Random Meanderings

Inspired by (okay - copying) several friends who set themselves literary challenges last year, I've been doing one myself this year.

Each month I will read something that challenges me - whether that be style, content or genre.

So, in January I read The Maytrees by Annie Dillard. Which was a strange book with not very much actual plot - but the writing is so beautiful that the lack of plot is completely irrelevant. It was a book you kept reading for the language. I do recommend it.

February I brought things closer to home and read Foolish Mortals by Jennifer Johnson. I'm not sure what I think of this. Again, it's beautifully written, though in a completely different style than The Maytrees. I enjoyed it less, though. It didn't have ths scope of Dillard's novel and I think that made me more aware of the meanderingness of the plot. And I'm not great with things set in Dublin. For some reason they don't interest me. So, it's probably a better book than I gave it credit for, but I stopped reading half way through and had to make myself finish it.

March's book is a toss-up between three possibilities. I'll tell you more when I've decided ...

I was watching the film Ordinary People again the other day. Leaving aside the vexed question of Beth, I have always loved that film for its portrayal of men looking after each other. (Okay, there's Janine, but the main healers are Dr Berger and Calvin.) It's not a subject that many films adress, I don't think. You get a lot of films about women helping each other through - just start at Steel Magnolias and work your way forward - but not so much men ... Of course, there's the buddy movie genre, but I'm not sure it's quite the same thing.

In an aside - that's actually Timothy Hutton's shoulder just visible in my icon.

I made it

lslaw made it
lady_akatari made it
jnghh made it

I'd be dancing, only I'm really tired ...

'Oh,' whined lslaw, 'I am so busy this year. I shall not be doing well in my Nano wordcount.'

Bastard's at 18,000 words.

*glare*

None of this would bother me if I wasn't at 13,500 and stuck. Why is everything I know that will happen scheduled for later in the story? Why?? And what are they going to do till we get there???

*whine*

*whine whine*

*gives up and goes to get dressed*

This year heavily influenced by the fact that Hard Times followed Our Mutual Friend on BBC7. I hate Hard Times. Dickens's charity may have been heartfelt (although it only applied to people in Britain), but HT doesn't have any answers and preaches against the people - the Utilitarians and the unions - who actually made a difference.

Give me North and South for the condition of England any day.

I gave up on Our Mutual Friend too - mostly because Michael Kitchen was a terrible John Harmon. He was too smug.

I really need to get out more.

... are not a good idea.

They are the reason I managed to get all the way home before realising that I'd left the shoes I'd just got reheeled in the restaurant. Hopefully they'll still be there tomorrow, which is the first chance I've had to go in and ask.

Bought some really nice Debbie Bliss Cashmerino wool on Sunday. I love how soft it is. Now I just need a really nice pattern for a scarf in DK. Something pretty.

To Knitty with me!

So I spent some of it listening to Bleak House on BBC 7.

It was very good.

Bleak House is still terrible. I came across a comment from somebody on Amazon or something about how BH wasn't massively loved and they couldn't understand this (or words to that effect) and I was just sitting there going 'Esther Summerson! That's why people don't like Bleak House - she's unbearable!' Which is a pity, because the rest of it is very good and Tulkinghorn is a fantabulous villain. But it all comes to nowt when the heroine is so saintly you want to knock her out cold ...

I quite like Dickens, but I always need a way in to his books. I generally read them after I've seen some sort of dramatisation. I did try to read The Pickwick Papers cold, but got stuck about a quarter of the way into it and never went any further. Maybe I should try it again some day. Or maybe I'll just read the good bits of Our Mutual Friend again ...

According to my log-in page, I last updated two months ago. I'm not sure how that happened.

Apologies to anyone who was worried about me, or who had stuff going on and would have liked me to be around. Given the year that's been in it, I don't suppose anyone was that surprised I pulled the disappearing act again.

Anyway, new month, new resolution. Time to get back in contact with people. Time to try some new things. Time to start buying and cooking my own food again, for one. (Wish me luck with this, it's not the first time I've made that resolution.) Time to turn my life around and get it going in a healthy and hopefully fun direction.

Ans: Bring the broken thing with you!

Yes, dear readers, my life has got so boring that I must now talk about shopping. The power adapter cord on my laptop had got so frayed that it had finally stopped working altogether. Taping it up didn't work. Pushing it around and holding it (thereby risking electrocution) didn't work. I had to give up. I needed a new one.

I don't do techy. I am very bad at it. It makes me want to say defensive things like, 'I've read Middlemarch! Twice!' So I did the only thing I could do. I bundled up the adapter, brought it to the shop, handed it to the sales guy and said, 'I need a new one of this.'

It worked. My computer runs once more. And, this may be my imagination, seems to be running faster ...

That was dull, wasn't it?

I saw the trailer for The Dark is Rising recently. It would appear that the film has decided to be nothing like the book. This is bad.

lslaw has come up with an idea to try to combat the damage that the current trend of 'take any children's fiction you can find and turn it into Harry Potter because Potter sells'. I think it's a good idea:

1. Get thee to Amazon, or better yet to your friendly local bookseller.

2. Buy a copy of The Dark Is Rising, and any other book that you feel has been ill-served in a recent or forthcoming film version. Try to avoid tie-in editions.

3. In September, take these books to your friendly local junior or secondary school and present them as a gift to be placed in school or class libraries.

4. Forward this proposal in any other appropriate journal, community or forum and encourage others to do the same.

It's not going to stop the powers that be, but it might help a little.

Oh, and just to be clear, neither of us are against Harry Potter. We both like Harry Potter. But we don't see the good in turning other, equally good, stories into bad copies of HP. It does both the new books and HP a disservice.

That's right, folks. Don't annoy Indian businessmen - they're really, really dangerous.

Or so it says on the back of the DVD of Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke, a film I picked up entirely because it was on sale for 10 quid. Seriously. It was behind Hum Tum - which I want, but not 37 euro worth of want - and, well, you know ... it wasn't 37 euro. So I bought it. It has Aamir Khan, Juhi Chawla and some (probably incredibly annoying) children. I'm half-hoping it will rehabilitate Aamir Khan a bit in my eyes. I don't really like Aamir. This is completely unfair, because the only thing I've seen him in was Lagaan and I only saw half of it (not because I turned it off, but because it was on TV and they were showing it over two days). But I just get the impression that he takes himself a bit too seriously. I think this is mostly the because the last things I know he was in are Lagaan and Mangal Pandey: The Rising. (He was also in Faana, but that seems to have sunk without a trace ...) Anyway, I really should give him a chance and HHRPK is one of his from back in the day when he wasn't afraid to dance in the rain and worry about nothing more political than how to get the girl ...

I'll let you know how that goes.

I was going to review Life in a ... Metro today, but I think one Bollywood entry per week is enough. I really must start doing other things so I can write about them.

Edit: Well, the DVD stopped playing half way through, so it had to go back (and is now living on a farm with lots of other DVDs and children who love it), but before it siezed up and refused to go any further, I learned two things:

1. The eighties went on in India for quite some time.
2. Aamir wasn't bad.

Sunday brought me unexpected Bollywood - Apne had arrived without me noticing. In fact I only went in to see if there was any word as to when it would show up, and there it was.

Getting a ticket for it was another matter.

Valshamerlyn: (bouncing up to the ticket desk) One for Apne please!
Ticket seller: It's not till 20 past 5.
Valshamerlyn: *thinks* Okay, it's 4 o'clock now, that's a valid warning.
*smiles* I know!
Ticket seller: You know it's a Bollywood movie?
Valshamerlyn: *thinks* Well, you know, the Hindi name and the Indian stars on the poster kind of gave that away, but I suppose I could have picked it off the list of times.
*smiles* I know!
Ticket seller: It's a very long movie.
Valshamerlyn: *thinks* We covered that with 'Bollywood' ...
*smiles* It's got Bobby Deol in it.

That shut her up.

So, I'm pleased to report that the film is indeed long (3 hours - which at least makes it value for money), and it's pretty okay. It's not going to set the world alight, but hey, it's a boxing movie about family values. How many of those do you find in your lifetime? Most of the time I wanted to shake Dharmendra's character, which was fun. And now at least I've seen a Dharmendra film; and he was good.

I really should see Sholay one of these days.

Edit: I've figured it out. It's Shilpa Shetty. This is her first film release over here since BB. People must be going to see her, not realising that they've bought a ticket to a three-hour boxing epic in which she does very little but be supportive. And then they're going out and complaining - so they cinema's warning pasty-faced ticket buyers like me who look like they don't know what they're getting into ...

Huh.

First, the names:
1) Rahul Raichand
2) Ban
3) Paul
4) Rikki
5) Natsumi
6) HEVN
7) Anjali Sharma
8) Clayman
9) Kaurwaki
10) Akabane
11) Ginji
12) Satvinder
13) Kazuki
14) Shido
15) Anu

( And now, the questions ... )

Okay, I finally get what the fuss over Abishek Bachchan is about.

Which should teach me not to judge from photos - I thought he was just moderately good-looking with the right surname. But no. He's good. And he's got enough star quality to pull off the most ridiculous moustache-goatee-general-scruffiness that I've ever seen.

He's not as good as his dad (yet). Seriously, in his sixties, dressed (for some reason) as the gypsy king and with his eyes all kholed up, Big B has enough 'it' to pull off leading a bunch of Brits in several dance sequences in a train station - and all you think is, 'wish I was dancing too' ...

Jhoom Barabar Jhoom - a tale of Rikki (Abishek Bachchan) and Alvida (Preity Zinta), telling each other tales while waiting for the Birmhingham train to come in. A cute little inconsequential love story. Abishek is fab as the Southall wide boy, making a living doing 'nothing and everything' but with enough sweetness in him to show in moments of startling naivite. Preity has less to work with, but does it entertainingly. Lara Dutta and Bobby Deol round out the cast as their respective fiances. What follows is pure bubbles, all told just for fun and worth in for Abishek's outfit for the Mr and Ms Southall dance competition alone. However ...

Whoever took all the drugs before picturising 'Kiss of Love' is forgiven - thanks to the shot of the men in dark coats and trilbies dancing on the courthouse steps.

Whoever put Bobby Deol in a bubble perm is not.

... lady_akatari

"... at tea time, which is the expression employed by the Irish Broadcasting Authority to indicate when the plain people of Ireland consume or should consume their evening collation."

Did I miss something? Is annoying over-explanation and wordiness back in? Because I just read that sentence in a published book. Who in the world doesn't know what tea time is??????

Sorry, may have got a little carried away there.

I have decided, based on the amount of books that have annoyed me recently, that either a) the world is full of terrible books that have inexplicably got published while everyone was looking the other way, or b) I'm just too damn picky.

Some days I feel like I should start an early warning system for these things, a sort of literary equivlaent of The Bad Movie Mecca ...

Under the cut!

( If )

Water, directed by Deepa Mehta, starring Lisa Ray, John Abraham and Seema Biswas

Amazing, powerful and beautiful film. Go see it.

This week's Flickr Ficktion is under the cut.

( The cut )

This is my first tagging from outside the LJ community. My god, the intarwebs have sucked me into their tentacly little grasp ...

The Rules
Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.


1. Quite often, I forget how great it feels to use my brain. And then I watch/read something that wakes up all my dormant lit crit skills and sends me skittering to the internet to find some decent crit (and gnashing my teeth with frustration when, once again, it isn't there). I miss academic libraries.
2. I can roll one eye at a time.
3. I'm the world's biggest procrastinator. I'm working on changing that.
4. I'm a pessimist. I'm also working on changing that, which sometimes leads me to saying insanely cheerful things at completely inappropriate moments.
5. I talk to myself. All the time. People in the street think I'm crazy.
6. I really don't get the beauties of nature and the countryside. I'm a city girl through and through - I understand that people seem to have this mysical, renewing relationship with nature, but ... well, it's all just green to me.
7. I am intermittently creative - I pick up crafts and then stop doing them. But everything gets finished eventually!
8. I am a sport retard. I can't think of one sport I can play with any level of skill. My PE teachers would be ashamed of me.

And I tag ... lycoris, 2bluecrocodiles, lslaw, robert_frogg, woodburner, jnghh, lady_akatari and kauaioo