maybe I'm racist against gingers

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Firstly I would like to note that this is the first blog post I am writing from my new specially-for-college laptop. It is meant to be a little boys' laptop but I do not care. (The one downside to the little-boys thing was that when my sister and I were setting it up at first, we had to spend about half an hour battling the virtual nanny installation which wanted to rob me of my liberties.) It's awesome, being smaller than most laptops (just like I wanted), having lime green detailing and squishy rubbery ("wipeable keyboard!") keys, and, best of all, pre-installed Lego Batman. Awww yeeeeeaah.

    Secondly, I've finished reading Dear Enemy by Jean Webster and holy cow that book has enough discussion of eugenics to choke a camel. An unfit-for-breeding camel. That's ok, though, as it's a fascinating subject.
    Anyway so in it there was this one bit where Sallie, heroine of the book and superintendent of this orphanage thing, has had to hire a new cook for the orphanage, and the new cook is this black lady named Sallie. Sallie the superintendent is miffed that someone else has her name and is like "but I'm the Sallie around here can you change your name?" and Sallie the new cook respectfully says no ma'am, she, cook-Sally, has had this name longer than superintendent Sallie has and also couldn't get used to being called something else. The issue is dropped.
    I was disgusted with superintendent Sallie, of course. Asking someone to alter one of the fundamental points of their identity for her own convenience. Major points lost. She was probably being racist, too; it was the early twentieth century, after all.
    BUT THEN.
    For the past couple of years up until the past couple of weeks I've been working part-time in the bakery section of a local cafe. It's a fairly small business. Anyway BUT THEN I remembered that several months ago this cafe hired a new cook to work in the kitchen, mostly for weekend brunches, and she happened to have the same name as the owner of the cafe (who is an old friend of my parents', known her all my life). So to avoid confusion we all actually ended up calling the new cook Sam instead of her rightful name. I think Sam was short for her middle name or something. (She's not black, but she is ginger.)

    Guess what the new cook and the owner are both named.

    Guess.

    Guess guess guess guess.

    ...

    Sally.


    (yes I know I am too easily amused. time to go do some laundry.)

summer reading

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I will finish The Book of Merlyn and Claudius the God before I go off to college. I will. I will. I will, dammit.

if i say on my blog that i'll read them, that's sort of like accountability, right?

    (you remember how a few months ago I read The Once and Future King and also I, Claudius? The nice thing was that my mother randomly had the sequel to the former lying around and my dad had the sequel to the latter lying around. And I don't think either of them had the first books. Little bit weird there.)

    Also, speaking of my mom, she herself has started up a blog of her own (hurray!) which I am now going to link to. It's called Roller Derby with the Saints, and she's got a couple posts up and they are beautiful, articulate, thoughtful posts. (she must be so ashamed of me oh gosh) It's heavily theological (Christian, specifically) and is and will be well worth reading.

    Hopefully she does not abandon the thing once she goes back to school in one month. (HEY MOM KEEP WRITING K.)

    EDIT later this same day: One of my best friends has just dropped by and loaned me a copy of Dear Enemy (the sequel to Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster) after apparently remembering something I had said about thinking about maybe reading it several weeks ago. Oh lawks.

Wimsey covers: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

     Dear Harriet Walter,

    Hurgh blugh I so do not feel like myself today. Partly because I've been drinking a fruit smoothie all day instead of, you know, actually eating. But I haven't felt like myself for over a week! It's disconcerting! Feeling like me isn't always the best thing, but by golly it's usually better than feeling like a great lumpish sack of gah.

    Anyway it's been, like, a month since I was rambling about Wimsey book covers, so we're going to see if doing that makes me feel better about things.

    The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928)

    With this story, we have the premise of a stiff in an armchair. Specifically an old dude. Is this a charming image? Absolutely. Hell, I want to end up as a dead old man in an armchair myself someday. The real horror of the plot (well, for me) comes when we find out that the man didn't actually die in the armchair in which he is found dead (read: murderalert! murderalert!). I mean, it's just so sad. He should have died peacefully in the armchair. Cruel universe!
(as always, captions refer to the image which comes before them)

    I rather like this cover. The colors are bold and straightforward, although the fern-things make things a little awkward as the one on the left rather looks like it's growing out of General Fentiman's head. Also I like that it looks like he was smothered with a newspaper. Actually, the newspaper rings bells in my mind that remind me of the sorts of white blankety things official people cover corpses with, which is appropriate. This one's just a little small. Like the baby-blanket version of a corpse blanket. Do people make corpse blankets for babies? Oh gosh.

    I'm pretty sure the Bellona Club wouldn't look like that, but let's say it's a depiction of the solitude of death or something. Again, the colors are nice. I like that it's rather subtler than the corpse-in-your-face versions of these mystery covers you get sometimes. Hey, let's look at those.

    Corpse with a fabulous mustache!

    Skeletal green corpse! (Love this.)

    Tasteful, quiet black-and-white Elizabeth George corpse!

    Um okay that doesn't make me uncomfortable at all...

      UM HI

    okay let's take a break from corpses now

    This, now, is super fabulous. Clean and pretty and simple.

    This is...not so fabulous. The spatial relations are really weird and keeping paint and alcohol in such close quarters makes me uncomfortable.

    Holy cow it's one of the covers in that series of covers which I've never seen a good picture of but I can actually see this one! It looks like...somebody taking a photo of a desk.

    I'm not...this is a little...well, er...um. Wow.

    Okay, that's much more soothing.

    wow that's tiny why did I even save that

 
    Hi, Ian Carmichael! I see you have the monocle in today. You almost never do in the miniseries. (This totally isn't a book cover but whatever.)

    Goodness, that's lovely! Totally unrelated to the story but lovely! Will it win the honor of being the best cover on this list?

     No. No it will not. Why not? Because there is still this:

    HOW BADASS IS THAT

so, like

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Lately I have totally

    -knitted 5 tiny piggies and started on a kiwi bird

    -finished I, Claudius and started on Claudius the God and read all of The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

    -watched War and Peace (1956), Superman (1978), Jane Eyre (2011) and a ton of "Doctor Who"

    -finally found a song for and started work on my LPW/HV video (huzz-freaking-ZAH)

    -had my sister fall asleep on me while I was reading Clouds of Witness to her, twice

    -closed a car door on my ankle really hard (by accident)

    -experienced strawberry-rhubarb crepes with  warm mascarpone inside and handmade whipped cream on top

    -procrastinated and avoided writing a scholarship essay by writing in my useless blog instead

    (watching Jane Eyre movies, especially really good ones, on five hours of sleep after a long day is not a good idea)

Wimsey covers: Clouds of Witness

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Let's look at more Wimsey book covers!

   Clouds of Witness (1926)

    Clouds of Witness doesn't have any really striking or recognizable images in the premise to work with; several of these covers have the theme of "bejeweled kitty" running through them, when they're not just depicting corpses sprawled over things. Which, you know, is all right when it's all right, but...maybe I just don't like having it made so obvious that, like most other people who read these books, I love kitties and corpses, and the publishers totally know that.

    (as before, all descriptions apply to the image preceding them)

    This is the copy of Clouds of Witness which I own. (Not my photograph, though.) It's really beautiful in person; slender, hardcover with shiny gold lettering and beautifully spare. The "best mysteries of all time" thing at the top is a little unsightly, but bearable.

    This is actually one of my absolute favorite LPW covers. Another of the black and white introduction-by-Elizabeth-George editions, its lines are so clean and its contrasts so stark that I feel like if I owned it and could be seen reading it, I would at last be a Real Adult. (I kinda wish the girl was supposed to be Harriet instead of...Mary I suppose it must be, or the sexy-Frenchwoman-lady, but - no wait if it's Mary then why does she have dark hair, is Mary supposed to have dark hair I can't remember, why would she if Peter is blonder than the California sun)

    I can't get a larger image, but I had to include this. It's an audiobook cover, so perhaps it oughtn't to count, but...it's, like, a tiny tiny gun laid on a tiny tiny splash of blood on a monocle. Either that or an enormous monocle with a normal-sized gun and blood splatter. RAD.

     Another audiobook. Um. Okay, for the sake of Justice I did not trust my faulty memory and actually found my copy of CoW and reread the part where Lord Peter falls into a bog. But you know what? My memory did not fail me. Absolutely nowhere in that passage does it say either that an impossibly tiny Bunter was trying to save Lord Peter by holding a twig in his general direction or that the bog was in fact a horrible, oozing pit of oversized intestines.

    This thing, however, is awesome. I love the dramatic colors and the gnarly tree and the misty, sinister cat.

    I think this one is Portugese or something. I adore it. Observe the kitty, the odd red-orange oval (eye?), the magic wand spraying candy and confetti, and the floating head of Mary who is now a ginger. Why is she a ginger? The world may never know.

    This is pretty much exactly the state I plan to be found in when I am dead. Minus the gross maroonish-purple background.
   

    Kitteh!

    Identical kitteh. With bizarre twig-forest in the background.

    I think these editions must have come out post-you and Petherbridge. They basically all have LPW on the cover and usually that LPW looks like Mr Peth.

    Usually.

    would you like some murky with that order of dim

     Isn't this peaceful? I feel soothed.

     Oh and I must not forget there's this. There are a number of Wimsey books done in this style, and I have never ever ever seen a good picture of one. The only pictures are all either tiny or blurry and tiny. This is a shame, as most of them look like they might be handsome if one could actually see the stupid things.

    
     dear sweet heavenly mercy tell me that is not supposed to be lord peter

    LATER UPDATE (3/15/11):
    Whoa hey I forgot this one. Seriously go look at it. Look at her slippers. Dude.

    EVEN LATER UPDATE (7/12/11):
    Is....is this real life? Is this an actual thing?

I, Claudius: Oh No She Didn't

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    There are actual tears of laughter in my eyes right now.

    I'm reading I, Claudius by Robert Graves, and Claudius and this jerk Sejanus have just arranged for Claudius' 13-year-old son Drusillus to be betrothed to Sejanus' daughter. Without running this idea by Claudius' dear grandmama Livia first. I'm going to quote the passage describing how that turns out, because it's stunning and horrifying and mindblowingly awesome and I cannot stop laughing.

    There was great alarm in the City when it was known that Sejanus was to become related with the Imperial family, but everyone hastened to congratulate him, and me too. A few days later Drusillus was dead. He was found lying behind a bush in the garden of a house at Pompeii where he had been invited, from Herculaneum, by some friends of Urgulanilla's. A small pear was found stuck in his throat. It was said at the inquest that he had been seen throwing fruit up in the air and trying to catch it in his mouth: his death was unquestionably due to an accident. But nobody believed this. It was clear that Livia, not having been consulted about the marriage of one of her own great-grandchildren, had arranged for the child to be strangled and the pear crammed down his throat afterwards. As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.

    The last sentence is possibly the funniest thing I have read in all my years.

    CONTROL FREAK MUCH THERE LIVIA

identify

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I love Lord Peter Wimsey. I am in love with Lord Peter Wimsey.

    I can't really identify with Lord Peter Wimsey.

    I am female. I am way younger than he is in any of the stories. I am poor. I am not universally fabulous. I am not talkative, quick-witted, a fast thinker, highly educated (yet), British, a war veteran, good with people, romantic or good at detection.

    I can't identify with Lord Peter as portrayed by Mr Ian Carmichael. Ian Carmichael is old and fat and made slightly creepy by the incongruity between his fattened oldness and his light, bouncy adopted speech, which flings Gs away with the maddened velocity of denial. (That is to say that he sounds rather affected and fake.)

Huuuu boy.

    I can't particularly identify with Lord Peter as portrayed by Mr Edward Petherbridge. Edward Petherbridge has, through his youtube videoblogging, become something of a cinematic British grandfather-figure to me. I adore him, but I watch his portrayal of Lord Peter as a grandchild would have their grandparent's old photo album from younger times shown to them and say, "gosh, Grandpapa, you were a looker back in the day!" if they had a habit of saying things before thinking those things through.

Yuss.

    I could almost identify with Peter-bridge through his devotion to a character (an awesome character) played by you, Ms Walter, except that he has a rather unusual and offputting method of expressing adoration and love and smitten-ness and so on with his face. Like, he looks kind of like he wants to stab you.

Umyeahaboutthat. (image taken from here.)

would you kindly get out of my personal space, miss vane?

                     

 (This is, I am more than happy to admit, a perfectly wonderful moment of loveface. I often think that the two of you had agreeable chemistry most of the time and completely devastating chemistry at certain well-placed moments.)

    Anyway. To get back to my theme.

    The times when I can best identify with any Lord Peter, be he literary, Carmichael or Petherbridge, is when I am watching Petherbridge as Peter and he's looking at (I want to type "loving on") a photo of you.

    At those times I am, like, one with the man. One and shining. Because I've just been there so many times. It's like "hey I'm not the only one!"

(iamsuchadork)

(let the reader note that I do in fact adore Edward Petherbridge)

I, Claudius

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    So a few weeks ago I was directed to the BBC's new radio drama adaptation of I, Claudius because through some means my mother had heard that you were in it.

    Can't think why I haven't mentioned this before. I listened to all six episodes, the first two at once and the remaining four as they became available online every week.

    Anyway. You were excellent in it. Your Livia made me really appreciate your Fanny Dashwood-from-Sense and Sensibility as being, in fact, a pile of kittens and happiness. (You get the most amazingly nasty roles sometimes. Honestly.)

i love this picture to bits and also it makes me want a live-action version of the story filmed with you in it, you can play Livia again, actually you should just play everyone

    (Tom Goodman-Hill playing Claudius oddly reminded me of Edward Petherbridge playing Newman Noggs. Great fun.)

    I have recently bought an actual copy of the actual I, Claudius in its original papery form, because I rather liked the radio drama and as I don't really like getting books from the library when I know they're going to take forever to read and they're cheap used anyway. I'm a couple chapters in and I think it's going to be lovely.

this is the copy I got, except on mine the background is more greenish. he looks so sulky I am sorely tempted to draw a curly little french mustache upon his upper lip and give him something real to sulk about. (image linked from here)

[UPDATE a couple weeks later: Just found this picture and it has you in, like, a different pose. I'm not sure why Caligula, Claudius and Augustus are all in that same position - and in almost the same clothes, too - but for a photoshopped family portrait it is still pretty awesome.]

 (photo linked from here)

Audible 2

(written at a previous date, and also being a continuation of the previous post)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I hate that Audible's selection of Wimsey stuff is almost entirely Ian Carmichael-centric. They've got, like, ONE Petherbridge-narrated book, and it's the effing Attenbury Emeralds. Come on.

    My library has Strong Poison and Have His Carcase as done by Mr Peth on tape. I've listened to both of them. They're abridged. In Strong Poison, among other things Charles and Mary's romance is completely cut out, poor dears, much like in the miniseries, which makes the end of the book rather abrupt. (Something about Sylvia or Eiluned saying how Lord Peter's too much of a gentlemen to present himself to be thanked and Harriet will have to go to him herself, and Harriet is like, "Oh, I won't do that," and then silence and the listener goes "wait wut".)

    The Have His Carcase audiobook is a bit anxiety-making when one can tell that lots of things are being left out but one can't remember quite what. (I've only read the book through once, as it's long and difficult and I've only been a Wimsey convert for about a year.) Though there's a very amusing bit, I remember, in the middle or near the end, when Lord Peter receives a prettified copy of the coded letter found on the body from the police, and he takes it to Harriet, and talks to her a little teeny bit about what sort of code he thinks it might be...and then he takes off to go see a man about a horse or something, and he comes back the next day and Harriet has cracked the fucking thing by herself. She sits on the floor and reads the decoded letter to Lord Peter. It's amazing.

    I love Edward Petherbridge's rendition of Harriet. It's so soft and husky and just a little bit breathy. Deeper than his Peter-voice.

    What was I going to say? Oh, yes. I haven't heard any audiobooks of Gaudy Night. I can't listen to Ian Carmichael be involved with Gaudy Night. He's just not romantically appealing in the least, and Gaudy Night is a special special thing to me. (I almost recall something about the Carmichael version having Joanna David involved? Was it dramatised? Sigh, my memory, she is barely civil to me.)

    I haven't heard the Petherbridge version either, partly because it's gosh-derned difficult to get one's hands on and partly because apparently it lasts two hours.
    Two hours.
    Gaudy Night.
    Gaudy Night in two hours.
    I don't even....how? Not even the miniseries managed to cut it down that bad. I mean, what did they do to get it that short? What could be left? What is even the point?

    I'll probably still find it sometime, though. What time I do devote to morbidity and literary masochism, to be sure.

    I'm sorry this letter/post is so jerky and wandering. I have a cold. I think I mentioned that earlier. I need somebody to make me tea and everyone is either off grocery shopping, at work or useless at teamaking. Sigh.

Audible 1

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I was screwing around on audible.com - you know, the audiobook site - and wishing I had the spare money for a subscription when I looked you up in their search engine.

    I was happy to see that you'd performed Hard Times by Dickens, because I'm reading it right now. Hate that yours is abridged, though. Bleh.

    Then I saw that you'd also done Rebecca by that du Maurier woman. I think I'd heard something of the sort before, and wasn't too happy about it because I wanted to hear it but I'm also not super fond of the story. (I haven't read the book, but I've seen the Hitchcock movie and also the miniseries as had Jeremy Brett starring. You were totally in that miniseries, too! It was one of your earliest screen things! You were a maid with a Yorkshire accent and you got really upset and I have photographic proof that you and Jeremy Brett were once in the same room together, which just makes me insanely happy.)

    Anyway so Audible has this thing where one can listen to excerpts from the work one is interested in, so I listened to the provided bit from Rebecca and it was a part early on in the story and I got to hear you play Mrs van Hopper. You. Mrs van Hopper. American accent. It was so incredibly weird I thought I was having a hallucination from, like, this cold I have. You totally did not sound like yourself! I am so making my sister listen to that excerpt when she gets home. I've texted her about it already.

    (I told you that I have a picture of you as my cell phone background, right?)

Paton Walsh

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    An innocent friend of mine who knows I love Dorothy Sayers has gotten me A Presumption of Death for Christmas, along with another couple books.

    I probably could have been a little bit more gracious about it. My brain just snapped into "hrrrrrmmmm" mode.

    Hrrrrrmmmmm.

    She meant well. I know those books get good reviews a lot of the time. From the professionals. I've never met any fans who actually like the things. Actually I've seen some pretty strong dislike coming from fans.

    Lack of fan enthusiasm is actually the reason I haven't read any of Jill Paton Walsh's attempted Lord Peter books yet, that and picking Thrones, Dominations up off a library shelf, reading a couple pages in the middle and getting extremely bad vibes. Something is wrong here, I thought to myself. Subtly but seriously, seriously wrong.

    I s'pose I'll try the book. I didn't have to pay for it and I don't have any library deadlines, at least. I know it's terribly bad form to trash a book or series of books without giving them a chance.

    But still. Hrrrrmmmm.

Macbeth

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    My mom asked the room in general today what the tiny little package as came in the mail was. My sister asked where said package had come from, and my mom said she believed it came from the UK.

    Naturally, the words "package" and "UK" make a combination which tends to seize me by the ears, being as it is that they are two of my favorite things and the best packages I ever get always come from the UK.

    Sure enough, the tiny little package turned out to be a copy of your book on Macbeth! I knew it wasn't going to be a huge book but great Scott this thing is tiny, tiny and delicate and holding it makes me feel like a zombie gorilla manhandling a butterfly. Fantastic picture of you on the cover, too.

    I believe I shall begin reading it now. I ought to be working on my prelab report for class tomorrow but I think I'll only do that once I've eaten. (said she, waiting for her mother to get done cooking like an extremely useless lump which cannot feed its own damn self)

    (PS, the author bio thing in the front flap claims that you have "contributed several essays and articles to other drama publications" and I just want you to know that it causes me near-physical pain that I don't know how to get my hands on these essays and articles in other drama publications)

novelist

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    When I was seven, I decided that one day I would be a Novelist. This key moment came after my family read the first Harry Potter book, and Ms Rowling made it look so easy, at least to my empty blue eyes.

    It's the one ambition I have never given up on or decided against.

    In a way, it's shaped my life so far. My mother tells me I have a gift for writing, making it the one and only talent I might have except for being able to wiggle my littlest toes. Not that I even write much at all, though I've been doing a little bit more and a little bit more over the past few months.

    But the odd thing is I've always been straight up dead centered on the notion that I am going to be a Big Thing. Originally it was just a Popular Thing like Rowling, but as my brain has grown it's become a Big Thing. An author so good, so brilliant and hilarious and devastating that oceans would crumble at my name. Pulitzer Prize winner on my first novel. Nobel prize winner on my fifth. Dying children would beg for me to have tea with them as their Make-a-Wish wish. I would write for all age groups, in any genre I wanted, and publishers would lap it all up. I would be a sort of literary Prometheus, bringing light and hope and great wisdom and the all the fires of joy and despair and aching survival to the minds of thousands. Serious Business.

    I'm only just now really questioning that but-of-course-I'm-going-to attitude, the manufactured destiny. (I'm 18 years old by now, so that's fair impressive.) I know I'm extremely underripe as a person, and I haven't really experienced much yet, but I can't help imagining myself, 37 years old, flipping burgers in the sewers to earn a living, alone and dead inside and sometimes wondering what happened to my dreams and certainties.

    It's not like I work hard at my writing, either. Is developing as a person enough to be doing? As I write that, the little voice in my head says DO BOTH like the demanding little bitch that it is.

    And then my dreams come out from behind the clouds again and they're like oh shit, when you ARE super rich and famous and adored people are gonna look into you and find this blog and that will not be a good thing, look at all this dreck I blather out

scribble

 (written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I have a habit of writing things down on my hands when I'm going to bed and don't want to forget something. Now this is a relatively normal thing, I know, as lots of people do it during the day, but it gets better when you realize that I write these things in the dark when I am mostly asleep.

    I can't always remember what I was thinking when I wrote the things. For example, one time I woke up with the words "sexual deadline" on my left palm. I don't know whether this was just a phrase I thought of and liked or a complaint or a threat or what.

    Another time, a few weeks ago I woke up and the words "who voiced the Wart?" were on there, which was really fucking disturbing until I remembered that I'd realized in my slumbering stupor that in Disney's movie The Sword in the Stone (based on the first part of, what hey, The Once & Future King) the character of the Wart/young Arthur sounds completely different in the beginning from how he does in, say, the fish scene, or the whole rest of the damn movie. And I'd wanted to look the movie up and see if he had more than one voice actor. (He had three.)

    And today I woke up and saw upon my forearm, mostly rubbed away, the following passage:

    A sickened, sensitive shadow, writhing in hands that were not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low

    Yes, children, this is the danger of reading H.P. Lovecraft before bed. You wake up and you have lines from "Nyarlathotep" scrawled on your goddamn body.

    I love books.

little mermaid

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I wonder what it was like for the Little Mermaid when she was enchanted and turned from a half-fish ectotherm into a fully human endotherm?

    She'd know about heat and cold from different ocean currents and basking on rocks in the sunshine, of course, but it'd be so different once she was human.

    She'd have gone from never producing any of her own heat and mostly staying the same temperature all the time in the ocean (with the occasional change depending on the aforementioned environmental variables) to having this fire inside her, all throughout her body, all the time. Can you imagine how weird that would be? She would sweat when she ran. She would discover the magic of hot cocoa. She would finally understand blankets.

    It would be like a kind of thermal puberty!