word document? I think it has something to do with being forced to be recursive and re-read everything written, as well as essentially having two seperate views of what you are writing - the stylised version and the plain words surrounded by markup. A close up view of a sentence followed by a quick ctrl+s and a refresh of the stylised page with a view of it in context seems to make me concentrate much more on what I’m writing, for some reason.
March 8th, 2008
I don’t know why I dislike analysing texts (Shakespeare especially for some reason!) and paintings so much. I started loathing it when I was doing my art A-Level, and one of the reasons I like the Impressionists so much is that their art is straightforward and about beauty and colour and joy. Painting’s like Renoir’s The Jardin d’Essai just leave me breathless. I’ve got to the stage in my documentation where I have to start putting down on paper exactly why I love the particular paintings I chose and why they influenced me so much and I’m having such a hard time doing it.
I do love the contrast of the aquamarine + teal and burned gold, I love how the flashes of silvery white add such liveliness and character; it makes the piece seem perfect. I think the buildup of textures and strokes is masterfully executed, but even writing it down in this blog in the most informal way possible makes me cringe a little. It seems to cheapen the art and make it less, discussing it. I do wish I could work out why I think it’s so, because intellectually I know that a group of people discussing what they love most about a piece of art means everybody gets more out of it; some people might spot bits other people haven’t noticed and so on.
I enjoy discussing The Wire and certain books and so on, it just seems to be visual/aesthetic things like artwork or video that I have a bit of a block with (and Shakespeare and a lot of the classics). This next lot of documentation is going to be painful.
This is dent to my determination to get it done is not helped by my evil evil housemate introducing me to Professor Layton and the Curious Village which is seriously quite scarily addictive. I have a terrible weakness for puzzles and this fulfils that weakness in a very big way. The art is really cute and the dialogue is either terrible on purpose or written by somebody with a very dry sense of humour, either way it makes me laugh a lot. I do like it.
February 28th, 2008
Planescape Torment is the best RPG I’ve ever played. The combat system sucks and it seems to be as buggy as hell but oh the story more than makes up for it. You start off waking up in a mortuary, with no idea of who you are or how you got there. Slowly you start to uncover your past and the past of your companions (who you pick up along the way with the exception of a floating talking skull called Morte who’s turns out to be there with you in the mortuary). I wasn’t completely sold on it until the first sign you get of something being not quite right - more than waking up clueless I mean. But then betrayals, treachery, double crossing, love and hate and insanity galore - the plots are layered and woven with such depth I couldn’t stop playing for about 2 days solid.
Why do so few game companies realise the importance of hiring proper writers? Is it really the case, that linear half hearted/2 dimensional stories are the ones people prefer? I don’t really know, I mean I suppose going by what’s on TV that’s the case… The Wire for example has some really amazing writing in it but it doesn’t seem to be aired anywhere in the UK and I think up until recently even to get the DVDs you had to order from amazon america. My friend assures me that what sells are the tired old rehashes of previous titles, and that’s why there’s such a lack of innovation in the game industry. I’m not entirely convinced though. I recently (well, not actually recently, but since I last posted) played Portal and the dialogue in it was outstanding, and I’m pretty sure that’s a big hit. Apparently the only reason Valve can spend so much time and money hiring really good writers is that they have steam and were started by private funds or something?
And it’s funny, writers seem to really want to write compelling and absorbing plots rather than your standard trash, and all the gamers I know seem to want to play them (maybe I just move in very elite circles or something!). We even, you know, buy them! I just don’t understand how the best selling games of last year were all sequels to one game or another as far as I know (fifa, need for speed, pro evolution, the sims).
Add comment February 6th, 2008
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say an uncommon-place thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles
Add comment December 5th, 2007
Chuckle in any form is a terrible word and should never be used by anybody. If I had an allergic reaction to any word, it would be this one.
Add comment November 28th, 2007
The Farseer Trilogy and the Tawny Man trilogy
Okay, firstly I really really enjoyed these books. Well actually I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, but they sure as hell inspired pretty extreme emotions in me. I’m not really the overly emotional type but these books had me weeping solidly for the last hundred pages or so, and laughing aloud and tearing up some more all through them besides.
The characters are elaborately constructed in little steps, and all of them are 3D and have depth, which is great. It’s what I like in my books, be they fantasy or not, it’s probably the most important thing to me. It was hard at first to get past Robin Hobb’s wishy washy first person narration style, but after a bit I realised even though it’s not my favourite tool in the world, she was certainly using it effectively.
The main protagonist is incredibly human - not only in his unreliable narration but in his thick-headed stupidity, embarrassment, inability to read other’s emotions. His distrustfulness and the way he made countless mistakes and misinterpreted pretty much everything only made him more endearing. I wanted to give him a clout over the head a couple of times mind you, but what’s important is that he was a human character, and a masterfully written one at that. Can’t tell you how rare this seems to be in novels.
I don’t want to really go into a HUGE rant about the characters and relationships as I doubt anybody who might read this really cares, but I’ve got to say on the offchance that anybody who knows what I’m talking about reads this :
The ending was the most disappointing I’ve come across in a long time. WHY in the name of god would you set up your characters and lay down scenes and in the epilogue completely ignore all the rules you’ve given them and come up with a lacklustre “happy” ending? WHY.
Phew, okay, got that off my chest - moving swiftly on……..
Oh yeah, I went to Naples for a week and also finished Resi evil and did my placement presentation - but this is all secondary to me NEARLY DYING OF THESE BOOKS.
August 5th, 2007
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